Arms race

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

An arms race is a competition between two or more countries for military supremacy. Each party competes to produce superior numbers of weapons or superior military technology in a technological escalation.

Most arms races have occurred in the modern era. One of the first arms races occurred in the pre-World War I era from the 1890s to 1914 where the five great powers of Europe (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Russian Empire, France, and the United Kingdom) were locked in an all-out military buildup, ranging from land armies, conscription, and artillery to battleships and competition between each country's mobilization speed. France reached a mobilization speed of just 3 days. At one point, it was estimated Germany could become fully war ready in only 2 days.

One significant recent example was the race to develop more and better nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Carl Sagan once famously described this arms race with the analogy of "two men standing waist deep in gasoline; one with three matches, the other with five."

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.