arms race research paper

• A-Z Publications

Annual Review of Political Science

Volume 3, 2000, review article, the causes and consequences of arms races.

• Charles L. Glaser 1
• View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637; e-mail: [email protected]
• Vol. 3:251-276 (Volume publication date June 2000) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.3.1.251
• © Annual Reviews

This chapter reviews the literature on causes of arms races, their consequences, and when a state should build up arms and engage in an arms race if necessary. The literature tends to equate external causes with threats; the chapter argues for a broader understanding that includes all causes of rational arming behavior. Internal causes of arms races are then understood to be factors within the state that lead it to adopt suboptimal policies. Although the causes and consequences of arms races are usually dealt with separately, in fact they are closely connected. When a state engages in an arms race because this is its best option, the state is acting rationally, the causes of the arms race are external, and the arms race has no consequences of its own. In contrast, when a state arms because domestic interests have distorted its policy, the arms race produces negative consequences. Research on the consequences of arms races has been hindered by the lack of a fully developed theory of when a state shouldrace; progress on defensive realism is helping to fill this gap.

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Publication Date: 01 Jun 2000

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Competition between great powers and a looming strategic arms race in the Asia–Pacific

• Original Paper
• Published: 29 June 2021
• Volume 3 , pages 123–136, ( 2021 )

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• Xi Luo 1 , 2  

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As competition between the United States and Russia intensifies, the importance of nuclear weapons is rising and innovation with regard to associated technologies is gaining momentum in both countries. The other regional nuclear-armed states, such as India, Pakistan, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), also have impetus to implement their own nuclear modernization plans. The Asia–Pacific region seems to be on the brink of a strategic arms race amidst bleak international arms control and related progress. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a nuclear-weapon state, China has played constructive roles in the international arms control process and should take on more responsibilities in this tough era.

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1 Introduction

As China gains influence as a great power with the world’s largest (as measured by purchasing power parity) or second-largest (as measured by nominal GDP) economy, the strategic studies’ community has concluded that strategic competition between great powers is now intrinsically trilateral rather than bilateral, as it was during the Cold War. With China involved, great power competition has become more complex and multi-dimensional. In technological, economic, and ideological realms, Beijing is viewed as a peer competitor and even a challenger by Washington. These trends prompted former United States President Donald Trump to shift from the traditional post-Nixonian U.S. “engagement” policy to one of “decoupling” and “containment.” Since current President Joseph Biden came to office, America’s policy on China policy has undergone a round of adjustment, but Washington still views China as a more assertive competitor (Biden 2021 ).

In the nuclear arena, China is now one of the triadic nuclear powers that possess land-based, airborne, and at-sea strategic nuclear weapons, and has been asked to participate in what were hitherto bilateral arms control negotiations, even though China holds an order of magnitude fewer nuclear weapons than the United States and Russia (Zala 2019 ). The United States and Russia have accelerated modernization of their own nuclear arsenals and increased the role played by nuclear weapons in their national security policies. Many observers predict that a new nuclear arms race is unavoidable and that the strategic stability between two major nuclear powers that existed after the Cold War is now obsolete (Gorbachev 2018 ).

Deepening strategic rivalry, unilateral non-compliance with and withdrawals from strategic arms treaties, as well as nuclear modernization activities and the introduction of entirely new weapons systems have undermined and controverted the existing international arms control process. Several milestone arms’ control treaties and agreements have been abandoned or face an uncertain future, even under the Biden Administration. These new factors—more players, linked in complex ways, modernization activity, plus new technologies, and the bleak outlook for arms control—make a new nuclear arms race not only probable, but also likely to be more dangerous and costly than before. Therefore, it is urgent that all states in the region, but especially the nuclear-armed great powers, cooperate to lessen the risk of an accidental nuclear conflict or a costly nuclear arms race.

To this end, this paper asks the following questions:

Driven by the renewal of major power rivalry, what are the potential military flashpoints and nuclear dangers in the Asia–Pacific region?

How does great power rivalry affect the prospect for cooperative efforts to reduce nuclear dangers?

Is it possible and reasonable to insist that China join in the trilateral arms control negotiation that the United States has tried to convene?

What kind of roles has China played in the international nuclear order, and how might it contribute to international arms control and the non-proliferation process in the future?

Is it possible, and if so, how might states reduce the risk of a dangerous strategic arms race in this region?

In summary, this essay contemplates, from a Chinese perspective, the worsening strategic rivalry between the great powers, surveys the present and prospective threat environment relative to the spread of nuclear weapons in Asia, reviews emerging strategic weapon systems and technologies, analyzes the relevant risks resulting from these trends and the adequacy of existing institutions to address proliferation challenges, and then explores ways of curbing and even reversing such trends. The overarching goal is to contribute to the rejuvenation of the nuclear arms control process and the avoidance of conflicts based on misinformation and mistaken assumptions about adversarial intentions.

2 Power shift and a worsening strategic rivalry

Since the end of the Cold War, the Asia–Pacific region has undergone two power shifts. The first was from the Cold War equilibrium of the two major superpowers to U.S. dominance. The second was from the short-lived absolute U.S. dominance to a three-power system that includes China. Characterized by China’s economic and military rise and the reemergence of an assertive Russia, the triangular strategic relationship will have an enormous effect on global peace and regional security. The first worrisome manifestation of the new tri-polarity was the deterioration of Russia–U.S. relations in the wake of the Ukraine crisis. The continued deterioration of U.S.–Russian relations has degraded the security of the Asian-Pacific region.

The other outstanding trend is the deterioration of the Sino–U.S. relationship, which is rooted in the power shift and addressed in realist transition theory (Shambaugh 2005 ; Fravel 2007 ). According to one exponent, political scientist and Harvard professor Graham Allison, transitioning from an order dominated by one great power that is then challenged by another substantial power, is fraught with peril and destined to cause increased risk of clashes and even war (Allison 2017 ).

It was more than 10 years ago that the U.S.–China relationship became the most important bilateral relationship in the world. Under the Obama administration, the United States began to adjust its China policy, but it still emphasized cooperation and engagement. After President Trump took office in 2017, the United States accelerated the pace of its China policy adjustment and deepened its suspicion toward China’s rise. A new “Washington consensus” emerged that the traditional China policy had failed and that the United States must toughen its China stance. In its 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) and Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), as well as relevant strategic documents released by the Trump administration, China was listed as the first threat to U.S. national security, ahead of Russia, North Korea, Iran, and the Islamic State (U.S. Department of Defense 2018 ). These documents su gg ested that U.S. security focus would pivot from counterterrorism after the September 11, 2001 attack, to great power competition because of China’s rise (Garamone 2018 ).

Driven by great power competition and corresponding mistrust and misunderstanding, the deterioration of the Sino–U.S. relationship has manifested in many issues, such as economic and trade frictions, disputes over intellectual property rights, technological decoupling, the Hong Kong issue, the Taiwan issue, and disputes in the South China Sea. Economically, the Trump administration initiated several trade conflicts and stepped up accusations against China of unfair trade practices. On the Taiwan issue, Trump provoked controversy when he floated the idea of increasing official contacts with Taiwan early in his term and then released several presidential orders relevant to relations with Taiwan. In the South China Sea, the United States strengthened its freedom of navigation operations and increased military ties with its regional allies. In the high-technology area, due to fears about Chinese companies playing a role in upgrading American infrastructure, Washington imposed sanctions on Chinese high-tech enterprises. These disputes intensified tensions that had already emerged during the Obama administration, which had moved to strengthen U.S. alliances in Asia and to shift more military assets to the Asia–Pacific region as part of its “rebalance to Asia” strategy. China has, in turn, dismissed U.S. concerns about the construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea, redoubled its criticism of U.S. security leadership in Asia, and tightened its claims on disputed maritime territories.

The shift from cooperative engagement to competition was fast and unexpected, and its effects have been magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Since early 2020, China–U.S. relations have deteriorated at an even faster pace. Official relations between the two countries are almost frozen, and the mutual antipathy among the two peoples is unprecedented. China–U.S. relations have experienced the most serious degradation since the normalization of diplomatic ties in the early 1970s. What will happen next is hard to predict.

3 A looming strategic arms race of the region

In the Asia–Pacific region, the post-Cold War international order has evolved from bipolar global competition to a rising strategic rivalry among the three great powers. The return of great power rivalry made the United States and Russia realize that they should enhance their own strategic deterrence capabilities. The dramatic deterioration of the global and regional threat environment gave other regional nuclear-armed states (such as India, Pakistan, and the DPRK) impetus to implement their own nuclear modernization plans. The rising number of regional actors with nuclear arsenals or nuclear aspirations may cause more nuclear threats and localized nuclear arms races while adding complexity to the tripolar nuclear standoff. Meanwhile, many more nuclear and non-nuclear states aspire to acquire missiles and missile technologies that lead to vertical and horizontal missile proliferation and enable the projection of a nuclear threat.

The United States and Russia, which account for more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, have accelerated the modernization of their nuclear arsenals. According to a report released by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in January 2019, it will cost an estimated $494 billion to modernize and operate the U.S. nuclear arsenal and facilities that support it during the period from 2019 to 2028 (Congressional Budget Office 2019 ). After a 1-year review process, the Trump administration published the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) report which reversed Obama’s attempt to downplay nuclear weapons and instead recommended increasing the role of U.S. nuclear weapons (U.S. Department of Defense 2018 ). The report rejected limiting the role of nuclear weapons to the sole purpose of deterring nuclear attacks, and instead emphasized “expanding” U.S. nuclear options to deter, and, if deterrence fails, to prevail against both nuclear and “non-nuclear strategic attacks.” To be clear, any use of a nuclear weapon to respond to a non-nuclear strategic attack would constitute nuclear first use (Kristensen and Korda 2020a ).

To “hedge against the potential nuclear and non-nuclear strategic threats,” the NPR emphasized that the United States should “expand flexible U.S. nuclear options.” Instead of Obama’s promised “no researching and deploying new kinds of nuclear warheads,” the new NPR reintroduced two low-yield warhead types in response to the deteriorating relations with Russia and China (U.S. Department of Defense 2018 ). The United States already deployed a low-yield warhead (W76-2) for the submarine-launched ballistic missile in late 2019. The W76-2 is a new single-stage warhead with a low yield (an estimated 5–7 kilotons), which modified an existing W76-1 two-stage thermonuclear warhead with the yield of 90 kiloton (Kristensen and Korda 2020a ). It also began to redevelop a nuclear sea-launched cruise missile, or SLCM-N, as another vital component of its comprehensive nuclear modernization plan (Mercado 2020 ). This nuclear submarine-launched cruise missile aims to provide a nonstrategic regional presence, largely to offset China’s land-based intermediate-range missiles not controlled under the bilateral Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty, now abandoned by the United States. Additionally, the United States tested a ground-based cruise missile in August and a ground-launched, intermediate-range ballistic missiles in December 2019; these were conventionally-armed (Mehta 2019 ), but could be modified to use nuclear warheads. All these capabilities are deemed necessary by the United States to enhance U.S. regional deterrence capabilities and counter a limited nuclear attack.

For its part, Russia has re-emphasized nuclear weapons as integral to reclaiming a major power role after the collapse of the former Soviet Union. It began an ongoing nuclear modernization program in the late 1990s. According to President Vladimir Putin’s report in late 2019, modernized equipment now accounts for 82 percent of Russia’s nuclear triad (Russian Federation Defence Ministry 2018 ). Russia’s declaratory policy is developing and deploying nuclear weapons to deter, and if necessary, prevail in a regional war—a strategy known as “escalate to de-escalate.”

Russia’s strategic modernization program has three elements. First, it is routinely replacing aging warheads and delivery systems. Russia’s nuclear triad consists of land-based international ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and strategic bombers. The land-based component of the strategic triad includes two versions of the SS-27: Mods 1 and 2. The focus of the current and bigger phase of Russia’s modernization is the SS-27 Mod 2 ICBM (known in Russia as RS-24 Yars) which are equipped with four multiple, independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs). Russia is also developing the heavy multiple-warhead ICBM (SS-X-29) known as Sarmat, and is ready to finish serial production in 2021 to replace the SS-18 (Army Technology 2010 ). In the sea-based component, Russia has already announced a plan to build five and purchase two more new Borei class submarines (Project 955A) to replace the older Delta IV SSBNs (Project 667BDRM) after 2023 (Kristensen and Korda 2020b ). Russia has also resumed production of the Tu-160 aircraft in 2019 and is expected to field the first ten Tu-160M2s before 2027.

Second, Russia has begun to modernize tactical nuclear weapons. As of early 2020, Russia has a stockpile of roughly 4310 nuclear warheads assigned for use by long-range strategic launchers and shorter range tactical nuclear forces. Of these, roughly 1570 strategic warheads are deployed, and another 870 strategic warheads are in storage, along with about 1870 nonstrategic warheads.

Third, Russia has begun to develop, test, and produce new “exotic” types of nuclear weapons. In March 2018, President Putin listed these planned and new nuclear weapons capabilities:

a nuclear-armed, maneuvering hypersonic glide vehicle (the Avangard) carried by a modified SS-19 and later SS-29;

a nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed cruise missile of “unlimited” range (the Burevestnik) to penetrate adversary’s missile defense systems;

an air-launched ballistic missile purportedly to target ships (the Kinzhal);

a nuclear-powered anti-ship hypersonic cruise missile (the Tsirkon);

an SS-18 follow-on ICBM with modern features to penetrate missile defenses (the Sarmat);

a deep-diving, unmanned, nuclear-powered, and nuclear-armed underwater delivery vehicle (the Poseidon) that is scheduled for delivery in 2027 (President of Russia 2018 ).

All of these programs illustrate that Russia is determined to continue its reliance on nuclear weapons as a key element of its national security strategy. Especially, the new “exotic” nuclear weapons provide means to augment existing nuclear forces with systems that are not counted under the New Strategic Arms Control Treaty (New START), now extended by the United States and Russia for 5 years, since President Biden was elected.

