The Development of the Arms Race and How We Think About It

Olav Njølstad

In the last decade of the Cold War, public and expert opinions about the nuclear arms race and its relevance for international stability and peace changed dramatically. As one observer noted at the time:

In the early 1980s, when US arms spending rose rapidly after several years of stagnation, public concern about the arms race also increased rapidly. [. . . ] The probability a run-away arms race would lead to nuclear war was seen as quite high.

At the end of the 1980s, the [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces] INF agreement and the rapprochement between the superpowers have led many to the opposite extreme of declaring the arms race dead. This is premature, for two reasons: the East–West conﬂict has seen periods of lower tension and less intense arming—but the arms race re-emerged eventually; and [. . . ], we are likely to see many new arms races, involving the smaller nuclear powers, the potential proliferators, Third World countries with unresolved border issues, etc. Many of these arms races may lead to wars or extremely wasteful arms acquisitions.¹

Today, some twenty-plus years later, it makes sense to use this note as a point of departure for a brief examination of the arms race phenomenon, during and after the Cold War, and of how our understanding of it has evolved since the ending of US–Soviet rivalry. Which of the cited public perceptions of the Soviet–American arms race was the more accurate, according to post-Cold War scholarship? And to what extent has the stated prediction of new arms races come true?

I will start out with the broader question of how our understanding of the arms race phenomenon has evolved over the last twenty to thirty years.

1Nils Petter Gleditsch,“Research on arms races,” in N. P. Gleditsch and Olav Njølstad (eds.), Arms Races: Technological and Political Dynamics (London: Sage, 1990), 13.

Arguably, there is less division about the nature and role of arms races among the experts of today than there was a few decades ago. Particularly note-worthy, the views of“number crunching” political scientists and historians with a more qualitative approach, which used to be wide apart, have become more compatible, and on important issues even appear mutually supportive.

Next, I discuss what implications, if any, the emerging consensus might have for our understanding of the East–West arms race during the Cold War. Here, my main conclusion is that the steady acquisition by the two superpowers of more powerful and effective conventional and nuclear armaments was indeed a major feature of the Cold War, but that it should be seen more as an asymmetrical, and partly unsynchronized, militarization of an ideological–

political and geopolitical conﬂict than a spiraling action–reaction process heading for Armageddon.

As for impact, I argue that whereas the nuclear arms race did not cause the Cold War, it put its distinct mark on it, especially in thefirst and last decade of the East–West conflict. Finally, I briefly address the arms races of the post-Cold War era. So far, they have been remarkably few, and their impact on inter-national peace and stability correspondingly small. Arms races, it seems, are less of a threat to international peace than to the economic well-being of nations. That being said, the moment we adjust our thinking about arms races to the multidimensional conflicts and security dilemmas of the twenty-first century, the picture may well change again.

Understanding arms races: an emerging consensus on the horizon?

The nature of the arms race phenomenon—its features, causes, and possible effects—has been a contested issue among historians, political scientists and statesmen for more than a century. Indeed, by the end of the Cold War, numerous schools of thought had presented their perspectives on what arms races are, why they occur, and what implications they may have for inter-national peace and stability. As Matthew Evangelista put it, there seemed to be more arms race theories than weapon acquisition decisions to explain.²

Over the last twenty-year period the explanatoryﬁeld has both narrowed and widened up. It has narrowed in the sense that some of the theories and propositions that were still highly inﬂuential back in the 1980s have lost relevance and support. It has widened up in the sense that the walls and gaps that once separated the more important schools of thought, and pre-vented fruitful exchange between them, have indeed been lowered and partly

2Matthew Evangelista,“Case Studies and Theories of the Arms Race,” Bulletin of Peace Proposals, 17:2 (May 1986), 197.

bridged. Participants in the discourse have increasingly come to recognize that arms races are of many types, some of which are calling for quite different kinds of explanation. Thus, any comprehensive theory will have to offer more than just a single analytical perspective.³

What is an arms race, then?

