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The term arms race, in its original usage, describes a competition between two or more parties for real or apparent military supremacy. Each party competes to produce larger numbers of weapon
Weapon

A weapon is a tool used to apply or threaten to apply force for the purpose of hunting, attack or defense in combat, subduing enemy personnel, or to destroy enemy weapons, equipment and defensive structures....
s, greater armies, or superior military technology
Military technology

see also Military technology and equipment'Military technology a broad concept that deals with a range of systems which is distinctly not civilian in application....
 in a technological escalation
Technological escalation

Technological escalation describes the fact that whenever two parties are in competition, each side tends to employ continuing technological improvements to defeat the other....
. Nowadays the term is commonly used to describe any competition where there is no absolute goal, only the relative goal of staying ahead of the other competitors.


Other uses
More generically, the term "arms race" is used to describe any competition where there is no absolute goal, only the relative goal of staying ahead of the other competitors.






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Encyclopedia


The term arms race, in its original usage, describes a competition between two or more parties for real or apparent military supremacy. Each party competes to produce larger numbers of weapon
Weapon

A weapon is a tool used to apply or threaten to apply force for the purpose of hunting, attack or defense in combat, subduing enemy personnel, or to destroy enemy weapons, equipment and defensive structures....
s, greater armies, or superior military technology
Military technology

see also Military technology and equipment'Military technology a broad concept that deals with a range of systems which is distinctly not civilian in application....
 in a technological escalation
Technological escalation

Technological escalation describes the fact that whenever two parties are in competition, each side tends to employ continuing technological improvements to defeat the other....
. Nowadays the term is commonly used to describe any competition where there is no absolute goal, only the relative goal of staying ahead of the other competitors.

Examples of arms races

  • The period preceding World War I
    World War I

    World War I, or the First World War , was a global military conflict which involved the Great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies of World War I and the Central Powers....
    , when Germany, Britain, France and Italy were competing to build the most powerful battleship
    Battleship

    A battleship is a large, heavily armour warship with a main artillery battery consisting of the largest calibre of guns. Battleships were larger, better armed, and better armored than cruisers and destroyers....
    . Lewis Fry Richardson
    Lewis Fry Richardson

    Lewis Fry Richardson, Fellow of the Royal Society   was an English mathematician, physicist, meteorologist, psychologist and pacifist who pioneered modern mathematical techniques of weather forecasting, and the application of similar techniques to studying the causes of wars and how to prevent them....
     made an arms race model, trying to retrodict
    Retrodiction

    Retrodiction is the act of making a "prediction" about the past. This is especially useful when one wishes to test a theory whose actual predictions are too long-term to be of immediate use....
     World War I
    World War I

    World War I, or the First World War , was a global military conflict which involved the Great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies of World War I and the Central Powers....
    , where he showed how two countries would go to war if more money was spent in the arms race than in trade.
  • At the geopolitical
    Geopolitics

    Geopolitics is the art and practice of using international political power. Traditionally, the term has applied primarily to the impact of geography on politics, but its usage has evolved over the past century to encompass a wider connotation....
     level of the 20th century, the United States
    United States

    The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
     and the Soviet Union
    Soviet Union

    The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a Constitution of the Soviet Union socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991.The name is a translation of the , romanization of Russian Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated ????, SSSR....
     developed more and better nuclear weapon
    Nuclear weapon

    A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either nuclear fission or a combination of fission and nuclear fusion....
    s during the Cold War
    Cold War

    The Cold War was the continuing state of conflict, tension and competition that existed between a number of world powers, including the United States, the Soviet Union, People's Republic of China, France, United Kingdom and those countries' respective allies from the mid-1940s to the early 1990s....
     (see: nuclear arms race
    Nuclear arms race

    The nuclear arms race was a competition for supremacy in nuclear warfare between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies during the Cold War....
    ). Immediately after World War II, the United States was behind the Soviet Union in the area of intermediate range missiles, but they managed to catch up with the help of German scientists. The Soviet Union committed their command economy to the arms race and, with the deployment of the SS-18 in the late 1970s, achieved first strike
    First strike

    In nuclear strategy, a first strike is a Preemptive war employing overwhelming force. First strike capability is a country's ability to defeat another nuclear power by destroying its arsenal to the point where the attacking country can survive the weakened retaliation while the opposing side is left unable to continue war....
     parity
    Parity