The dynamics described above in the U.S. and Russian nuclear arms replacement and modernization doctrine and deployment converge to suggest that this nuclear arms race between the United States and Russia will be different from that during the Cold War. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the number of deliverable weapons in the Soviet and U.S. nuclear arsenals was approximately equal. Their key strategic nuclear objectives were to obtain sufficient capacity to inflict a certain level of assured damage to the other one in a retaliatory strike. Driven by the reality of assured retaliation and near certainty of mutual annihilation in a nuclear war, the two nuclear superpowers had little incentive to attempt to preemptively strike the other’s strategic nuclear forces. During the second half of the Cold War, Soviet leaders became uncertain that they could indefinitely maintain a prospect of guaranteed retaliation and mutual annihilation (Green and Long 2017 ). Two decades after the Cold War ended, we find that the principles guiding the numbers or size of nuclear weapons have changed. On one hand, the United States re-emphasized nuclear deterrence, boosted its nuclear modernization, and acted skeptically toward arms control measures. Thus, the guiding principles that shape the size and type of U.S. nuclear forces have shifted from preserving strategic stability between the nuclear great powers to countering strategic threats from nuclear adversaries, whether they be small, medium, or great powers. Conversely, Russia’s nuclear modernization is still motivated in part by Moscow’s strong desire to maintain overall numerical parity with the United States. The Russian leadership perceives that the U.S. ballistic-missile defense system constitutes a real future risk to the credibility of Russia’s retaliatory capability. In an action-reaction dynamic, Russia began to research and develop new nuclear systems to counter deployment of U.S. missile defenses. This unrestrained nuclear competition between the United States and Russia may complicate future bilateral arms control negotiation and potentially affect China’s understanding of its own nuclear retaliatory capabilities (Glaser and Fetter 2016 ).

Apart from the major powers, more and more regional states have acquired the scientific, technological, and industrial capabilities to produce ballistic missiles or cruise missiles, which undermine the efforts of restraining the proliferation of both missiles (Nuclear Threat Initiative 2015 ). The DPRK, India, and Pakistan have declared their possession of nuclear weapons and demonstrated their ability to use ballistic missiles. The DPRK test-fired an inter-continental range ballistic missile, which can reach at least the west coast of America, some 8000 km away. India flight-tested a system with a range of 3500–5000 km. Pakistan also has intermediate-range ballistic missiles able to carry nuclear warheads over 2750 km. Evidently, states will continue developing or acquiring missiles and the related technologies despite interdiction, international condemnation, sanctions, and asymmetric efforts to limit them.

4 The “Post-INF” capabilities and major powers’ strategic interactions

Despite the fact that the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) ended in 2019, the issue of INF-range missiles has not disappeared. For America, its withdrawal was driven by Russia’s alleged treaty violations and China’s rising conventional and also nuclear-armed missile capabilities. Under the former Trump Administration, the United States held that if it remained bound by the INF treaty limits, then the United States would be increasingly at a disadvantage with respect to Russia and China. American analysts argued that China has deployed thousands of land-based intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles, and 95 percent of them would violate the INF if China was party to it, which, of course, it is not (Stokes 2019 , 2). After the U.S. withdrew the INF, Russia decided to suspend its obligations with respect to the INF treaty as a countermeasure. The Biden Administration is watching Russia’s and China’s potential employment of nuclear and conventional armed intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles, with intent to seek negotiations on a global treaty to ban them (Squassoni 2021 ). The termination of the treaty means that the Asia–Pacific region has entered into a “post-INF” era in which, as is explained below, “post-ballistic” capabilities become a priority in military planning for these states and tripolar great power strategic interactions become more complex.

The “post-ballistic” capabilities arise from emerging technologies, such as advanced guidance and stealth technology. Enhanced by these new technologies, a new generation of cruise missiles and tactical (shorter-range) ballistic missiles gained greater accuracy, reliability, and affordability than the long-range ballistic missiles. Modern cruise missiles can fly at low altitudes below radar coverage, which make them less visible to radars and more difficult to detect and defend against, as well. Shorter range ballistic missiles, with their accuracy measured in meters, have become effective tools for taking out high-value, well-defended targets inside an adversary’s territory.

However, these attributes leave target nations a very limited ability to counter the new generation of missiles in wartime. Hypersonic vehicles with speeds of Mach 5 and above, for example, can drastically reduce the timelines for attack and response. The further proliferation of hypersonic missiles and the related technologies may cause miscalculation and misperception. Hypersonic weapon systems are divided into hypersonic glide vehicles and hypersonic cruise missiles. The United States, Russia, France, Japan, China, and India are all pursuing, and Russia has deployed, earlier versions of these weapons. Furthermore, the growing popularity of dual-capable missiles, when equipped with either conventional or non-conventional warheads, is also destabilizing and could lead to devastating deterrence failures, because this payload ambiguity increases uncertainty in a crisis, and thereby the stakes in not striking first.

Russia has tested and fielded a new ground-launched cruise missile system (9M729), which the United States declared violated the INF treaty since May 2013 (U.S. Congressional Research Service 2019 ). Over the last 2 decades, China has deployed several new models of land-attack and anti-ship conventional cruise missiles which are viewed by the United States as providing what it calls “Anti-access/Area-denial” (A2/AD) capability. On August 3, 2019, the day after the United States withdrew from the INF Treaty, then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper revealed that the United States aims to deploy INF-range missiles in the Asia–Pacific to counter China’s “A2/AD” capabilities (Kobza 2019 , 11). At the same time, the Pentagon initiated a study to evaluate whether the United States needed new military capabilities to offset any advantage Russia and China might acquire by deploying a ground-launched cruise missile of INF range (between 500 and 5500 km). The potential U.S. Army and/or Marine Corps options to deploy land-based intermediate-range missiles in this region include: the intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) with hypersonic glide vehicle, with range of 4000 km; the Tomahawk ground-launched cruise missile (GLCM), with the range of less than 2500 km; The Improved Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), with the range of less than 700 km; and the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), with the range of 499 km (Ogilvie 2020 , 3).

The potential deployment of the previously prohibited ground-based INF-range missiles by the United States in the Asia–Pacific region, especially in the western Pacific, may increase the complexity of trilateral great power strategic interactions. In response, some Chinese scholars have suggested that China should increase the survivability of its nuclear forces by deploying multiple warheads on missiles, and experimenting with hypersonic boost-glide vehicles, etc. (Zhao 2019 ). Some analysis outside China even speculated that Beijing might change its longstanding no-first-use (NFU) commitment and the minimum nuclear deterrence posture (Baklitskiy 2019 ). Yet, to date, in spite of the speculation of some in Washington that it would amend its NFU policy in the near future, China has upheld its NFU commitment to non-nuclear states.

As for Russia, President Putin announced that Russia will deploy new missile systems and augment its missile defense in its eastern regions (Blank 2019 ). Russia also took other countermeasures that enhance Sino–Russian military ties and help China to boost its own missile defensive systems (The Guardian 2019 ). The Sino–Russian military cooperation between their respective missile defense systems can be traced back to U.S. withdrawal of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) in 2002. Driven by the U.S. potential development of the aforementioned missiles, Sino–Russian relations gained new momentum recently; this was deemed a “comprehensive strategic partnership” by China and “an allied relationship” by Russia.

5 Will China join the trilateral arms control negotiation?

In early 2019, the Trump Administration began to push for a trilateral arms control that would include America, Russia, and China. Then-president Trump noted that “Russia, China and we are all making hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons which are costly and ridiculous” (Sonne and Hudson 2019 ). In April 2020, the U.S. State Department released a report titled “U.S. Priorities for Next-Generation Arms Control,” which outlined U.S. priorities for “next-generation arms control” involving both Moscow and Beijing (Ford 2020 ). The U.S. tended to cite China’s participation as a pre-condition of the extension of the New START. The treaty limits U.S. and Russian deployed strategic nuclear forces, and additionally facilitates inspections and exchanges of information on the status and movements of their inter-continental ballistic missiles and heavy bombers.

At the time, U.S. proposals to trilateralize the existing U.S.–Russia arms control negotiation appeared disingenuous, given that relatively small Chinese nuclear forces are not equivalent to those of the United States and Russia (Kristensen and Korda 2020a ). Footnote 1 Leaving aside the quantitative and qualitative differences between the U.S.’s and China’s nuclear forces, China’s warheads and relevant delivery systems are stored at separated locations, which means that the existing New START counting rules are not suitable for China (Quinn 2019 ). Several Chinese spokesmen rejected Trump’s calls officially, arguing that the two nuclear superpowers should [bear] the main responsibility of reducing their arsenals to lower levels (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC 2020 ). From Beijing’s perspective, any request for trilateral arms control dialogue from the United States is more a litmus test of its campaign of maximum pressure toward China on a range of policy issues, and an excuse for its withdrawal from the treaty for non-substantive reasons. China also worried that verification of China’s forces under a trilateral treaty could help to detect and weaken Beijing’s limited nuclear retaliatory capabilities, which rely in part on opacity and ambiguity as a substitute for the limited nuclear force levels.

China’s negative attitude toward trilateral strategic arms control negotiation does not mean that China does not support the international disarmament and non-proliferation process. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a nuclear-weapon state, China has played constructive roles in other multilateral nuclear-related negotiations. In the 1990s, China actively led negotiations on military-to-military confidence building and risk reduction. It signed the multilateral 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and participated in the international monitoring systems being set-up to detect nuclear explosions around the world. China pushed for a treaty preventing an arms race in outer space (Gallagher 2019 , 2). China also played a supportive role in negotiations leading to the 2015 multilateral Iran nuclear deal aimed at limiting that country’s pathways to developing nuclear weapons. In the non-proliferation of missiles and their technologies, although it has not participated in any of the world's major export control mechanisms except for joining the Nuclear Suppliers Group in 2004, China joined the Hague International Code of Conduct against Ballistic Missile Proliferation (HCOC) and pledged to halt missile exports in 1992, 1994, 1998, and 2000. In August 2002, China promulgated its own missile export control regulations and lists that corresponded closely to the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) guidelines (Einhorn and Samore 2002 , 62). Since 2003, China has applied to join in the MTCR but failed when blocked by the United States.

When the United States shifted its China policy from engagement to containment under the Trump Administration—a posture likely to be maintained under the Biden Administration—China became even more sensitive to the United States’ trilateral arms control initiative. Nonetheless, China embraces dialogue underpinned by the principles of fair, equitable, and concrete. China will participate in negotiations when involving in a broader set of negotiating partners, such as France and the United Kingdom, with similar levels of nuclear forces rather than being singled out. All five officially recognized nuclear-weapon states (the so-called “P5”) convened and collaborated successfully in the Iran negotiations. From Beijing’s perspective, a P5 format might be more conducive than the prospect of negotiating alone with the two nuclear superpowers. The P5 would be a good place for Beijing to negotiate confidence-building measures such as the No First Use (NFU) principle. Some Chinese scholars even support the notion that China could enter into nuclear arms control dialogues rather than nuclear arms reduction negotiations, because the concept of arms control is more comprehensive than arms reduction (Wu 2019 ).

6 Reducing the risk of dangerous strategic arms races

The rapidly worsening global security environment, exacerbated by the pandemic, has led to several missile-control treaties or agreements being abandoned or facing an uncertain future. The ABM Treaty and the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty collapsed. The termination of the INF Treaty highlights the fact that bilateral arms control ultimately would not curb the geographical spread and technological advancement of missiles. The Trump administration announced its withdrawal from the Open Sky Treaty. The 2010 New START, the only remaining treaty on limiting strategic ballistic missiles and strategic bombers, was saved only at the last moment by its extension by the Biden administration. Under Trump, even nuclear testing was put back on the agenda with unfounded American claims of the resumption of Chinese nuclear testing, which would have contravened the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban’s “zero-yield” standard (U.S. State Department 2020 )—reinforce just how far this negative trend went in the United States. Although many hope that the Biden administration will reverse this trend, structural trends at the global level involving the nine nuclear-armed states, and the chaotic state of American domestic politics and foundations of its foreign policy, mean that no one can predict its stance on these issues for longer than a few years.

China opposes an arms race outright due to its cost and potential strategic risks. From the Chinese perspective, the situation could be improved through the following measures. First, states should strengthen and enlarge existing missile-control institutions. A combination of deteriorating great–power relations, uncertainties about the impact of emerging technologies, and the fact some “post-INF” missiles are inherently attractive to states, with low political and legal barriers to acquisition and use, has undermined controls on missile proliferation. There is no universal norm, treaty, or agreement that governs the development, testing, production, acquisition, possession, transfer, deployment, or use of missiles. Apart from the bilateral missile-control treaties, the relevant mechanisms include unilateral (export controls), coordinated among exporting states as the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), or multilateral but not legally binding and far-from-universal measures, such as the HCOC. Despite its imperfections, the MTCR—the only existing multilateral arrangement covering the transfer of missiles and missile-related equipment, material, and technology relevant to weapons of mass destruction (WMD)—has brought a significant degree of order to containing the spread of ballistic missiles. The Hague Code of Conduct (HCOC), an offspring of the MTCR and a useful set of voluntary confidence-building measures, refers only to one category of missiles.

The existing regulations covering missiles fall far short of those that would avoid a costly and potentially deadly arms competition. For those concerned and responsible states in this region, it is the right time to act now, or we will find ourselves beset by a destabilizing missile-related arms race. These existing instruments should give proper priority to cruise missiles and hypersonic missiles and even missile defense. The scope and number of participants should be enlarged. A regional missile-limitation regime that provides prior notice of missile and satellite launches to enhance transparency and predictability might also offer great strategic benefits to all states in the region (Akira 2004 ).

Second, all states—but especially the great power, nuclear-armed states—must do everything possible to avoid the risk of war and nuclear war. States that possess nuclear-armed missiles must ensure that no accident or incident ever happens. All the nuclear-armed states should take the famous saying “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” as a common understanding and restrain their development and employment of any ballistic or cruise nuclear missiles. Nuclear-armed states should be divided into three levels according to the quantities or qualities of their nuclear weapons. Each level should have different responsibilities.