A much cited deﬁnition by Colin S. Grey holds that an arms race is occur-ring when you have“Two or more parties perceiving themselves to be in an adversary relationship, who are increasing or improving their armaments at a rapid rate and restructuring their respective military postures with a general attention to the past, current, and anticipated military and political behavior of the other parties.”⁴

As pointed out by Bruno Tertrais, Grey’s deﬁnition has the double advan-tage of avoiding the alacrity and out-of-control connotations suggested by the term “race” while, at the same time, being restrictive enough to avoid the fallacy of counting any substantive development, progress, or build-up in weapons acquisition as evidence of an arms race.⁵

Equally important, Grey suggests that arms races, like war, serve a political purpose (the increase in armament is calibrated to balance or overtake the strengths of another state). In and by itself a rapid increase in military spend-ing by two neighborspend-ing countries does not constitute a military competition or an arms race. To do so, the military build-up must be imbedded in some sort of rivalry between the two governments in which they seek to improve, or at least maintain, their relative power and inﬂuence, either toward each other or within the international system. As noted by Grant T. Hammond, if war is the continuation of politics by other means,“then arms races are the militariza-tion of politics short of war.”⁶

More speciﬁcally, the emerging consensus among students of arms races is mirrored by their increasing support of three crucial propositions.

First of all, arms races cannot be caused and sustained by non-relational factors such as “Eigendynamik” or “technological momentum” alone. The claim of Dieter Senghaas and others that arms races are essentially“autistic”

and “inner-directed” phenomena, is still in want of convincing empirical support.⁷ This is not to say there are no Eigendynamik and technological

3Early advocates for the view that, in explaining arms races, we need to apply a combination of systemic, national and subnational levels of analysis, were Barry Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain and Germany Between the World Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), and Grant H. Hammond, Plowshares into Swords: Arms Races in International Politics, 1840–

1991 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1990).

4Colin S. Grey,“The Arms Race Phenomenon,” World Politics, 24:1 (October 1971), 40 [italics in the original source].

5Bruno Tertrais,“Do Arms Races Matter?” The Washington Quarterly, 24:4 (2001), 123.

6Hammond, Plowshares into Swords, 30.

7According to Dieter Senghaas, the notion of arms races as“other-directed” and primarily driven by action–reaction dynamics between two or more antagonists is “at least highly dubious,

momentum at work; only that military competition and arms races both spring from“conflicting purposes or mutual fears”—in short, rivalry between states.⁸This view can be traced back to the father of the English school of international relations, Hedley Bull. More recently, in his influential study of arms races and war in the 1850–1945 period, Paul Kennedy argued that arms races“are the reflection of complex political/ideological/racial/economic/ter-ritorial differences rather than phenomena which exist, as it were, of them-selves [. . . ].”⁹

Interestingly, Kennedy’s assumption has been conﬁrmed by quantitative empirical analyses. In their 2011 survey of 220 rivalry dyads between 1816 and 2000, Toby Rider, Michael Findley and Paul Diehl found that, although most rivalries never experience an arms race, some 25 per cent do. Other ﬁndings were that the probability of an arms race between any pair of states

“increases by over 80 per cent when moving from non-rivalry to rivalry,” and that those rare military build-ups that actually do occur in the context of non-rivalry“appear to be cases of coincidental arming, rather than actual interde-pendent arms races.”¹⁰ In other words, for all practical purposes true arms races are caused by interstate rivalry.

Secondly, even if arms races are caused by interstate rivalry driven by perceptions of fear and insecurity, there is little or no evidence in support of Robert McNamara’s notion of a “mad momentum” making arms races, once started, almost impossible to control. Sure, the perception of threat by one actor may trigger an action–reaction process, with the opponent responding in kind. But there is nothing automatic in this; other outcomes are equally possible (for instance, an action–inaction process, or even a unilateral arms

if not completely false.” At least for the Cold War period, the armament decisions of the big powers and their allies had rather been“mainly inner-directed and less dictated by external forces. The self-centered imperatives of national armament policies have been far stronger than those which have resulted from the reciprocal interactions with the so-called potential enemy.” Dieter Senghaas,

“Arms Race Dynamics and Arms Control” in Gleditsch and Njølstad, Arms Races, 15–30 (a slightly revised version of“Arms Race Dynamics and Arms Control in Europe,” Bulletin of Peace Proposals, 10:1 (February 1979), 8–19. See also D. Senghaas, “Towards an Analysis of Threat Policy in International Relations,” in Klaus von Beyme (ed.), German Political Studies, volume 1 (London:

Sage, 1974), 59–103. Interestingly, by the end of the Cold War, Senghaas himself was calling for multilevel analyses of the arms race phenomenon. In 1990 he wrote:“An appropriate analysis of the armament problematique must take into account at least three levels of the problem: systemic confrontation (or power rivalry), armament competition, and armament dynamics.” D. Senghaas,

“Systemic confrontation, Armament Competition, and Armament Dynamics,” in Gleditsch and Njølstad, Arms Races, 346–51.

