ABSTRACT
Introduction The end of the ColdWarmeant the end of a bipolar world in which all international political events could be explained by the opposition of the Soviet and American blocks. One of the principal features of this bipolar world was the arms race. However, with current political and economic changes, past theories must be reviewed. Recent research on arms races has tended to model regional conflicts, such as India-Pakistan and Greece-Turkey. But there is also the question of whether Cold War explanations of armaments allow us to understand the post-Cold War defence expenditures of the United States? With this in mind, this chapter develops theoretical specifications of action-reactionmodels applied to theUnited States with the idea that redefining the grievance coefficient, described by Richardson (1960), can permit existing theories of arms race to adapt to the new international context, in which the United States is the only super-power and give alternative explanations to the dynamics of armament and disarmament.