The first level should be Russia and the United States which, as nuclear superpowers, have more than 90% of the world’s nuclear warheads. The deterioration of great power relationships has increased the possibility of a nuclear arms race. Their negative attitudes toward arms control became a major barrier to the international non-proliferation progress. The nuclear superpowers should reduce the role of nuclear weapons in their military arsenals by rejecting preemptive nuclear strikes or declaring that the sole use of nuclear weapons is as “the last resort” to defend national security.

The second level should include France, Great Britain, and China, the other three members of the P5, or permanent UN Security Council member states. It is imperative to encourage these states to make more contributions in the international arms control process.

The third level would include the four de facto nuclear states: India; Pakistan; North Korea; and Israel, which are not members of the P5 and are outside the NPT. Their rights to exploit nuclear energy peacefully should be respected. Meanwhile, every effort should be given to limiting and reducing the risk of a nuclear war or conflict between India and Pakistan, to supporting the denuclearization process of the DPRK and rescuing the Iran nuclear deal, while guaranteeing national security, and to realizing eventually a Middle East WMD-free zone promoted by Israel.

Last but not the least, the new arms control and disarmament dialogue must address directly the new factors that could increase the risk of accidental or inadvertent nuclear conflict; most importantly, the potential destabilizing effects of new non-nuclear-weapon technologies, such as ballistic-missile defense, anti-satellite weapons, and precision-strike missile technology. These emerging advanced technologies supplement and even enhance nuclear weapons while offering non-nuclear states capabilities with which to offset the projection of conventional and nuclear forces by the great powers. With the widespread applications of emerging technologies, non-nuclear military facilities and platforms may degrade nuclear decision-making and increase the risk of an accidental nuclear war. Thus, Track 2 dialogues on emerging technologies and some non-nuclear-weapon systems might be useful for developing workable proposals to reduce the resulting risks.

The continued high-alert levels of American, Russian, British, and French warheads to support “launch on warning” is another risk that deserves urgent attention. Moreover, Russia, and the United States each possess huge counterforce capabilities, which threaten not only each other, but also lesser nuclear adversaries. In contrast, China, India, and Pakistan reportedly keep their nuclear weapons undeployed at central storage facilities, on low-alert levels. Their retaliatory strike capabilities are based on the principle of “launching under attack,” not “launching under warning.” China proposed that the P5 agree to adopt NFU as long ago as 1994, and this could lay the foundation for developing codes of conduct to decrease risks (Pan 2018 ). Recognizing the NFU principle could lessen the risk arising from misperception and misunderstanding of the preemptive strike posture on one hand, and sustain the taboo against nuclear employment on the other.

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Luo, X. Competition between great powers and a looming strategic arms race in the Asia–Pacific. China Int Strategy Rev. 3 , 123–136 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42533-021-00078-8

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Article contents

To arms, to arms: what do we know about arms races.

• Richard J. Stoll Richard J. Stoll Department of Political Science, Rice University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.350
• Published online: 26 September 2017

Arms races are important phenomenon They can involve the commitment of vast amounts of resources that might otherwise be used to help societies. And arms races can be a cause of war, although there is a debate on how this happens. With the arrival of the behavioral revolution in international relations, the number of quantitative studies of arms races exploded. But with the end of the Cold War, interest in studying arms races declined sharply. This is unfortunate because it is fair to say that most of the important questions involving arms races were not resolved in the empirical work that was done during the period of the Cold War.

• military expenditures
• spiral model
• deterrence model
• arms competitions
• arms race onset
• arms races and war
• empirical international relations theory

Introduction

This article will briefly review some of the salient aspects of the early studies of arms races through the end of the Cold War then recent (published from 2005 through 2016 ) quantitative studies of arms races will be considered. 1 Finally suggestions will be offered for where this area of study should go.

A (Very) Brief Review of the Early Study of Arms Races

There is a long history of quantitative and systematic scholarship on arms races in the field of international relations. Two of the most important early scholars were Lewis Richardson, who published a number of pieces between the World Wars (see, e.g., Richardson, 1939 ), and Samuel Huntington who produced a systematic examination of arms races from the 1940s through the onset of the Cold War (Huntington, 1958 ). As noted above when the behavioral revolution came to the study of international relations, a large number of studies on arms races were undertaken. In what follows, a series of “signature studies” from the beginning of the quantitative study of arms races are discussed. There were two key questions addressed in these studies:

What drives arms races? Do arms races lead to war?

What Drives Arms Races?

Much of the early work on arms races centered on trying to understand what drives the acquisition of armaments. A great deal of this literature was inspired by the Richardson equations (Richardson, 1939 ). 2 Richardson was interested in understanding what would have an impact on the “defenses” of a pair of states in competition with one another. Note that his writing referred to defenses, not military expenditures. Figure 1 displays the Richardson equations.

Figure 1. Lewis Richardson’s “Linear theory of two nations.”

Richardson assumed that for two states in an arms competition the changes in their defenses would be a function of three things:

The defenses of the other state. He assumed that each state would react positively to the previous defenses of the other state (i.e., increases by one state would lead to increases in the other state). In the Richardson equations the coefficients for the defense of the other side were referred to as defense coefficients.

The state’s own defenses. He assumed that each state would react negatively to its own previous defenses. The coefficients for the state’s own defenses were referred to as fatigue coefficients.

The overall relationship of each state toward the other. He called the coefficients for the overall relationship grievance coefficients and assumed that these coefficients would be positive. That is, for a pair of states engaged in an arms race net of independent of the impact of the defenses of the other side and its own defenses, the grievance of each state toward the other would have a positive impact on its own defenses (i.e., the defenses of each state would increase). Given Richardson’s focus on arms races, he did not consider whether the grievance coefficients could be negative.

The form of the Richardson equations suggested that the coefficients could be estimated by statistical analysis. And there were numerous efforts to do so. Typically researchers used military expenditures as their indicator for defenses.

This is only a brief review of Richardson’s work on arms races (see Leeds & Morgan, 2012 , for a good review of arms race studies over the entire time period). This article only references a few additional key studies and discuss the issues and main problems of this research. It begins by noting that through time the methodologies used to explore arms races became more sophisticated. As well, the quantity and quality of data improved. But findings were inconsistent.

A significant focus of this research was to evaluate whether arms expenditures were externally driven or internally driven. If the changes in state A’s defenses were driven by State B’s defenses and vice versa, this suggests the two states were in an arms race against one another. But it was possible that a state’s defenses were driven by internal factors. In Richardson’s formulation, high levels of previous defense would lead to a decrease in current defense due to the costs of building and maintaining a large military. But a number of quantitative researchers embraced—or at least allowed for—a different interpretation. They argued that the military, the defense industry, and portions of the government would press a state to have higher and higher levels of expenditure. That is, while Richardson believed the coefficients for α ‎ and β ‎ would be negative, other researchers argued they would be positive.

Of course, one could argue that the signs of α ‎ and β ‎ could be treated as an empirical question: Just estimate the coefficients for a particular pair of states and see what happens. But generally studies were not this atheoretical. Most work involved a great deal of thought about the underlying causal mechanisms that drive changes in defense. Nevertheless, there was a sense that the results of the statistical analysis would serve to clarify the relationships being studied.

Unfortunately the empirical studies did not all point in the same direction for a particular (potential) arms race. Looking at the United States and the Soviet Union, Majeski and Jones ( 1981 , p. 273) found “no causal relations exist between the military expenditure series” of those two countries. On the other hand, at roughly the same time the results of Wallace’s ( 1980 , p. 271) study of the military expenditures of the United States and the Soviet Union “offer[ed] no support whatever to those who are convinced that the arms race results from the ineluctable nature of the political or economic system on either side. Rather, it would appear that both superpowers are reacting to external [emphasis in original] rather than internal stimuli.” There were a number of differences between these two studies. But the fact that these two well-done studies come to completely opposite conclusions (and there are other examples as well) is—to say the least—disheartening. As Moll and Luebbert note in their review of arms races models ( 1980 , p. 166): “The common failure of statistical tests to discriminate among various models indicates that there are fundamental problems with either the explanatory power of the models or the discriminating ability of the tests. Which is the real difficulty remains a subject for future research.”

Of course, if one varies statistical techniques, data, and spatial temporal domain, this may have an impact on the results. But for research based on the Richardson equations there was another issue that led to inconsistent findings about whether particular dyads were engaged in an arms competition or were being driven by internal factors. Consider two polar cases: one in which both states in a dyad are driven internally and the other in which both states in a dyad are driven externally. If both states are driven internally and each is growing at a constant rate there will be a solid correlation between the data series of the two states (i.e., it will look like an externally driven arms race). 3 And if both states are driven externally by each other’s defenses the relationship within each state to its own previous level of defenses should be strong (i.e., an externally driven arms race may look like a situation in which both states are driven by internal forces). So regardless of whether a dyad is purely driven internally or whether there is a pure arms race in a dyad, there should be a high degree of correlation between (a) the defenses of both sides, and (b) within each state its defenses and its previous defenses. This is only a simplistic depiction of the relationships, but it should convey the essence of the issue (see Stoll, 1982 ). To illustrate one aspect of this argument consider the simple set of correlations displayed in Table 1 .

Table 1. Correlation Among European NATO Members Military Expenditures, 1960–1990

Note: N = 31

Country Abbreviations

Netherlands

United Kingdom

Table 1 shows the correlations of military expenditures among European members of NATO from 1960 through 1990 . 4 As you can see the correlations are fairly high. In fact, the average correlation is .70 and it rises to .88 if Portugal is removed. At the risk of being painfully obvious, none of the members of the dyads of European NATO countries were engaged in an arms race against each other; they were allied to one another. The point is that simply looking at military expenditure patterns is a poor way to judge whether countries are engaged in an arms race against one another.

So the earlier generation of arms race studies did not come to firm conclusions about whether particular dyads were engaged in an arms race or whether their increases in defenses were driven by something else (in particular by internal factors). While the sophistication of studies increased, as did the quality of the data, consensus was not achieved.

Do Arms Races Lead to War?

The second major area of research was whether states involved in arms races were likely to end in war. The belief that arms races lead to war was one of the main motivations for Richardson’s work; he felt that arms races were a primary cause of World War I. This was also the prime motivation of Huntington’s work ( 1958 ). Post World War II, this was a very important question for the obvious reason that an arms competition between the superpowers that ended in war might result in a nuclear exchange and the killing of millions and millions of people.

While a number of theoretical approaches were applied to this question, the two most prominent approaches were the spiral model and the deterrence model (Levy & Thompson, 2010 , pp. 30–31). In the spiral model, states take actions against each other (increasing their defenses) for defensive purposes. However, while each state regards its own actions as defensive, each sees the other state’s states actions as offensive. Consequently the defensive actions of each state will be misperceived as offensive and lead to war.

While the spiral model focuses on the unintended consequences of defensive actions, the deterrence model focuses on the failure of states to take sufficient action to convince other states that if a war is fought they will lose. That is, war comes about if a state fails to increase its defenses sufficiently to dissuade the other state from attacking.

Each line of reasoning is plausible. What is less plausible is that it is an either–or situation (Levy & Thompson, 2010 , p. 31). It seems more likely that sometimes one model would apply and that in other situations the other model would apply. So, the critical issue is what distinguishes these two situations. Uncovering the factors that differentiate the validity of these two perspectives is a far more difficult and demanding task. And one that was not directly addressed in most of the early literature on arms races.

There is another important issue. How do we select cases to study to evaluate whether arms races lead to war? There were a large number of studies that looked at this relationship. But how did researchers studying this question identify arms races?

One approach was used by Huntington ( 1958 ). Huntington ( 1958 ) was the first well-known effort to gather information on a series of arms races and draw general conclusions as opposed to a deep dive into a particular arms race. He relied on his study of history to identify 13 arms races from 1840 through the Cold War. 5 And of course, instead of creating one’s own list of arms races one could use the consensus of historians to identify a number of races or even a single race for close study. But it seems likely that any two scholars would not achieve a complete consensus on arms races; that is, which states were involved and the years of the arms race. As well this entire approach is unlikely to be as rigorous as one that relies on quantitative measures. A different approach was used by Wallace ( 1979 ). He looked at major power dyads involved in militarized interstate disputes. Militarized interstate disputes occur when a state explicitly threatens, displays, or uses military force (Palmer, d’Orazio, Kenwick, & Lane, 2015 ). Wallace created an index for the military expenditures of each of the two states in a dispute over the previous ten years. He then multiplied the two indices together. He inferred that the higher the value of this multiplicative index, the more rapid the military growth in the dyad and the greater the chance of the dispute ending in war. His empirical analysis supported this assertion.

There were a number of issues with his research. One was that many of the major power dyads that ended in war were associated with the World Wars (i.e., these cases were not independent of one another). There were also several issues about his multiplicative index. First the multiplicative index could produce a large value even if one side’s value was very small; that is, while one state in the dyad may have rapidly increased its military expenditures, the index could produce a large value even if the other state was showing only small increases in military expenditures. This is not an arms race. A second issue with the index was that if the expenditures of both sides were declining for the first nine years but turned up in the last year the index would have a positive value. Finally, no one was able to replicate the index. As well as noted by Leeds and Morgan ( 2012 , p. 144) a number of follow-up studies (Altfeld, 1983 ; Diehl, 1983 ; Weede, 1980 ) found a much weaker relationship than Wallace.

The broader issue is about the basic research design used by Wallace. He did not examine whether arms races lead to war. He looked at dyads that engaged in militarized interstate disputes and asked whether if prior to the dispute the dyad engaged in rapid military growth. If so, Wallace predicted (and his results—with the caveats of other studies noted above—supported this) that the states were very likely to engage in war.

