Arms Race Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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An arms race is generally understood as a process of competitive acquisition of weaponry. The domestic and international forces driving an arms race may be as era-defining as global ideological rivalry or as idiosyncratic as the preferences of an admiral’s spouse, but evidence of hostility between the racers is a definitional requirement, usually including an assertion on each side that the buildups are necessary because of the growing arsenal of the opponent.

Arms racers are often pairs of nation-states, but interactive arming may occur also between alliances, within nation-states, between armed services, within armed services, or among nonstate actors. One example of complex interactions among more than two nation-states is trilateral arming among China, the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war era. Arms racing may precede war, substitute for war, or grow out of unresolved issues following war, but as a rule, weapons production during wartime is not considered arms racing.

Races are identified by the names of the participants (e.g., U.S.-Soviet Arms Race) as well as by the nature of the weaponry (e.g., the nuclear arms race). Arms races also may be distinguished according to whether they are essentially qualitative or quantitative. Qualitative arms racing means that participants compete to develop higher quality, more effective arsenals. Qualitative races are characterized by weapons whose accuracy, range, and lethality change quickly and by rapid research and development of new weapons technologies. Quantitative racing is competition in numbers of existing weaponry. Arms control specialists find that quantitative races are easier to limit by agreement than qualitative races. Rapidly moving qualitative races also facilitate agreement, but only in obsolescent technologies.

Conceptualizations

Arms races are conceptualized in several ways. One view is that arms racing can be understood as a mechanistic process like the motion of billiard balls but capable of generating unanticipated and undesired effects such as World War I (1914–1918), or a nuclear war catalyzed by a crisis. Other analysts see arms racing as tacit but intelligent communication, in which acquisition of weapons systems becomes a coded conversation. This view assumes that adversaries know and understand each other’s political goals and that new weaponry becomes reasonably well known on both sides, perhaps by open testing.

A policy instrument conceptualization views arms racing as a device to achieve political-economic goals, foreign and domestic, deliberately and rationally. Arms racing also may be conceived as a less rational result of internal bureaucratic forces: domestic political and economic bargaining, competition among military services, incremental decision making, and failure to discard old programs, such as the U.S. horse cavalry. In this view the arms buildup is a result of a military industrial complex grafted onto the legislature. Large-scale weapons systems are seen as fruit of a patronage system and may have little to do with the outside world. Choice of adversary is then mostly a historical accident and may be altered to meet domestic political, including electoral, needs.

Some scholars, such as Brian Eslea (1985), understand arms racing in part or in whole as an aberrant consequence of psychological pressures on decision making, so that racing is propelled by misperception, genuine psychopathology, or imperatives of gender on decision making. Larger theoretical arguments about interstate conflict dynamics have posited a role for competitive armaments processes in catastrophe theory, in the intersection of competition for resources and political alliances as well as in escalation of disputes to crises and thence to war. The fact that arms races often originate in or precipitate territorial disputes leads to the inclusion of contiguity (close proximity, usually understood as a shared border) and geostrategic data in many explanations.

Examples Of Arms Races

Soviet Union-United States, 1948–1989

Israel-rejectionist states, various dates; e.g., 1957–1966

India-Pakistan, various; 1957–1964

Chile-Peru, 1868–1879

England-Germany, 1898–1914

Are Arms Races Risky?

Under what circumstances is arms racing dangerous? When is it stabilizing? Deterrence theorists assert that some arms races contribute to conflict stabilization, hence to peace (deterrence stability). Intriligator and Brito argue (1984) that for some constellations of weaponry, racing leads to peace. Power equilibrium hypotheses and power transition arguments also can be developed in which military power is used to restore balance and order. Similar arguments apply to horizontal proliferation as potentially stabilizing. Racing also may preserve peace at least temporarily by substituting another arena for competition.

However, arms races may be deterrence-stable (in the sense that ratios of weapons remain constant while the arsenals grow), while being neither mechanically stable, nor crisis-stable. Arms races may then be war precursors in the long term because mechanical instability can occur within deterrence stability or other forms of stability.

Some types of arms races are probably more hazardous than others. Observers cannot avoid the conclusion that racing in weapons of mass destruction (WMD)—chemical, biological, nuclear, radiological—is inherently dangerous. Arms racing in nuclear weapons is risky even if tightly controlled, simply because of the inevitable environmental contamination before, during, and after the arms race, and because of the risks of accidental detonation, loss, theft, and diversion. As weapons proliferate, into whose hands they may devolve becomes a more urgent question. The specter of the “terrorist” use of WMD looms large, but it should not obscure the risk that status quo powers themselves may not be reasonable users of WMD.

Does arms racing itself risk interstate war? Arms racing may be perilous because it can be a method of maximizing arsenals before initiating a war (risk of a long and severe war). Alternatively, arms racing may be misunderstood by a potential adversary as signaling imminent attack when none is intended (risk of an accidental war). Arms racing from a position of notable inferiority may even invite preemptive attack (deterrence failure).

Arms racing is not typical nation-state behavior. Scholars come to contrasting conclusions about the political consequences of arms racing, depending on variations in their original assumptions, definitions of terms, conceptualizations, and initial political conditions. Outcomes are affected by dynamic factors such as power transitions and the type and form of the race and by specifics such as the nature of the weaponry, as well as the risks taken in deployment, such as instituting automatic launch-on-warning mechanisms. On balance, the risk posed by arms racing in general cannot be given a single answer.

The social science term arms racing, understood as unstable escalatory processes, is now established in the natural sciences as well, especially in the context of evolutionary theory. In biology, arms racing is understood as an interactive process of adaptive defense and offense, against pathogens, parasites or predators. For instance, in a predator-prey pair, racing prey animals evolve resistance to predator toxins, while predators evolve more effective poisons, capturing the social science concepts of dyadic relationships and action-reaction spirals.

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