ABSTRACT
Quantitative and qualitative improvements in strategic and theater-level offensive capabilities have not been the only subject of superpower competition, however. The pursuit of superior nuclear war-fighting capabilities has come to include, as well, a race to prevent retaliatory strikes through destruction of the adversary’s command structure and the development of sophisticated defense systems and weaponry such as antiballistic missile systems and space-age laser and particle-beam weapons. International hostility may help get an arms race started and maintain it once it has begun, but varoius kinds of domestic influences also help maintain high levels of military spending. The idea of an arms race captures the sense that opposing states may be driven, from fear of permitting the other to gain an advantage, into an even sharper and perhaps ultimately self-defeating competition. This perspective on competition emerges also in the action-reaction perspective on arms races associated with the work of Lewis Frye Richardson.