For the moment let us accept Wallace’s findings. Understanding the conditions under which a dyad that engages in a militarized interstate dispute is more likely to end in war is a contribution to understanding why wars happen. But it does not explain the relationship between arms races and war. Even if we accept Wallace’s index as a valid indicator his research design does not allow for the possibility that there may be many arms races that are not associated with disputes. Including these cases may produce very different conclusions about the linkage between arms races and war.

The End of the Cold War and the Decline of the Study of Arms Races

The early work on arms races did not reach firm conclusions on either of the two main questions. There was little consensus on whether particular dyads engaged in an arms race (as noted earlier, two sophisticated studies of the United States-Soviet dyad reached opposite conclusions). And if there was little consensus on whether particular dyads were engaged in an arms race, it was of course difficult to determine whether arms races led to wars. As noted above Wallace (and those studies that followed up on his research) did not provide a definition of an arms race. They circumvented the problem by studying dyads involved in disputes and asking if their prior military expenditure patterns predicted to the outbreak of war.

One other aspect of the early studies of arms races—regardless of which of the two main themes was being investigated—was the fact that most were monocausal. The early studies that were conducted included few control variables, and their central focus was on arms races. 6 This focus was not inappropriate. It made no sense to build and test more complicated models without first exploring simple conceptions. But if we discover that simple models do not predict outcomes then we need to move on and develop more comprehensive models.

And indeed, through time, arms race studies became more sophisticated. But the problem of identifying arms races still remained. And then the Cold War ended. It is fair to say that the Cold War—and the United States-Soviet arms race—stimulated a great deal of work on arms races. This did not mean that most scholars focused on this one arms race dyad, but their research was inspired by this important and potentially deadly competition. Once that competition disappeared so did a great deal of the scholarly interest in arms races.

Research on arms races did not totally disappear after the Cold War, but if only a few pieces of research are conducted on a topic, researchers in the field are unlikely to reach a conclusion. Every piece of research involves making choices about things such as indicators, time period, and analysis techniques. All of these decisions—as well as others—are important. Researchers do their best when making these decisions, but no one can be sure they have made the right decisions. So, no one study—no matter how well done—will convince the field that we understand something. We need a series of studies in which researchers made different decisions on critical elements of the research to reach the same conclusion. When there are enough diverse studies that reach the same conclusion, the field can reach a consensus.

To be clear, this is not an indictment of the work that was done after the end of the Cold War and before the studies to be reviewed here. It was of high quality. There simply was not enough work—and enough variability—to reach firm conclusions.

The Current State of Quantitative Arms Race Studies

The focus of this article is on recent quantitative studies, in particular published work between 2005 and 2016 . The search was primarily in journals that focus on quantitative research. But journals that are not primarily quantitative were searched as well as books. The studies identified are listed in the “Further Readings” section of this article.

Below the key elements of recent studies are discussed. Studies were put into groups to facilitate comparison. The groups are as follows:

Singleton studies. There are several recent studies that are unique and do not fall into a category that has multiple studies. Course of arms competitions. Studies in this group try to account for the interaction of armaments behavior between sets of states. Arms race onset. This was not a topic that was the focus of early research. Studies in this group try to account for the initiation of arms competitions between states. Arms races and war. These studies seek to determine if (or under what circumstances) arms races lead to war.

As mentioned earlier, the current studies are more sophisticated than the earlier studies. This sophistication encompasses the methodology used (and in some cases the data), but what is to be highlighted here is the theoretical aspects of the recent work. Most importantly, the current work has moved away from the monocausality of earlier studies. The current research on whether arms races lead to war is premised on the belief that arms races are only one factor (albeit an important one) in the relationship between r a pair of states and whether this dyad engages in war.

Recent Arms Race Studies

Within each category listed above (except for the singleton papers), studies will be reviewed in chronological order. A complete description of each study will not be offered. The focus is on the basic approach used in each study, the time period examined, the measure of armaments/arms race, and the primary results.

As noted earlier, there were several quantitative studies that about individual topics within the general area of research on arms races. These subjects were not part of the initial set of quantitative studies on arms races.

Nuclear Proliferation . Kroenig ( 2016 ) explored whether the size of the United States nuclear arsenal from 1945 to 2011 influenced other countries to explore, pursue, or acquire nuclear weapons. The underlying idea behind the paper is that under Article VI of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) existing nuclear powers pledged to reduce their nuclear arsenals. But for many years the United States and the Soviet Union did not do this; instead they increased their arsenals. And even when they started to reduce their nuclear arsenals, one can argue that nonnuclear states were dissatisfied with the pace of reductions. So it is plausible that other states would begin their own nuclear programs both because the United States was neglecting its obligations under the NPT and/or because they saw the United States as a threat that could only be countered by nuclear weapons. The key dependent variable of the study comes from Singh and Way ( 2004 ). In each year they classify states into one of the following (ordinal) categories:

The state does not have any desire to acquire nuclear weapons. The state seriously considers a nuclear weapons program. The state makes an active effort to pursue a nuclear weapons program. The state explodes a nuclear weapon or assembles a weapon.

Kroenig finds that while a state’s nuclear program is influenced by a variety of security, economic, and political variables it is not affected by the United States’ nuclear arsenal. This is not an arms race study per se, but it does relate the arms behavior (in terms of nuclear weapons) of other countries to the United States.

Aid and Arms Races . Collier and Hoeffler ( 2007 ) examine whether there is a positive relationship for developing countries between the receipt of aid and military spending during the 1960–1999 time period. The idea is that aid is fungible and as it increases this allows the government of the developing country to shift its own resources to the military.

The dependent variable in the study is the log of military expenditures as a proportion of GDP (this is a common measure of defense effort or defense burden). Collier and Hoeffler ( 2007 , p. 4) average their data over five-year periods. 7 They also note that the dependent variable is “problematic because data on military expenditure are unreliable” (Collier & Hoeffler, 2007 , p. 4).

They have a number of independent variables. I will only note those that are relevant to their primary hypothesis and to arms races. They include aid as a proportion of the state’s GDP. 8 They also measure what they term threat from neighbors (sum of military expenditures of neighbors divided by the country’s GDP) and emulation of neighbors (sum of military expenditures of neighbors divided by the sum of neighbors’ GDP).

Their key finding is that aid is positively related to a state’s military expenditures as a proportion of GDP. The impact of aid can be quite substantial. The authors estimate that African military spending is “almost double its level in the absence of aid” (Collier & Hoeffler, 2007 , p. 4). As well, there is a positive relationship between the emulation variable and the state’s defense effort. As was true of the previous piece of work reviewed, this is not a “classic” arms race study. But it does relate the military expenditures of a state to the defense efforts of its neighbors.

Regional Aspects of Arms Races . Goldsmith ( 2007 ) studies military spending using spatial econometrics techniques. This facilitates the estimation of the impact of military spending in a region on the individual states within the region. His 9 measure of spending is defense burden: the military expenditures of the state divided by its GDP. This variable is logged. He asks whether arms races occur among nearby states. He analyzes the year of 1991 and also the time period 1980–1991 .

Goldsmith finds that there is clustering around low defense burdens in the Americas and Africa, and there is clustering around high defense burdens in Europe and the Middle East. While most people would have anticipated clustering around high defense burdens in the Middle East on the surface, the same finding about Europe seems puzzling. But recall the time frames that Goldsmith studies: 1991 and 1980–1991 . These periods included portions of time that involved the violent breakup of Yugoslavia.

Although Collier and Hoeffler and Goldsmith do not have the same focus, their conclusions have something in common. They both find that there can be regional aspects to arms competitions. This needs additional study, and the arms race dynamics study discussed next does precisely that (albeit for only one arms completion).

Arms Race Dynamics . Abu-Qarn and Abu-Bader ( 2009 ) studied the Israeli–Arab arms race. The Arab states that were part of the study were Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The time period they studied was 1960–2004 . They examined a four-actor system and also a two-actor system in which Egypt, Jordan, and Syria were considered to be a single actor. They also included several structural breaks: the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, the initiation of peace talks in the late 1970s, and the 1979 peace agreement between Israel and Egypt.

They used two measures of defense. One was the military expenditures of the countries. The other was the most widely used measure of military burden (or effort): military expenditures divided by GDP. These two variables were calculated for all four countries in the study. As noted earlier, they also considered a single Arab actor. When analyzing a single Arab actor their measures combined the data for all three Arab countries.

Their results indicate that the Arab states respond to Israeli changes in both military expenditures and the military burden of Israel. They found evidence of bidirectional causality between Israel and Syria. However, Jordan was usually found to be uninvolved in an arms competition with Israel. The same results apply when the structural breaks are included in the analysis.

This concludes the analysis of the “singleton” studies. All the studies but Kroenig’s find that arms competitions do occur between states. In addition the studies of Collier and Hoeffler ( 2007 ), Goldsmith ( 2007 ), and Abu-Qarn and Abu-Bader ( 2009 ) all find—albeit in very different ways—that there can be arms competitions at a regional level.

Arms Race Onset

During the time period examined there were a series of studies on the onset of arms races. This was not as popular question in the early arms race literature because of the focus—both direct and indirect—on the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Since that arms race was already underway, the emphasis was on the two issues noted above: what drives arms races (internal or external forces) and whether arms races lead to war. But in the current era without a signature arms race, the question of arms race onset has attracted more attention.

Rider ( 2009 ) uses the rivalry dyad-year as the unit of analysis. His dyads are taken from Thompson’s ( 2001 ) rivalry data set. Most rivalry data sets identify cases in terms of the amount of conflict they experience. But Thompson uses a very different procedure to create his data set. He identifies rivalries not though their conflict behavior but through a study of history. His question is whether government officials viewed particular states as rivals. 10 To identify arms races Rider uses the same procedure as Gibler, Rider, and Hutchison ( 2005 ); this is discussed in the review of that piece in this article. The time frame for his study is 1816–2000 . Rider finds that if a rivalry dyad experiences at least one militarized interstate dispute in the past five years this is positively associated with the onset of an arms race. Furthermore, an arms race is more likely if the dispute is about territory.

Rider, Findley, and Diehl ( 2011 ) cover several of the major questions about arms races. They compare dyads in rivalry with dyads that are not involved in rivalry. They use Diehl’s ( 1983 ) arms race index. He takes the average of the percentage increase between t-3 and t-2, and the percentage increase between t-2 and t-1 for each state in the dyad and then adds the two figures together. The time period of their study is 1816–2000 . They found no “automatic” relationship between being involved in a rivalry and an arms race (about 75% of rivalries never experience an arms race). But nevertheless, arms races are more likely to occur within a rivalry than between two states that are not engaged in a rivalry. Furthermore, an arms race is more likely to occur after the rivalry “locks in” (i.e., after the rivalry experiences its ninth or tenth militarized interstate dispute).

Another study by Rider ( 2013 ) also deals with the outbreak of conventional arms races. He relies on a variant of Diehl’s arms race index. An arms race exists if over a three-year period the states have at least an 8% increase in military expenditures or personnel. They do not have to be involved in a dispute to be coded as being involved in an arms race. He studies the time period 1919–1995 . He finds that arms races are most likely when the dyad has both a territorial issue and the states in the dyad are involved in a rivalry.

A final study of arms race onset is by Lee and Rider ( forthcoming ). They predict the likelihood of a pair of states engaging in a militarized interstate dispute or an arms race. Using two data sets about territorial claims they study the time periods 1870–2001 and (separately with a different data set on territorial claims) 1919–1995 . They use the same measure of arms race as Gibler, Rider, and Hutchison ( 2005 ). The key concepts that they add to the onset of arms race literature (as one would expect from the title of the article) are trade interdependence and trade dependence. They find that these two factors are negatively correlated with the onset of arms races.

The onset of arms races was not one of the original major questions in the arms race literature. But it is obviously an important question. Unfortunately, there are only a handful of recent studies on this topic. As you can see, one particular scholar is the driving force in recent work on this topic, but it is fair to say that our understanding of the onset of arms races has been advanced by this recent work. We have learned that arms races are most likely to start if the dyad of states engages in a militarized interstate dispute that is territorial. Also, arms races are more likely if the states in the dyad are engaged in a rivalry. Finally, arms races are less likely to start if the states in a dyad have a high level of trade interdependence or if a state in the dyad is dependent on trade with the other state. Of course, one can say that these findings are “obvious” and “we knew this all the time.” But that is not same thing as having well-done empirical studies that lead to these findings.

Arms Races and War

The final question about arms races that has been explored in recent studies is one of the original focuses of this literature: Do arms races lead to war? This is obviously the most important question in the arms race literature. And as we look at the current world with the interactions between the United States and Russia and between the United States and China, this topic has significant relevance.

Gibler, Rider, and Hutchison ( 2005 ) study conventional arms races and war. They define an arms race as involving two rival states, as given in Thompson ( 2001 ). In addition, both rivals must have increased the military spending and/or personnel by 8% in every year over the preceding three years. The time period of their study is 1815–1992 . They determined that only a few of these situations led to war. Only 13 of 79 wars identified by the Correlates of War Project from 1816 through 1992 were preceded by an arms race. As well, only 25 of the 174 strategic rivals identified by Thompson ( 2001 ) had an arms race before a war.

Colaresi and Thompson ( 2005 ) built their work on Senese and Vasquez’s steps-to-war model (see below; Senese and Vasquez published several articles before their book was published). 11 The time period of the study was 1919–1995 . Their research found support for many of the relationships in the steps-to-war model. They code mutual military buildups using Horn’s ( 1987 ) definition. For each state in a dyad, the average increase in military expenditure through time is calculated. If the expenditures of both sides were above average in the current year and increasing over the past six years, then a mutual arms buildup is coded. Following the steps-to-war model they do not simply look at military expenditures by the dyad as a causal factor for war; they include additional variables. They find that the greater the number of previous crises, the greater the risk of war. The presence of a mutual arms buildup and a rivalry also increases the chances of war. In fact if the states are involved in a mutual arms buildup, this increases the risk of war by about 180%.

