Question

Arms race leads to total destruction of the world. In this background, what are the effects of Arms race?

Answer 1

An arms race denotes a rapid increase in the quantity or quality of instruments of military power by rival states in peacetime. The first modern arms race took place when France and Russia challenged the naval superiority of Britain in the late nineteenth century. Germany’s attempt to surpass Britain’s fleet spilled over into World War I, while tensions after the war between the United States, Britain and Japan resulted in the first major arms-limitation treaty at the Washington Conference. The buildup of arms was also a characteristic of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, though the development of nuclear weapons changed the stakes for the par

Over the past century, the arms race metaphor has assumed a prominent place in public discussion of military affairs. But even more than the other colorful metaphors of security studies–balance of power, escalation, and the like–it may cloud rather than clarify understanding of the dynamics of international rivalries.

An arms race denotes a rapid, competitive increase in the quantity or quality of instruments of military or naval power by rival states in peacetime. What it connotes is a game with a logic of its own. Typically, in popular depictions of arms races, the political calculations that start and regulate the pace of the game remain obscure. As Charles H. Fairbanks, Jr., has noted, “The strange result is that the activity of the other side, and not one’s own resources, plans, and motives, becomes the determinant of one’s behavior.” And what constitutes the “finish line” of the game is the province of assertion, rather than analysis. Many onlookers, and some participants, have claimed that the likelihood of war increases as the accumulation of arms proceeds apace.

A close examination of the historical evidence reveals a different picture. Political purposes almost always drive and govern arms races. It is common for a major race to be initiated by a state interested in changing the political status quo. In some cases, the response of states content with the status quo is swift and resolute, but in other cases it is constrained by domestic political or economic considerations or diverted by diplomatic calculations. The course of an arms race has frequently exacerbated a sense of rivalry and occasionally even determined the timing of a war; but most often it has ended in a political settlement between rivals or in a decision by one side to moderate its buildup.

The first competitive buildup in which contemporaries used the arms race metaphor seems to have been the naval rivalry in the late nineteenth century, in which France and Russia challenged Britain in the context of acute tensions over colonial expansion. The British responded with a determination to remain masters of the seas. The ultimate result was not war, but rather an Anglo-French political settlement in 1904 and an Anglo-Russian rapprochement in 1907 against the background of a rising German threat.

The German challenge to Britain in the early twentieth century involved the most famous naval arms race of all. As the post-Bismarck political leadership decided that Germany must become a world power, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz was able to justify building a large German battle fleet. When the British finally responded, the upshot was a competition that fit an action-reaction model more closely than any other arms race. The Germans in the end could not keep up, because of domestic difficulties in raising taxes and pressures to give greater priority to spending on the army. Though the naval arms race did poison Anglo-German relations, it was the actions of the German army, not the German navy, that ultimately produced war in 1914.

Answer 2

They are widely believed to have significant consequences for states' security, but agreement stops there. In the debate over their consequences, one side holds that arms races increase the probability of war by undermining military stability and straining political relations.