    Parity is a concept of equality of status or functional equivalence. It has several different specific definitions.* Parity , the name of the symmetry of interactions under spatial inversion...
    . However, the strain of competition against the great spending power of the United States created enormous economic problems during Mikhail Gorbachev
    Mikhail Gorbachev

    Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a Russian politician. He was the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, serving from 1985 until 1991, and also the last head of state of the USSR, serving from 1988 until its collapse in 1991....
    's attempt at konversiya, the transition to a consumer based, mixed economy
    Mixed economy

    A mixed economy is an economic system that incorporates a mixture of private and government ownership or control, or a mixture of capitalism and socialism....
    , and hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union. Because the two powers were competing with one another instead of aiming for a predefined goal, both nations soon acquired a huge capacity for overkill.


Other uses


More generically, the term "arms race" is used to describe any competition where there is no absolute goal, only the relative goal of staying ahead of the other competitors. An arms race may also imply futility as the competitors spend a great deal of time and money, yet end up in the same situation as if they had never started the arms race. An evolutionary arms race
Evolutionary arms race

In evolutionary biology, an evolutionary arms race is an evolutionary struggle between competing sets of co-evolution genes that develop adaptation s and counter-adaptations against each other, resembling an arms race....
 is a system where two populations are evolving
Evolution

In biology, evolution is change in the heritability trait of a population of organisms from one generation to the next. These changes are caused by a combination of three main processes: variation, reproduction, and selection....
 in order to continuously one-up members of the other population. For example, a predator / prey
Predation

In ecology, predation describes a biological interaction where a predator feeds on its prey, the organism that is attacked. Predators may or may not kill their prey prior to feeding on them, but the act of predation always results in the death of the prey....
 arms-race involves predators evolving more effective means to catch prey while their prey evolves more effective means of evasion. This is related to the Red Queen
Red Queen

The Red Queen's Hypothesis, Red Queen, "Red Queen's race" or "Red Queen Effect" is an evolutionary hypothesis. The term is taken from the Red Queen's race in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass....
 effect, where two populations are co-evolving to overcome one another but are failing to make absolute progress.

In technology, there are close analogues to the arms races between parasites and hosts, such as the arms race between computer virus
Computer virus

A computer virus is a computer program that can copy itself and infect a computer without the permission or knowledge of the user. The term "virus" is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware, adware and spyware programs that do not have the reproductive ability....
 writers and antivirus software
Antivirus software

Antivirus software is computer software used to identify and remove computer viruses, as well as many other types of harmful computer software, collectively referred to as malware....
 writers, or spammers
Spam (electronic)

Spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: Messaging spam, Newsgroup spam, spamdexing, spam in blogs, wiki spam, Classified advertising spam, mobile phone spam, Forum...
 against Internet service provider
Internet service provider

An Internet service provider is a company that offers its customers access to the Internet. The ISP connects to its customers using a data transmission technology appropriate for delivering Internet Protocol datagrams, such as dial-up, DSL, cable modem or dedicated high-speed interconnects....
s and E-mail
E-mail

Electronic mail, often abbreviated as e-mail, email, E-Mail, or eMail, is any method of creating, transmitting, or storing primarily text-based human communications with digital communications systems....
 software writers.

See also

  • Cold War
    Cold War

    The Cold War was the continuing state of conflict, tension and competition that existed between a number of world powers, including the United States, the Soviet Union, People's Republic of China, France, United Kingdom and those countries' respective allies from the mid-1940s to the early 1990s....
  • Missile Technology Control Regime
    Missile Technology Control Regime

    The Missile Technology Control Regime , drafted by Dr. Richard H. Speier, is an informal and voluntary partnership between 34 countries to prevent the nuclear proliferation of missile....
  • Space Race
    Space Race

    File:Space race1.jpgThe Space Race was a competition of space exploration between the Soviet Union and the United States, which lasted roughly from 1957 to 1975....


Literature


  • Richard J. Barnet: Der amerikanische Rüstungswahn. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1984, ISBN 3-499-11450-X
  • Jürgen Bruhn: Der Kalte Krieg oder: Die Totrüstung der Sowjetunion. Focus, Gießen 1995, ISBN 3-88349-434-8