Senese and Vasquez ( 2008 ) published a book on their steps-to-war model. Like Colaresi and Thompson, Senese and Vasquez uses Horn’s ( 1987 ) measure of mutual arms buildups that was just discussed. But this is only one component of their model of the steps-to-war. Fundamentally, their model is—for lack of a better term—anti-realist. That is, they believe that if states follow the prescription of realism this increases the chances of war. 12 They analyze dyadic militarized interstate disputes. They include a set of variables that tap the essence of realism. They conduct their analyses for three time periods: 1816–1945 , 1946–1992 , and the post-Cold War time period (their data end in 2001 ).

For the 1816–1945 time period disputes that are about territory are more likely to lead to war. 13 The more steps (i.e., actions advocated by realists) that are taken the higher the chances of war. In this time period the presence of an arms buildup increases the chances of war. For the Cold War period, mutual arms buildups do not increase the chances of war. But in the post-Cold War period mutual arms buildups have a positive impact on the chances of war; that is, the post-Cold War period looks a lot like the pre-Cold War period.

Rider, Findley, and Diehl ( 2011 )—discussed earlier in this article—also study the relationship between rivalries, arms races, and war. The time period of their study is 1816–2000 . They use Diehl’s operationalization of an arms race. They find that taking rivalries into account is important to understanding that relationship. In particular, locked-in rivalries (those rivalries that have experienced a large number of disputes) that experience an arms race are more likely to experience a war.

Sample ( 2012 ) reinforces the results of Senese and Vasquez. She uses Horn’s ( 1987 ) measure of mutual arms buildup. She finds—as they do—that a mutual arms buildup in the pre-Cold War era is likely to lead to an escalation of a militarized interstate dispute (or any dispute occurring over the following five years) to war. But this relationship does not occur during the Cold War.

Recent studies of arms races and war embed the presence of an arms race as part of a more extensive model. A significant portion of this work builds on Senese and Vasquez’s steps-to-war model or other conceptions that views the chances of war as a result of multiple factors. That is, while the presence of an arms race in a dyad contributes to the chances of a war breaking out, there are other factors (such as the presence of an ongoing rivalry between the states in the dyad) that also play a role. As with the other later studies of arms races these current studies are more sophisticated. Of course this means methods and data, but more importantly there is increased theoretical sophistication.

The Future of Arms Race Studies

Currently there is a paucity of arms races studies. But with recent events involving the United States, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea there will be renewed interest in arms races. There is a good base of knowledge to build upon, but there is not consensus on the answer to the most important questions in this literature. 14 Clearly it is necessary to move forward both with general inquiries about arms races and studies that offer insight into current situations.

So where do we go? What should we do differently from previous work? This discussion is not about using newer analysis techniques and/or better data. Of course, we should take advantage of these advances. But what should we do beyond this?

Move Away From Using Total Military Expenditures

Most arms race studies—regardless of when they were published—rely on total military expenditures. Some use this as the main variable of interest. There are two alternative variants. One involves what is usually viewed as defense effort (or burden); this is military expenditures divided by the GDP of the country. The other involves an over-time measure involving increases in total military expenditures and/or military personnel; in addition, some studies use defense effort (or burden) over time. On the surface these measures seem like a good approach. And these measures avoid the issues which arise if a researcher tries to construct indicators based on elements such as military hardware or military personnel, as well as attempting to consider elements of quality. It can be difficult to construct good measures of these alternative measures. But there are substantial drawbacks to using total military expenditures.

First, when dealing with arms races involving the United States in the post–World War II era, what about United States war involvements (in particular, Korea and Vietnam)? If you are conducting an arms race study involving the United States during the time periods of those wars and use a measure based on total military expenditures, then all of the resources that the United States was devoting to the wars will be counted toward the arms race. This makes absolutely no sense. To be sure, this may be an extreme case, but nevertheless it illustrates one way that total aggregate military expenditures figures can be misleading. Arms race studies cannot use total military expenditures when one or both states are engaged in a war with countries that are not involved in the arms race. Of course, one could use a measure of military expenditures that removed the amount being spent on the war(s) involving the state. But determining this amount may not be a simple task.

There are additional issues with military expenditures that are not so simple to resolve. During the Cold War there were extensive efforts both in and out of government to determine the level of military expenditures of the Soviet Union. While there were differences among scholars about the actual level of expenditures of the Soviet Union, there was general agreement on one thing: The official figure for defense that was released by the Soviet government was too low. Among those who were trying to provide more accurate estimates of Soviet military expenditures there were two general approaches.

The first was the residual approach (Becker, 1964 ). The premise of this approach was that the total Soviet budget contained all the military expenditures of the Soviet Union, but that significant portions of military expenditures were in other budget lines. With an economy based on central planning, everything had to be accounted for. So, if there was spending for defense that was not in the defense budget it had to be located in other parts of the Soviet budget. The residual approach can be illustrated using defense spending in the United States. If the United States builds nuclear weapons, the expenditure for this is not in the defense budget; it is in the budget of the Department of Energy. Furthermore, one can argue that when it comes to outer space, some of United States defense capability has been funded by NASA. But there was a significant difference between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. First, for the Soviet Union there were more budget lines outside the defense budget that contained spending for the military. Second, the Soviets were trying to hide their total military expenditures, while the “extra” expenditures outside the United States defense budget were (and still are) widely known and fairly easy to include in a budget figure for defense.

So the issue of obtaining an accurate figure for the Soviet budget involved significant effort. It involved estimating the proportion of other budget lines that were part of military expenditures and adding these figures to the Soviet military budget. Since the government of the Soviet Union was trying to keep this secret, there was considerable uncertainty about which additional categories of their budget—and in some cases how much of a budget category—should be added to the “official” Soviet military expenditure budget. This was not an arbitrary process, but different researchers could reach different conclusions about how much of other lines in the Soviet budget should be part of the Soviet military budget.

The second method to create a figure for the total military budget of the Soviet Union was the direct costing method ( GlobalSecurity.org ., 2016 ). This involved calculating the cost of individual items (e.g., a specific type of Soviet tank) and then aggregating by the total number of such items. In particular, United States firms were asked to estimate how they would build Soviet military equipment and how much this would cost. Their expenditure estimates were used to compute the total Soviet military budget. But there was a significant problem with this approach. In the United States, labor was (and is) very expensive, so it was (is) efficient to use as much capital as possible. But in the Soviet Union the opposite was true; capital was expensive and labor was cheap. Thus using estimates of the way the United States would build military equipment and then converting this into Soviet military expenditures produced much higher estimates for military items for the Soviet Union than building items the way the Soviets did.

This brief description makes one thing clear: The link between total military capability and total military expenditures may not be simple or direct, and reasonable people can reach very different conclusions. There is no better illustration of this disconnect than the results of the Team B exercise in the 1970s (Cahn, 1993 ). In the 1970s a great deal of pressure from conservatives in the United States was directed at the CIA’s evaluation of the threat from the Soviet Union. As a result “Team B” was created. A group of conservative critics of the CIA received security clearances and were given access to the same information the CIA used to create its estimates of a variety of things about the Soviet military. Team B concluded that the CIA had significantly underestimated Soviet military capabilities in a number of areas.

Following this exercise (although there was no official acknowledgement that Team B had anything to do with it), the CIA doubled its estimate of the proportion of the Soviet economy that was devoted to the military. This also meant that the estimate of Soviet military expenditures was doubled. But the CIA did not increase its estimate of any element of the Soviet military. To be absolutely clear, the revision of the Soviet military expenditures was not accompanied by a revision of the amount of hardware, personnel, or any other element of the actual military forces of the Soviet Union. The CIA decided that, while the Soviet military was no larger than they initially calculated, the Soviets were far less efficient then the CIA had thought. Consequently, they doubled their estimate of the proportion of the Soviet economy that was devoted to their military.

One can take different positions on the CIA revision. One point of view is that if the Soviet Union was devoting this much effort to the military, they were incredibly dangerous and likely to engage the United States in military conflict (i.e., why devote so much to the military if they didn’t intend to use it?). Alternatively, one could argue that any country that needed to devote so much of their economy to produce a military of that size was bound to encounter significant economic difficulties. But from the point of view of using military expenditures as a gauge of military capability, the fact that the CIA could revise its estimates and double the expenditure figure for the Soviet Union should raise questions for those who feel that military expenditures are the best way to measure military capability. I note as well that the estimation of Soviet military expenditures was considered to be—quite rightly—a very important question. The United States government spent a great deal of effort and resources to calculate this figure. The level of these resources dwarfs the effort that scholars (whether individuals or groups) could do. But even with a large amount of resources, it was not simple or straightforward to generate estimates.

Some may feel that the machinations to create a figure for the military expenditures of the Soviet Union—while perhaps interesting—are a historical footnote. But currently, those interested in military expenditures face a new challenge: How much does China spend on its military? As with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, there is a consensus that the Chinese are not transparent about their military budget. Of course, no one disputes that the United States is spending considerably more on its military than China is spending. But what are the Chinese spending? The recent study of Cordesman with Kendall ( 2016 ) offers the following data for the Chinese military expenditure budget in 2015 from a variety of sources (note: all figures are in billions of U.S. dollars):

Open in new tab Chinese official figure: 141.1 US Department of Defense: 180.0 SIPRI 15 214.5 IISS 16 314.0 Open in new tab

As you can see, there is a wide range of estimates. Lack of transparency—the same problem that existed for Soviet military expenditures—makes it difficult to produce a reliable estimate for Chinese military expenditures. Of course, estimating military expenditures for most countries is not as difficult as producing a figure for China. But the Chinese example reinforces the point that using expenditures as a measure of military power is not always simple and straightforward.

There is a second issue that makes using total military expenditures problematic even if one is confident that there are no issues with the expenditure figures themselves. If the dynamics of an arms race (let us assume it is between just two states) are measured by total military expenditures, this implies that the competition involves all the armed services of both states. But this is—to say the least—implausible. For example, Huntington ( 1958 ) lists 13 arms races from 1840 to the Cold War. For each of these races Huntington lists only a single service; for example, he classifies the Cold War arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union as only involving nuclear weapons.

Of course, one could argue that Huntington was not correct; that is, arms races typically involve more than one military service. But consider the Military Balance 1989–1990 (International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1989 ); in 1989 (the year many people would argue is the last year of the Cold War), it reported the active duty army of United States was 766,500. The active duty army of the Soviet Union was 1,596,000. Given that the United States army was a bit less than half the size of the Soviet army, it is hard to argue that there was arms race between the two armies. And the classic naval arms race between Great Britain and Germany around the turn of the 20th century was clearly not matched by one between the armies of these two countries. Of course, it is possible that two states can be racing each other in more than one service. But even if one wants to use military expenditures to tap military power researchers should treat arms races as between individual services (although if one assumes that a pair of states are engaged in arms races across multiple services, these individual races may need to be modelled as linked to one another).

Scholars need to seriously consider whether the appropriate measure of arms races is not expenditures at all but is something more directly related the armaments. For example Stoll ( 2006 ) identified a number of naval competitions in which states established goals in terms of the number of capital ships:

From about 1860 through the early 1900s the British government (in presentations to Parliament) explicitly used the two-power standard. That is, the government argued that the British navy should be as large (or perhaps a bit larger) than the next two largest navies.

In 1904 the British government convened a special admiralty committee to study the two-power standard. The conclusions of this committee were expressed in terms of numbers of battleships (Marder, 1961 , p. 124).

On November 22, 1890 , the French Superior Council (the high command of their navy) approved the French naval budget with the statement that “the combatant units of the French fleet must be equal in number to those of the combined fleets of the Triple Alliance” (Ropp, 1987 , p. 197). 17

Between 1907 and 1922 the Japanese navy advocated the so-called 8-8 program. This specified a fleet of eight modern battleships and eight modern cruisers. The Japanese wanted to have a fleet (at least in terms of major units) that was 70% of the size of the United States Navy. This ratio was based on studies by the Japanese navy which concluded that if a smaller fleet was at least 70% the size of a larger fleet, the larger fleet could not win (Evans & Peattie, 1997 , pp. 143, 150).

There are other examples of states having goals for their navies tied to ship totals, particularly the number of capital ships. While the operationalization of capital ship changed through time (see Modelski & Thompson, 1988 , pp. 50–96), it always meant that capital ship was the type of ship would be part of the battle line in a major naval engagement. Governments commonly used ship counts—not expenditures—to estimate naval capability.

There were also a number of efforts during the Cold War to construct indicators of the nuclear balance between the United States and the Soviet Union (see, e.g., Barash, 1986 ; Eden, 1989 ; Pry, 1990a , 1990b ; Speed, 1980 ). Some of these measures were quite complicated, and the scholars did not always reach the same conclusion. But all focus on weapons (their number and characteristics), not military expenditures.

Finally, there were a number of efforts to estimate the balance of conventional forces between NATO and the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War. That is, a number of analysts believed that just using expenditure data was not the best way to evaluate the force balance. Two examples are Kaufman ( 1983 ) the Congressional Budget Office ( 1988 ) and Epstein ( 1988 ).

I am not suggesting that using measures of the appropriate military power will always be simple. In fact in most instances it will be difficult. But given the major problems with using total military expenditures I believe the study of arms races should move in this direction.

The Start of an Arms Race Is Not Always a Dyadic-Level Decision

Virtually all work on arms races treats the onset as a dyadic-level decision, which of course it is. But the empirical work assumes both states decide in the same year to compete against one another. Think about this for a moment. Does this make sense? It is not as if there is a meeting between the two states and they reach an agreement to engage in an arms competition. Of course, if two states see each other as rivals, it is reasonable to expect that the two states may engage in an arms competition, but they need not reach that decision in the same year.

Several examples were listed earlier of simple rules that are well documented among naval historians, but note that they all are about single states. They do not always reference a specific target state. Additionally, consider the situation concerning major power navies after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 . The consensus among naval historians is that Japan was sizing its navy to the United States Navy, and the United States was sizing its navy to that of Great Britain. So the size of each of these navies was tied to another navy but not to each other.

