Arms Race

Context:
- It can (typically) be associated with significant increase in Military Spending.
- …
Example(s):
- Naval Arms Race (1890s-1914), primarily between the British Empire and Germany which included the launch of the HMS Dreadnought in 1906.
- Nuclear Arms Race (1945-1991), culminated in the production of thousands of nuclear warheads/nuclear weapons by both sides.
- Space Race (1957-1969), began with the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 and culminated with the U.S. moon landing in 1969.
- an AI Arms Race (of AI-based military systems).
- a Cyber Arms Race,
- …
Counter-Example(s):
- Arms Control,
- Space Race,
- One-Upmanship.
See: Military Technology, Offensive Weapon, Defensive Weapon.

References

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/26/new-global-arms-race-west-military-spending-conflict
- NOTES:
  - In 2022, global military spending increased 3.7% to a new high of $2.24 trillion. Europe saw its steepest increase in over 30 years.
  - The US frames China as a "threat" mainly as a reaction to China freeing itself from US economic dominion.
  - Ukraine is seen not as an effort to restore law, but as part of a West vs Russia power struggle.

(Wikipedia, 2023) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_race Retrieved:2023-9-5.
- An arms race occurs when two or more groups compete in military superiority. It consists of a competition between two or more states to have superior armed forces, concerning production of weapons, the growth of a military, and the aim of superior military technology. Unlike a sporting race, which constitutes a specific event with winning interpretable as the outcome of a singular project, arms races constitute spiralling systems of on-going and potentially open-ended behavior. ^[1]
  The existing scholarly literature is divided as to whether arms races correlate with war.^[2] International-relations scholars explain arms races in terms of the security dilemma, engineering spiral models, states with revisionist aims, and deterrence models.^[2]