7Grey was very conscious about this fact himself. See, for instance: Colin S. Grey, The Soviet– American Arms Race (New York: Saxon House, 1976), 4.

8 Hammond, Plowshares into Swords, 34.

9 Paul M. Kennedy,“Arms-races and the Causes of War, 1850–1945,” in Strategy and Diplomacy 1870–1945: Eight studies (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), 174.

10Toby J. Rider, Michael G. Findley and Paul F. Diehl,“Just part of the game? Arms races, rivalry, and war,” Journal of Peace Research, 48:1 (2011), 93, 97.

reduction by the other side in order to ease tensions). To start and sustain arms races a number of rational decisions have to be made. These may in turn be criticized, reconsidered, modified, or reversed, which is why there are many examples of aborted arms races as well as of arms races controlled or ended by mutual accord. With reference to historical examples of the latter two categor-ies in the 1850–1945 period, Paul Kennedy refuted “that once-popular thesis about‘the merchants of death’, that is, that armaments manufacturers pervert public policy, influence governments into excessive military expenditures, and are ultimately responsible for wars.” In Kennedy’s view, even more con-temporary evidence suggest “that the thesis about the influence of arms manufacturers does notfit the facts, either as to the timing, or the direction, or the meaning of the current armaments spiral.”¹¹

Grey made a similar point with reference to the Soviet–American arms race, which in his words was“littered with the blueprints and even prototypes of weapon systems that the United States did not deploy” (and this presumably holds true for the Soviet Union as well).¹²Also Rider, Findley, and Diehl found that arms races are controllable; albeit, in their sample of 220 rivalry dyads, forty-two out of ﬁfty-three documented rivalries with arms races ended in war.¹³

Finally, theﬁnding that arms races are caused by interstate rivalry, not the other way around, and may be started and ended by the exercise of political will, has the important implication that arms races cannot be a sufﬁcient or necessary cause of war. Yet many experts still posit a direct or indirect causal relationship between the two. Apart from the spiraling action–reaction pro-cess suggested by Lewis F. Richardson, arms races are said to directly cause war or increase the likelihood of war for many different reasons, such as to

“increase the inﬂuence of the military in decision making (Noel-Baker, 1958), lower trust (Sample, 1996), exacerbate the urge for pre-emption (Lam-belet, 1975; Morrow, 1989; Weede, 1980), and encourage the use of shortcuts that result in misperception ( Jervis, 1976)”; or, to indirectly cause war by undermining deterrence (Glaser, 2000).¹⁴

11Kennedy,“Arms-races and the Causes of War,” 173.

12Grey, The Soviet–American Arms Race, 6 [emphasis added].

13Rider, Findley and Diehl,“Just part of the game?” 93, Table III.

14Rider, Findley and Diehl,“Just part of the game?” 86. The publications referred to are: Philip Noel-Baker, The Arms Race: A Programme of World Disarmament (New York: Oceana, 1958); Susan G. Sample,“Arms races and escalation of disputes to war,” PhD dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1996; John Lambelet,“Do arms races lead to war?” Journal of Peace Research, 12:2 (1975), 123–8;

James D. Morrow,“A twist of truth: A reexamination of the effects of arms races on the occurrence of war,” Journal of Conﬂict Resolution, 33:3 (1989), 500–29; Eric Weede, “Arms races and escalation:

Some persisting doubts,” Journal of Conﬂict Resolution, 24:2 (1980), 285–7; Robert Jervis, Perceptions and Misperceptions in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976); and Charles Glaser,“The causes and consequences of arms races,” Annual Review of Political Science, 3 (2000), 251–76.