As far as the British are concerned, virtually all scholars of naval competitions would assert that Germany and Great Britain engaged in a naval arms race from 1898 to either 1912 or 1914 . There is also significant evidence that the leadership of the German navy began to size their navy to Great Britain’s in 1898 , but when justifying its budget request in the British Parliament the Royal Navy did not mention the German navy until 1900 . 18 These examples—admittedly all about navies—suggest that while there are arms race dyads we are better off thinking in terms of armaments targeting. That is, state A begins to size one of its military services to that of state B. Shortly afterwards state B decides that state A is doing this and begins to size its military service to that of state B. This would probably happen quickly, but there may be a gap of a few years before it occurs. Our research on arms races should acknowledge this and not automatically assume that two states pick the same year to start sizing their military forces to the other state.

In recent years there has been little work on the quantitative study of arms races, whether trying to understand why the start, how they progress, or whether they end in war. These are all important questions. And previous research on arms races did not provide clear answers for any of these questions before scholars turned away from these issues.

As noted earlier, it is likely that we will see a resurgence of interest in arms race studies. And we should definitely build on the foundation of earlier work. While the amount of interest in this topic declined after the Cold War, the sophistication and quality of recent work is to be admired and emulated. Arms races are an important topic worthy of study. Current events also suggest that there will be arms competitions in the near future. So, it is vital that scholarly community re-engage in this field of study.

Recent research has embedded arms races in a broader set of relations between countries. This line of research should be continued, but it is also vital that arms race studies move away from using total military expenditures, whether by itself or as part of a composite measure. It is critical that we do the hard work of developing more direct measures of military capability. We should also consider whether armaments decisions are also influenced by neighbors and/or regional states. Finally, we should not assume that both states that engage in an arms race make this decision in the same year.

Further Readings: Quantitative Arms Race Studies, 2005 to 2016

• Abu-Qarn, A. S. , & Abu-Bader, S. (2009). On the dynamics of the Israeli–Arab arms race. The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance , 49 (3), 931–943.
• Colaresi, M. P. , & Thompson, W. R. (2005). Alliances, arms buildups and recurrent conflict: Testing a steps-to-war model. The Journal of Politics , 67 (2), 345–364.
• Collier, P. , & Hoeffler, A. (2007). Unintended consequences: Does aid promote arms races? Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics , 69 (1), 1–27.
• Gibler, D. M. , Rider, T. J. , & Hutchison, M. L. (2005). Taking arms against a sea of troubles: Conventional arms races during periods of rivalry. Journal of Peace Research , 42 (2), 131–147.
• Goldsmith, B. E. (2007). Arms racing in “space”: Spatial modelling of military spending around the world. Australian Journal of Political Science , 42 (3), 419–440.
• Kroenig, M. (2016). US nuclear weapons and non-proliferation: Is there a link? Journal of Peace Research , 53 (2), 166–179.
• Lee, H. , & Rider, T. J. (2016). Evaluating the effects of trade on militarized behavior in the context of territorial threat. Foreign Policy Analysis , orw009.
• Lee, H. , & Rider, T. (forthcoming). Trade, arms races, and territorial disputes. Foreign Policy Analysis .
• Rider, T. J. (2009). Understanding arms race onset: Rivalry, threat, and territorial competition. The Journal of Politics , 71 (2), 693–703.
• Rider, T. J. (2013). Uncertainty, salient stakes, and the causes of conventional arms races. International Studies Quarterly , 57 (3), 580–591.
• Rider, T. J. , Findley, M. G. , & Diehl, P. F. (2011). Just part of the game? Arms races, rivalry, and war. Journal of Peace Research , 48 (1), 85–100.
• Sample, S. G. (2012). Arms races: A cause or a symptom? In J. A. Vasquez (Ed.), What do we know about war? (2d ed., pp. 111–138). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Senese, P. D. , & Vasquez, J. A. (2008). The steps to war: An empirical study . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Altfeld, M. (1983). Arms races? And escalation? A comment on Wallace. International Studies Quarterly , 27 (2), 225–231.
• Barash, D. P. (1986). The arms race and nuclear war . Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
• Becker, A. S. 1964. Soviet military outlays since 1955 . DTIC Document. Retrieved from http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=AD0602072 .
• Berkowitz, D. M. , & Berliner, J. S. (1993). An evaluation of the CIA’s analysis of Soviet economic performance, 1970–90. Comparative Economic Studies (Association for Comparative Economic Studies) , 35 (2), 33.
• Cahn, A. H. (1993). Team B: The trillion-dollar experiment. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists . Retrieved from http://www.proudprimate.com/Placards/teamb-cahn.htm .
• Colaresi, M. P. , Rasler, K. , & Thompson, W. R. (2008). Strategic rivalries in world politics: Position, space and conflict escalation (1st ed.). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
• Colaresi, M. P. , & Thompson, W. (2005). Alliances, arms buildups and recurrent conflict: Testing a steps-to-war model. The Journal of Politics , 67 (2), 345–364.
• Congressional Budget Office . (1988). U.S. ground forces and the conventional balance in Europe . Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
• Cordesman, A. H. , with the assistance of J. Kendall (2016). Estimates of Chinese military spending . Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies. Retrieved from https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs .
• Diehl, P. (1983). Arms races and escalation: A closer look. Journal of Peace Research , 20 (3), 205–212.
• Eden, L. (1989). Nuclear arguments: Understanding the strategic nuclear arms and arms control debates . Paper book and 5¼-inch floppy disk. Edited by S. E. Miller . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Epstein, J. (1988). Dynamic Analysis and the Conventional Balance in Europe. International Security , 12 (4), 154–165.
• Evans, D. , & Peattie, M. (1997). Kaigun: Strategy, tactics, and technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887–1941 . Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press.
• Gibler, D. , Rider, T. , & Hutchison, M. (2005). Taking arms against a sea of troubles: Conventional arms races during periods of rivalry. Journal of Peace Research , 42 (2), 131–147.
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1. Of course, there was some work done after the end of the Cold War and the last few years, but arms races were not a major focus of research. And to be honest, arms races are not a major focus of recent research.

2. Richardson’s work was relatively unknown until the September 1957 issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution (Vol. 1, issue 3). All three articles in that issue were devoted to his work. This was followed by a volume that compiled Richardson’s work on arms races and the causes of war (Richardson, 1960 ).

3. Note: The two states need not be growing at the same rate for this to happen.

4. The source for military expenditures is SIPRI ( 2017 ). Expenditures are in constant ( 2014 ) U.S. dollars. I included all countries that (a) SIPRI classified as Western European and (b) were members of NATO during the entire time period studied.

5. Huntington spends no time in his article explaining how he created his list of arms races; he basically just lists the cases in a footnote.

6. In later years there was a tendency to include a large number of control variables. But current practice—rightly so—has been to discourage the unfettered use of large numbers of control variables in favor of a more nuanced (and theoretically justified) approach that avoids using a kitchen sink of control variables.

7. They do not explain why they average across five-year blocks. They note, “Although this approach has been conventional in much of the growth literature, it has only just begun to be applied to the phenomenon of military spending” (Collier & Hoeffler, 2007 , p. 4).

8. They create the variable through a process involving instrument variables. See Collier & Hoeffler ( 2007 , pp. 11–12).

9. The paper only lists the first two initials of the author. I did not assume the author is male; I verified it.

10. This single sentence cannot possibly convey the magnitude of Thompson’s efforts. The reader is invited to read the original reference to these data (noted in the text).

11. A chapter in Colaresi, Rasler, and Thompson ( 2008 ) provides an updated version of this analysis.

12. Of course, realism—in its many variants—is not about preventing war but about the actions states should take to do as well as they can in a hostile world. This might involve fighting wars.

13. They look at whether the current dispute or any dispute involving the same states over the next five years ends in war.

14. Even if there was a consensus on these questions, one has to consider whether things may be different in the current era.

15. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

16. International Institute for Strategic Studies. Note the figure is for 2014 and is in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP).

17. The Triple Alliance involved Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy.

18. As noted earlier in presentations to Parliament, the British Navy justified its budgetary request in terms of the two-power standard: The British navy should be at least as large as the next two largest navies in the world.

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8 The Cold War Arms Race: Forces Beyond the Superpowers

• Published: January 2016
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The arms race during the Cold War was determined not only by the nuclear-armed superpowers but also by their allies and other actors, as well by asymmetries of conventional forces. Its four stages evolved from unintended escalation in 1945–55, which created by 1968 the threat of nuclear proliferation, but led to deceptive stabilization during the next decade and a half, only to result in the race’s unexpected termination during the period from 1985 to 1991. As such, the Cold War arms race was happily anomalous, as the confluence of circumstances that made it prone to precipitate catastrophe, is all but certain never to recur. Coming to grips with its legacy thus means above all resisting the temptation to draw false analogies that could only make the very different problems of today’s world more difficult to deal with.

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• DOI: 10.4324/9780203477168-18
• Corpus ID: 53546218

Arms race models and econometric applications

• J. Dunne , E. Nikolaidou , Ronald Smith
• Published 2000
• Political Science, Economics

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30 Citations

Is there an arms race between pakistan and india an application of gmm, the econometrics of military arms races, a hierarchical bayesian arms race model.

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Determining Military Expenditures: Arms Races and Spill-Over Effects in Cross-Section and Panel Data

The prisoner's dilemma and regime-switching in, the prisoner's dilemma and regime-switching in the greek-turkish arms race, the demand for military spending in developing countries: a dynamic panel analysis, military expenditures and economic growth: allowing structural breaks in time series analysis in the case of india and pakistan, arms race and economic growth: the case of india and pakistan, evidence of asymmetric cointegration between the military expenditures of india and pakistan, 15 references, arms race modeling, arms races and proliferation, modelling greek-turkish rivalry: an empirical investigation of defence spending dynamics, the arms trade and the stability of regional arms races, expectations and arms races, is there a greek-turkish arms race : evidence from cointegration and causality tests, chapter 5 military alliances: theory and empirics, greece and turkey: the case study of an arms race from the greek perspective, investigating causal relations by econometric models and cross-spectral methods, external security determinants of greek military expenditure: an empirical investigation using neural networks, related papers.

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Is there an Arms Race between Greece and Turkey?

• J. Paul Dunne , Eftychia Nikolaidou and Ron P. Smith

Richardson's action-reaction model of an arms race has prompted a considerable body of research that has attempted to empirically estimate such models. In general these attempts have been unsuccessful. This paper provides an extensive reconsideration of the estimation issues and using some recent developments in time-series econometrics, provides a comprehensive analysis of data for Greece and Turkey. It finds evidence of some form of cointegration between the military expenditures in both countries, but not of Richardson arms race type.

©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston

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• PMC10539143

Publish or Perish: The Research Arms Race in Residency Selection

Brian elliott.

Brian Elliott, MD, is Chief Resident, Wright-Patterson Medical Center; and

J. Bryan Carmody

J. Bryan Carmody, MD, MPH, is Associate Professor, Eastern Virginia Medical School.

“We need less research, better research, and research done for the right reasons.” 1 So began a 1994 editorial in the British Medical Journal by statistician Douglas G. Altman. Noting that incentives for career advancement led many physicians to conduct research that was inappropriately designed, incorrectly analyzed, selectively interpreted, or outright fraudulent, Altman argued for abandoning the use of publication quantity as a measure of ability.

One might hope that Altman’s words would have inspired systemic change in the nearly 3 decades following his eloquent editorial. Instead, it seems the publish-or-perish arms race has spread to medical trainees. The Figure shows the dramatic increase in PubMed-indexed research publications with medical student authors in the past 15 years. While these data are limited in their ability to represent all medical student research, they are a sample that alludes to an alarming trend.

Number of New Articles in Medical Literature With Medical Student Authors, 2009-2022

Note: Data obtained from PubMed using advanced search filtering for author affiliation including “medical student” and the period 2008 to 2022. Because some student authors may not list a medical student affiliation or publish in journals not PubMed-indexed, these data likely underestimate medical student research productivity.

This trend would be worth celebrating if this increase in publications represented flourishing science. Yet an analysis of PubMed-indexed publications found that most medical student articles were reviews or case reports, and the majority (59%) were cited not even once. 2 Rather than scientific curiosity, the burgeoning research output by medical students is partially a consequence of the residency selection process.

At competitive residency programs, program directors increasingly use research productivity to discriminate among applicants. In the National Resident Matching Program’s most recent survey, program directors rated involvement and interest in research as being as important as membership in Alpha Omega Alpha or the Gold Humanism Honor Society when deciding whom to interview or rank, 3 and 41% of program directors in a different national survey reported that research participation will become more important after the transition to pass/fail scoring for Step 1 of the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE). 4 In every specialty, the mean number of research experiences listed in residency applications is higher for graduating MD students who match compared to those who do not. 5 Unsurprisingly, medical students report their primary motivation to perform research is out of professional necessity to advance, 6 and they cite the desire to increase their competitiveness for residency applications as the most common reason for taking dedicated research years. 7

The result is a research arms race among residency applicants. The Table shows the increase in research abstracts, publications, and presentations among matched US MD students across every specialty. Successful applicants in competitive specialties such as dermatology, neurological surgery, and plastic surgery now report more than 20 research items on average, and even primary care specialties have seen a 2- to 3-fold increase in this metric. In fact, in most specialties, the average unmatched applicant today reports more research items than the average matched applicant did 10 years ago. 5 , 8 Yet there is little—if any—evidence that residents today are any more prepared for residency than those in previous eras. Moreover, evidence suggests that while research in residency may correlate with clinical performance, research in medical school does not. 9 - 11 But this research arms race shows no sign of slowing. In fact, 60% of medical students plan to redirect time previously spent studying for a scored USMLE Step 1 to more research activity. 12

Average Number of Research Presentations, Abstracts, and Publications of Matched Applicants by Specialty From 2009 to 2022

Note: Data obtained from National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) Match data via https://www.nrmp.org/match-data-analytics/archives/ . Time intervals based on those reported by the NRMP.

