Arms race
An
arms race is a competition between two or more countries for military supremacy. Each party competes to produce larger numbers of
weapons, greater armies, or superior military
technology in a
technological escalation. A defining characteristic of an arms race is the intention to develop more and better
nuclear weapons during the
Cold War (see:
nuclear arms race).
Carl Sagan once famously described the
overkill in this arms race with the analogy of "two men standing waist deep in gasoline; one with three matches, the other with five." The
Soviet Union devoted their
command economy to the arms race and with the deployment of the
SS-18 in the late 1970s achieved first strike superiority. However, the strain of competition against the great spending power of the
United States created enormous economic problems during
Mikhail Gorbachev's attempt at
konversiya, the transition to a consumer based, mixed economy, and hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The term "arms race" is used generically to describe any competition where there is no absolute goal, only the relative goal of staying ahead of the other competitors.
Evolutionary arms races are common occurrences,
e.g. predators evolving more effective means to catch prey while their prey evolves more effective means of evasion. This is sometimes called the
Red Queen effect. In addition to predators,
parasites can force their hosts into an arms race.
In technology, there are close analogues to the arms races between parasites and hosts, such as the arms race between
computer virus writers and anti-virus software writers, or
spammers against
Internet Service Providers and
E-mail software writers. Such analogies are not fully accurate as they describe situations where absolute, not necessarilly relative, gains are the important metric.
Lewis Fry Richardson made an arms race model, trying to
retrodict World War I, where he showed how two countries would go to war if more money was spent in the arms race than in trade. There is an interesting economic idea here, but since the model was made after the war, it did not have the prophetic power it might have had.
*
Cold War*
Missile Technology Control Regime*
Nuclear arms race*
Space race
