Arms Races

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There have been arms races several times in recent history, brought about by military equipment becoming highly dependent on technology. Perhaps the first important arms race was the competition between Britain and Germany at the turn of the century to build bigger and better battleships, the ‘Dreadnoughts’. The major arms race since the Second World War has been the competition between the USA and the Soviet Union to build up more powerful nuclear weaponry, especially ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles), in the hope of achieving a first strike capacity over the enemy. In more recent times the emphasis has shifted to competition for more and more sophisticated and accurate conventional weapons; it was these weapons which gave the US-led forces in the Gulf War overwhelming superiority over the Iraqi forces.

The arms race is a central part of balance of power theory: any technological advance by one side threatens the other, which then tries to build better weapons, forcing the first mover to improve its weapons, and so on.

Often a new stage in the arms race may be launched by a relatively small development; for example, circular error probable (CEP—a measure of ballistic missile accuracy) improvements by the Soviet Union led in the early 1970s to extra investments by the USA, and the development of anti-ballistic missile systems by the USA in the 1960s, although defensive in themselves, were seen as a threat to the balance of power by the Russians, who therefore increased their weapons developments still further.

At a lower level, arms races clearly happen between any group of countries with potential conflicts, one of the best recorded being that between India and Pakistan in the 1970s and 1980s. There is considerable theoretical confusion about arms races: it is unclear, for example, whether actual or merely potential military capacity in one country spurs another to build up its forces. Similarly, many force enhancements seem to come about simply because the available technology makes a new weapon system possible, with no reference to any supposed threat elsewhere. It may be more sensible to see arms races as just one element in the overall threat assessment that any nation has to make.

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