A Potential Solution

Permitting residency applicants to list only 3 to 5 research publications, abstracts, and presentations could mitigate this academic inflation. Rather than padding their applications with more low-quality science in the hope of catching a program director’s attention, applicants would have an incentive to pursue more rigorous and higher-quality projects to fill the limited space on their applications. Such a policy would be consistent with the Association of American Medical Colleges’ recent change to limit applicants to listing only 10 experiences (including work, volunteer, and research experiences) starting in the 2023-2024 residency application season. 13 Removing the quantitative component of research evaluation could also promote a holistic review more focused on compatibility between applicants and programs. 14

But just as the research arms race has emerged as a byproduct of a residency selection process intended to encourage and reward merit, this policy change should be considered through the lens of potential unintended consequences.

Would Limiting Research Hurt Applicants?

For some residency applicants, prodigious research output may counterbalance weaknesses elsewhere in the application. Limiting the number of research items that an applicant could report could prevent these individuals from competing for residency positions in the way they perceive they are best equipped. Yet such applicants could still demonstrate their merit to programs by doing higher-quality research.

Further, when considering research output as a measure of worth for graduate medical education, it must be appreciated that there are wide disparities in applicants’ access to research opportunities. There is scant evidence that unlimited research output “levels the playing field” for applicants from lesser-known or international medical schools. Instead, there are systematic differences in publication count for students by sex, race, and medical school rank. 15 Indeed, the fact that more famous and well-resourced institutions provide easier access to mentors and projects may be one of the most important ways in which these institutions reproduce and perpetuate status hierarchies. 16

Would Limiting Research Hurt Science?

Advances in medical science continue to improve patient care—and some of the most important discoveries in medicine (including heparin, insulin, penicillin, ether anesthesia, spermatozoa, and the sinoatrial node) were made by or with crucial contributions from medical students. 17 Yet biomedical science in the 21st century is a sophisticated endeavor. Exploring its frontiers requires complex techniques and extensive experience. Today’s medical students aren’t likely to stumble upon major discoveries unless they are participating in high-quality projects.

Even without making groundbreaking discoveries, participating in research that is adequately resourced and well-mentored may help students develop critical thinking skills and an appreciation for the challenges of producing high-quality research. Limiting the number of items that can be considered during the initial review of the residency application will not negate these benefits.

Would Limiting Research Hurt Physician-Scientists?

Some trainees who initially participate in research to enhance their residency application may be inspired to careers as physician-scientists. 18 Yet it’s doubtful that a medical student disinclined to pursue a research career after their first 3 to 5 publications would be convinced by another 10.

Would Limiting Research Lower Standards?

Reforms to medical education often prompt concern that standards are being lowered and that patients and the profession will suffer by training physicians who are less grounded in biomedical science. 19 Limiting the number of research outputs that could be listed on an application would not remove research as a component of residency selection or the incentive for applicants to pursue it. Instead, it would incentivize quality over quantity and direct applicants’ efforts toward contributing to meaningful science.

Ending the Research Arms Race

So long as the number of residency applicants to some specialties exceeds the number of positions, residency selection will remain a high-stakes and highly competitive process. Program directors will seek measures of merit, and applicants will aspire to demonstrate whatever measures of merit programs value. The natural result is an arms race.

In defining measures of merit, graduate medical education has a responsibility to ensure that applicants compete in ways that benefit patients or the profession rather than just providing relative advantage in the zero-sum selection game. Research is valuable, but its value is not based on quantity. Graduate medical education programs can choose to structure the incentives for trainee research in a way that furthers science and patient care—or in a manner that generates research pollution and fuels a senseless arms race. As Altman concluded his seminal editorial, “As the system encourages poor research it is the system that should be changed… Abandoning using the number of publications as a measure of ability would be a start.” 1

Author Notes

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policy of the Department of Defense or United States Air Force.

Europe’s Protectionist Arms Race

• Daily Economy

Europe is on the brink of responding to American industrial policy with its own protectionist measures, contributing to a destructive arms race of state intervention. In 2022, the US passed the CHIPS act , a $280 billion collection of funds for investment into new “technological” industries. In doing so, the United States, once a supposed bastion of free trade and economic liberalism, ushered in a new era of industrial policy. 

While it is perhaps too soon to evaluate the success of the CHIPS act at achieving its stated goal of creating a fully domestic supply chain for “strategically important” manufactured goods, the bill’s price tag and the development in the American Chips industry that predates the bill suggest it is may at best be wasteful and distortionary. Yet, the cost of the CHIPS act may be many times larger than its simple price tag. Our friends in Europe see American consolidation of technological industries as a threat to their own economies. Unsatisfied with their equivalent CHIPS act , many in Europe are calling for fundamental reform to the European economy in response to American and Chinese actions. Former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi is at the center of this push for European “competitiveness,” and in an upcoming report to the European Commission, he is anticipated to call for a series of drastic reforms. In response to our interventionism, Europe seems set on implementing its own harmful industrial policy, heralding a new era of economic warfare between power blocs. 

The basic motivation behind European calls for centralization is not a new one. European leaders believe themselves to be in a weak position, and they see centralization of the economy through industrial policy as a way to strengthen their hand. This feeling of weakness is not hard to explain. The European economy has been persistently weak since the 2008 recession. The Eurozone crisis precipitated nearly a decade of slow growth. Just as the continent was beginning to recover, the COVID pandemic forced lockdowns and overzealous spending, which in turn produced years of inflation. As if the continent wasn’t doing poorly enough, Russia invaded Ukraine, precipitating further sanctions and an end to the supply of Russian natural gas. A slow economy has discouraged investment, and Europe is lagging behind in strategically important industries. 

Draghi, for his part, sees the problem as one of disunity. He argues that while Europe has “the same natural size advantage…fragmentation is holding us back.” Rather than focus solely on reducing barriers to economic integration, however, he and others in Europe seem set on simply trying to copy American industrial policy. In a speech in June he called for the EU to use “subsidies and tariffs to offset unfair advantages created by industrial policies and real exchange rate devaluations abroad.” Rather than save the continent’s economy, Europe leaders will likely only succeed in copying our mistakes. 

Taken at face value, some aspects of this push for unification are grounded in sound economic logic. Draghi calls, in part, for regulatory standardization in telecommunications and tech industries in general. Past research has found that in technological industries in particular, differences in regulatory regimes between countries obstruct the creation of large-scale networks. As a result, Europe is unable to create the extensive supply chains that new industry requires, and cannot benefit from economies of scale. 

Those calling for European “competitiveness” do not mean actual economic competition. Instead, their goal is strategic power through centralization and intervention. European leaders believe that the continent must have “key” industries to produce goods like microchips, regardless of whether Europe actually has a comparative advantage in those industries. 

This kind of political competition between governments, rather than market competition between companies, leads to lower efficiency as governments protect unprofitable industries. True, private industry would still have a role, but Draghi and others want to encourage consolidation through state support. Consolidation may be economically optimal, and if so the market will tend towards it as larger firms see increased profitability. State intervention, however, would mean that chosen private companies would be protected from internal competition through subsidies and tariffs, reducing efficiency and growth. The US CHIPS act, for instance, has so far paid out the vast majority of its grants to a small handful of massive companies. State intervention will only ensure that the supply chain for CHIPS and other prioritized goods conforms to the interests of politicians and bureaucrats, rather than those of producers and consumers. 

Yes, state sponsorship may boost European production of, say, microchips relative to what would be present in a free market, at least in the short term. If so, advocates of intervention will hail it as a victory. And it may be a victory, for politicians. But it will be a loss for the consumer, and, in the long run, for European strength as well. If it wants to, in the short term, the state can ensure that any one good is produced at a greater quantity than it could be in the free market. But that particular increase always comes at the cost of an overall reduction in wealth. 

Every euro spent on state subsidies is a euro taken from the private sector, and thus a euro that cannot be spent on the development of an industry for which there is actual market demand, depriving other industries in the process. 

Draghi himself acknowledges the need to facilitate investment in startups, but subsidies and other forms of protectionism would make it impossible for new companies to get off the ground. 

Rather than engage in a losing battle of control and consolidation, the EU should side-step it entirely, decoupling Draghi’s beneficial push for an open intracontinental market from the harmful tilt towards state industrial policy. In fact, the EU could benefit substantially by leveraging the competition inherent between its member states, and the opportunity for specialization that having more than two dozen nations, each with their own particular advantages in production, would provide. 

Abandoning state intervention may well require accepting some harsh truths. Europe may simply not be able to produce every single good with a potential strategic use, and that may upset some in Europe, but relying on trade for some goods and allowing the market to instead focus on those industries in which Europe excels at will lead to better long-term performance, and even eventual profit from American and Chinese mistakes. European companies could, for instance, take advantage of taxpayer-subsidized American chips to produce goods further down the supply chain, like computers or electric vehicles. 

If carried out, this new era of European industrial policy will further weaken a sluggish continental economy, and may drag the US economy along with it. EU attempts at direct investment and subsidy will likely spur calls from American interest groups for even more subsidies and investment on our end. While the Biden administration says that it is unbothered by EU measures, other US officials warn that they will incur a US response when actually implemented. 

Ultimately, the replacement of global, interconnected, supply chains with attempts at autarky through subsidy will only impoverish every country involved. And as Europe attempts to respond to the CHIPS act, expect American politicians to cry foul, and call for even further spending in response. Protectionism may beget more protectionism, as governments compete to bolster their power at one another’s expense. 

James Eiler

James Eiler is studying economics and history at Dartmouth College. He interned with AIER during the summer of 2024.

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What Today’s Nuclear Arms Race Looks Like to Hiroshima Survivors

The survivors of the last atomic bombs have a warning for us in the new arms race..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

I’m Kathleen Kingsbury. And I oversee the Opinion report at The New York Times.

This year, we are doing a series to call attention to a burgeoning nuclear age. As the Cold War closed, many people on the United States stopped thinking about nuclear weapons. Yet now, countries like the United States, Russia, and China, the largest nuclear powers on Earth, are spending trillions of dollars to build new arsenals of weapons. We’re really in a new arms race.

In many ways, this has been hidden from the American public. There is no public conversation about it. There are no protests in the way that we saw in the 1980s. And what we saw then was that when the public raised its voice, when it raised its concerns with lawmakers, then there was real change, and arsenals began to shrink.

As we enter this new nuclear age, I thought it was really important to go and talk to the only people on Earth who have lived through an atomic bombing before and understand the aftermath and the pain and suffering that they have gone through over many, many years. So last fall, I traveled to Japan with my colleagues, Bill Hannigan, who covers national security for Opinion, and our research assistant, Spencer Cohen. After we returned from Japan, Bill Hannigan and I sat down to talk about who we spoke with and the themes that we heard from the survivors’ stories.

Before we talk about our reporting in Japan and the incredible experience of meeting with the survivors, I think for both of us, it was the first time visiting Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And of course, as a national security reporter, you’ve been steeped in these questions around nuclear threats. Before our trip to Japan, how did the idea of a nuclear explosion live in your own imagination?

Really as a historical fact, it was more like a history than it was a real thing. I’ve read so much about this over the years. But the power of a nuclear bomb, it’s very hard to come to grips with. Like many Americans, you don’t think about this being reality. And it wasn’t until when we were on the ground in Japan that you really got that human level of understanding. Yeah. I think it was actually really striking to me is, when we were in Hiroshima, it’s just like any other city. In my imagination, it feels like this place should be a living memorial. And actually, there are certain ways that it is.

In the center of the city is this incredible memorial museum to the victims of the bombing. And you go into that museum and you can tell the care that the community has put towards trying to make sure that the world doesn’t forget what happened that day.

But there are other things that made it seem as though the city had really tried to move on quickly. They began rebuilding right away. And what was it, four years later, they had a baseball team that the city rallied around.

In Nagasaki, it’s a thriving port. It’s huge. And I think it’s also important not to lose sight of the fact that these communities picked themselves up and tried to figure out how to rebuild.

Yeah, I mean, the other thing that struck me about Hiroshima was, once you start talking to people, how many have a connection to the bombing. If you engage people, they all have their own stories. A lot of these people are in their 80s or 90s. And their experiences are seared into them since they were little kids. And so when you’re talking to them, you’re seeing it and hearing it through a child’s eyes.

Yeah, I think that’s something actually that’s really important to remember, that the oldest survivor was probably only a teenager basically in 1945.

One of the people who really stuck with me was Chieko Kiriake, who, even though she’s in her 90s now, she remembers that day in incredible detail.

If you could start by telling us how old you were and where you lived on the day of the bombing?

[SPEAKING JAPANESE]

She was 15. At that point in the war, Most of the schoolchildren in Hiroshima had been mobilized. They were no longer going to school. They were working in factories.

She was working in a cigarette factory. She had a pass to walk down to a health clinic.

And I was walking along the river. It was such a hot day, and my knee hurts. So I kind of took a shade in the little hut and sort of stop and wipe the sweat off my head. That’s when I saw a great flash.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

She talked in detail about first, the flash of light.

Then the noise.

She said the light came first. It was so blinding that I couldn’t see anything. And then I don’t know how long, but it felt like a while after I heard the sound and the blast came together with the sound. The shock was so big that the little storage house that I was in, I was buried underneath the rubbles.

At the moment, there was a pitch dark.

As I look back, I must have been on the fringe inside this mushroom cloud.

And then what was really incredible was hearing her talk about the scene afterwards.

I saw all that wooden houses are flattened to the ground. And the smoke started to come. And it was just slowly coming to burn, but it wasn’t yet engulfed in flame. That’s how I managed to escape.

The people who she had seen whose skin was melting off their bodies —

— full of burnt hairs, burnt — and almost like curled and standing, like an opera hair, she said — and their face swollen, almost double the size, and that their lips are swollen, too swollen to say anything.