Assumptions like these are hard to test, and it is difficult to see how any of the suggested factors can possibly be more than a contributing cause of military conflict. In fact, there is strong reason to believe that there is no direct causal relationship whatsoever between arms races and war; only a spurious one. Noteworthy, Paul Kennedy came to this conclusion in his study of the pre-Second World War arms races, stating: “it is logically false to see the sequence as arms races causing war: what we would see, rather, is that antagon-isms between nations often produce an arms race and may produce an armed conflict. Both of the latter phenomena are consequences of the former.”¹⁵

The proposition that interstate rivalry is the main cause of both arms races and war, with the corollary that the relationship between arms races and war is a spurious one,finds some, but not full, support in recent quantitative ana-lyses.¹⁶Thus, Rider, Findley, and Diehl found that, out of a total of 220 rivalry dyads, there were more wars caused by rivalry without arms races than by rivalry with arms races (52 versus 42). However, since the former category was far more numerous than the latter, consisting of 167 versus 53 dyads, the wars-to-rivalry ratio was much lower in rivalry dyads without than in those with arms races (31 versus 79, approximately). Still, they could find no positive correlation between arms races and war when the arms race occurred early in the life of the rivalry. Only when arms races occurred at a later stage,“in the context of mature rivalry,” did a significant positive correlation emerge.¹⁷ Again, this may actually indicate a spurious, rather than a causal, relationship since escalation to war is more likely to happen later in rivalry, after repeated disputes, regardless of whether there is an arms race or not.¹⁸According to a recent study, the introduction of an arms race in mature rivalries does not add much to the likelihood of war simply because“most all of the other risk factors are [already] present.”¹⁹

In any case, the notion that arms races lead almost inevitably to war, which was once regarded as an iron law of international politics, has been proved historically false and statistically incorrect.²⁰

15Kennedy,“Arms-races and the Causes of War,” 174.

16Paul F. Diehl and Mark J. C. Crescenzi,“Reconﬁguring the arms race–war debate,” Journal of Peace Research, 35:1 (1998), 111–18; Paul F. Diehl and Gary Goertz, War and Peace in International Rivalry (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000).

17Rider, Findley and Diehl,“Just part of the game?” 93. For a mainly similar conclusion, see:

Douglas Gibler, Toby J. Rider and Marc L. Hutchison,“Taking arms against a sea of troubles:

Conventional arms races during periods of rivalry,” Journal of Peace Research, 42:2 (2005), 131–47.

18Paul R. Hensel, “An evolutionary approach to the study of interstate rivalry,” Conﬂict Management and Peace Science, 17:2 (1999), 179–206.

19Paul Senese and John Vasquez, The Steps to War: An Empirical Study (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 245.

20This observation seems consistent with the statistical ﬁndings about the causation of militarized disputes presented by John Oneal in his chapter in the present volume.

The Cold War arms race in retrospect

Back in the high days of the Cold War, it was widely assumed that the Soviet–

American rivalry was imbedded in a spiraling and potentially dangerous arms race, in particular with respect to nuclear weapons. Indeed, to many laymen and experts alike, the nuclear arms race stood out as the very essence of superpower rivalry. To some, the term“arms race” almost became shorthand for Cold War rivalry itself.²¹

Does this interpretation of the Cold War seem reasonable today, some twenty years after its peaceful ending and in light of the emerging consensus among arms race theorists? In the following I will present four propositions about the role and nature of the military competition in the Cold War that address different aspects of this question.

Proposition 1: In terms of relative military spending the Soviet–American military competition in the Cold War may not fully qualify as an arms race, at least not a permanent one. That being said, military expenditure may not be the crucial criteria in this particular case.

Was the Cold War an arms race?

In order to answer that question properly, we must return for a moment to the criteria suggested by Grey:“A perceived adversary relationship between two or more states whose governments are increasing or improving their armaments at a rapid rate and restructuring their respective military postures with a general attention to the past, current, and anticipated military and political behavior of the other parties.”²²Whereas few experts will question that the Cold War relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States was a truly hostile one, and that their respective military postures reﬂected, to a considerable extent, how they perceived each other’s military capabilities and intentions, serious doubts have been raised as to whether the

In document International Relations Since the End of the Cold War New and Old Dimensions (Page 182-200)