And she talks about, in detail, how the fact that she had been on one side of the river essentially saved her life.

The people on the other side, closer to the hypocenter, their eyes bulged out. The ears burned off. And the clothes burned and all those, so I barely survived.

If it was only a couple minutes later, then I would have died as well. It’s such a horrible luck.

Now these stories are really hard to hear. But I think they’re really important to sit with. Because there’s no denying the destruction that a nuclear weapon can bring. Once you hear these horrific tales of people not only from August 6, but 80 years later, they’re still living with the trauma of having been there on that day.

What the experience of August 6 —

Toward the end of our conversation with Chieko, I asked her about her life after 1945.

I never — I never considered myself lucky to be able to survive, despite many of my friends lost their lives. Even a year later, this was 1946 and on, the commemoration, official commemoration started. The people came together to commemorate the loss.

And I hated to go because I would see the parents who lost their children in atomic bombing. They’re looking at us. It’s not that they directly say anything to us, saying, like, my child had to die, and why do you survive? I felt so, as their piercing look. And I really wish that I died with them so that I don’t feel this guilt. So I never considered myself lucky, surviving the bomb.

That was a common theme that we came across from the survivors, this sort of burden of living and having to carry these experiences around with them for the rest of their lives. And the idea that why did I live when my friend or my family member died? What makes me the person that lives?

Can you say your name to begin with?

Another survivor we spoke with was Keiko Ogura.

All right. Let me introduce myself. Is it OK? My name is —

She lived near a shrine which people were told to go visit if there was some sort of disaster.

We were told in case something happened that made the air raid time, go to Shinto shrines or Buddhism temples. And the doctors will be there. So many people, thinking of that, rushed [to her area]. But actually, there was no doctor.

People were coming up the hill to where she lived. Many of them were begging for a drink of water because they were parched.

I only heard what they say was water. Somebody seized my leg and said give me water. And then I ran back and got the water and then deliver.

And then my father asked to us, children, you didn’t give water? We shouldn’t give water. If we give water, heavily wounded people will die. I did not know that. And two persons actually died in front of me.

She did. She gave two people cups of water. And they both died because of their internal injuries as a result of drinking that water.

That became my trauma, you see? I blamed myself. Keiko, you are a stupid girl. You don’t know anything. You killed them.

As if there was some sort of knowledge that she was supposed to have as this young girl, knowing the injuries that these people were enduring.

It continued more than 10 years. I saw nightmares and then recalled dreadful days and then blame myself. So, in a way, I didn’t have scars, but I had the invisible scars.

Here she is now, a woman in her 80s, still carrying around this tremendous guilt for what happened.

And it went beyond guilt. In Japan, a lot of survivors faced discrimination in the years since.

Well, I think it’s a cultural thing, primarily, not wanting to talk about your bad luck. Or there was some thought, as if these people were stained, that they carried around this kind of unseen disease as a result of the bomb. And so admitting that you were a victim was something that you did not reveal to another person for fear that you might not be seen as a good prospective spouse or employee or mother or father.

That they were permanently damaged.

Right. That they carried around this mark of shame.

Of course, they were also reminders to the Japanese of the fact that the country had lost the war.

Yes. But now they kind see it as a responsibility to talk about their experiences so that it never happens again.

Right. And they are very keenly aware of the rising threat in a way that I think most of the American public is not, because they’ve had this lived experience.

Yes I mean, the fear over nuclear use is why Keiko travels the world telling her story.

Now what the survivors are worrying about is to die and meet our family in the heavens. I heard many survivors are saying what shall I do? I’ll be asked, “Mom, what did you do to abolish nuclear weapons?”

There is no answer I can tell them. I saw many people who died in front of me. And then, every year, standing by the river, I say that I will endeavor to abolish total nuclear weapon.

Because for us, a single bomb, 1,000, or 10,000 bombs means the same. Please tell the truth of the nuclear weapon. Don’t talk about the hatred. Knowing is the most important piece of education, I think.

We survivors are so fearful. Right now, every day I’m so afraid because of Putin’s war. We have to do something. But what I can do is just to tell my story, the reality of nuclear weapon.

The world is facing a lot of major challenges right now, climate change, income inequality, the rise of authoritarianism, global pandemics. This is a problem that the world is facing that at one point we contained. We obviously didn’t solve it entirely, but there was a moment in which the world came together, and through the treaties that were signed, there was an active decision made that we wanted to make this threat less volatile.

And now we’ve turned the corner. And we’re headed in the opposite direction. And so it feels like a moral imperative to try to put the world back on that safer path.

I mean, after you hear what we’ve heard, you can’t help but think, how are we inching closer to a more volatile era when it comes to nuclear weapons?

You can see photographs and hear more from Chieko Kiriake, Keiko Ogura and the other survivors Katie and Bill interviewed by visiting nytimes.com/opinion and searching Hiroshima.

By Kathleen Kingsbury and W.J. Hennigan

Produced by Phoebe Lett

The threat of a nuclear arms race is building. In an effort to bring light to this new and terrifying nuclear era , Opinion’s editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, and the writer W.J. Hennigan interviewed Japanese survivors of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this audio essay, they share stories from two of the survivors they met, Chieko Kiriake and Keiko Ogura, who were just 15 and 8 years old on Aug. 6, 1945.

To see more photographs and read more stories from them and other survivors, click here .

(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected] .

This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Phoebe Lett. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek. Mixing by Isaac Jones. Original music by Carole Sabouraud, Pat McCusker and Sonia Herrero. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Spencer Cohen.

This Times Opinion series is funded through philanthropic grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York , Outrider Foundation and the Prospect Hill Foundation . Funders have no control over the selection or focus of articles or the editing process and do not review articles before publication. The Times retains full editorial control.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Kathleen Kingsbury is the Opinion editor of The New York Times, overseeing the editorial board and the Opinion section. Previously she was the deputy editorial page editor. She joined The Times in 2017 from The Boston Globe, where she served as managing editor for digital. She received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished editorial writing. @ katiekings

W.J. Hennigan writes about national security, foreign policy and conflict for the Opinion section.

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In AI Arms Race, Data Centers Are the Table Stakes for Hyperscale Players

Hyperscale tech companies and global investment firms continue to invest heavily in digital infrastructure for AI, citing it as a game-changing technology for society and the economy.

But after a selloff in the tech sector, some stock investors are assessing the timing of the payoff on these big bets on AI. As securities analysts scrutinize timelines for a return on that investment, the tech titans say they will continue to invest in data centers, which they see as table stakes to compete in an AI-powered future.

That means the data center construction boom is likely to continue, with space in short supply and future capacity being fully pre-leased, often before shovels even hit the dirt. It also means that the financial risk of the AI boom lies primarily with hyperscale tenants, rather than developers or their sponsors.

Any risk of oversupply may also be moderated by the constraints on electric power and equipment, analysts say. This could extend delivery timelines for new data centers, but also reduces the possibility that IT facilities will be sitting empty if AI business is slow to materialize.  

The tech titans say they are encouraged by early adoption of their AI offerings and are not slowing their investment.  

This week’s earnings reports indicate the 4 major hyperscalers - AWS, Google, Microsoft and Meta - are investing about $50 billion per quarter on digital infrastructure, including GPUs for AI computing and the data centers to house them. That spending is likely to continue into next year, and may even increase, companies indicated.

This upbeat outlook has boosted shares of companies on the forefront of the AI boom, including NVIDIA, Microsoft, Google and players in the GPU production ecosystem.

But some bellwethers of the AI rally in the stock market are hitting serious turbulence. Share prices of  Supermicro and NVIDIA have each slid about 20 percent over the last month amid broader losses for stocks. Although the selloff is widely attributed to worries about a slowing economy, analyst concerns about valuations for AI-focused players have contributed to the downturn in tech shares.

Despite the recent slide, Supermicro (+200%) and NVIDIA (+55%) still boast strong year-to-date returns.

Blackstone Sees $1 Trillion in Data Center Spending

The world’s largest investors see AI as a game-changing technology, with digital infrastructure playing a key role in societal transformation.    

“ I believe the consequences of AI are as profound as what occurred in 1880 when Thomas Edison patented the electric light bulb,” said Stephen Schwarzman, Chairman and CEO of Blackstone. “Current expectations are that there will be approximately $1 trillion of capital expenditures in the United States over the next five years to build and facilitate new data centers.”

Blackstone knows about trillions. It is the world’s largest alternative asset manager, with more than $1 trillion in assets under management. It owns and operates QTS Data Centers , and invested in many other projects and companies, with a total portfolio of $55 billion of data centers, with over $70 billion in prospective pipeline development.

It’s not just a bet on the future, either. It’s generating returns now. “Our data center platform was the single largest driver of appreciation in our real estate and infrastructure businesses and for the firm overall in the second quarter,” said Michael Chae, Chief Financial Officer of Blackstone, in an earnings call .

Will 2025 Be the Year of the Data Center?

Firms such as Blackstone have plenty of company, according to CBRE’s annual investor sentiment survey . “Data centers continue to benefit from greater investment, particularly from new investors,” CBRE reports. “Ninety-seven percent of respondents to this year’s survey, many of whom are the world’s largest institutional real estate investors, plan to increase their capital deployment in the data center sector this year.”

Some examples of that optimism:  

• “We believe that 2025 will be the ‘Year of the Data Center’ and that we are on the cusp of transitioning from a hype cycle into an industrial-driven build cycle,” writes David Cahn at Sequoia Capital .
• “Two megatrends are driving the demand for data center capacity and will continue doing so in the years to come: organizations migrating their data from on-site servers into the cloud and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI),” writes KKR, which has backed that thesis through acquisitions of CyrusOne and CoolIT Technologies.
• “ Soaring GPU demand is rippling across the global economy, but no area has been more affected than data centers,” says the analyst team at Jefferies . “Over the past two years, data center demand has skyrocketed, surging to over 30% annual growth in some key markets.”

Hyperscale operators remain confident in their current level of infrastructure spending, and see limited risk in overbuilding.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that he would "rather risk building capacity before it is needed, rather than too late, given the long lead times for spinning up new infra projects."

“ We are at an early stage of what I view as a very transformative area in technology,” said Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google. “When we go through a curve like this, the risk of under-investing is dramatically greater than the risk of over-investing. Even if it turns out that we are over-investing, these (GPUs and data centers) are infrastructure which are widely useful for us.”

With $19 billion in capex last quarter, Microsoft has been making the largest investments in AI. CFO Amy Hood said about half of that was for servers (CPUs and GPUs) and half for data center capacity. That includes a growing reliance on data center developers. 

“We are constrained on AI capacity,” said Hood on the earnings call. “Because of that, we have signed up with third parties to help us as we are behind with some leases on AI capacity.”

At DCF we have been tracking the power constraints in key markets and resulting data center space crunch (see our 2024 forecast for more on this). Some analysts believe this reduces the risk of an AI bubble.  

“The pressing question is: Can supply keep up?” writes Jefferies. “Market constraints — including scarce raw materials, limited land, labor shortages, and construction bottlenecks — pose serious challenges. Most critically, power generation and grid capacity are lagging.”

While this may slow delivery timelines, in the long term there may be a silver lining for the planet.

“One beneficiary of the data center boom may be the global energy transition,” says Jefferies. “The growth in data centers is expected to help renewable power developers reduce risk by allowing them to form longer-term contracts at higher prices.”

“AI will catalyze an energy transformation,” predicts Sequoia Capital. “New solar construction, battery innovation, a resurgence in nuclear energy—these will be long-term effects of the AI wave.”

Will AI Deliver on its Promise? And When?

One prominent dissenter to the bull case is Goldman Sachs equity analyst Jim Covello.

“ My main concern is that the substantial cost to develop and run AI technology means that AI applications must solve extremely complex and important problems for enterprises to earn an appropriate return on investment (ROI),” Covello said in a Goldman Sachs research note . “What $1 trillion problem will AI solve? Replacing low-wage jobs with tremendously costly technology is basically the polar opposite of the prior technology transitions.”

Sequoia’s Cahn also perceives a gap between the revenue expectations implied by the AI infrastructure build-out and actual revenue growth in the AI ecosystem but says investors taking the long view will be rewarded.  

“A huge amount of economic value is going to be created by AI,” Cahn writes . “Speculative frenzies are part of technology, and so they are not something to be afraid of. Those who remain level-headed through this moment have the chance to build extremely important companies. … In reality, the road ahead is going to be a long one. It will have ups and downs. But almost certainly it will be worthwhile.”

And as KKR notes in its analysis, you still need to pick the right kinds of picks and shovels.

“Knowing how to value these investments is also critical,” write KKR’s Waldemar Szlezak and Andrew Peisch. “We have observed other investors acquiring legacy data centers that may no longer be suited for tomorrow’s computing needs or that may not have the power sources in place to support customer growth plans. It is important for data center players to be able to call on experts in areas such as real estate, energy, technology, policy, and climate issues to help identify and appropriately underwrite digital infrastructure investments.”

What if it takes longer for AI businesses use cases to emerge? Large-scale IT services cannot run without data centers, which are expensive to build. But the risk equation for data center development has changed dramatically since the dotcom bust era of the early 2000s, when service providers constructed entire multi-tenant facilities and then sought to fill them with customers, many of them startups.

In today’s supply-constrained market, most data center deals involve single-tenant projects that are fully leased to large tech companies with excellent credit, often before construction has begun. This pre-leasing reduces the risk for the developers and investors. If AI services take longer to gain traction, hyperscale customers might take longer to fill their data center space with servers.   

There’s Tension in Technology Timelines

The current discussion echoes similar discussions about cloud computing, and whether enterprises would ever feel comfortable moving workloads into the cloud. Those with good memories may recall  Larry Ellison’s rants about cloud hype , but it wasn’t long before cloud became a big business for Oracle.

Some industry veterans say skepticism is part of any major technology transition, as recently noted by Daniel Golding, Chief Technology Officer at Appleby Strategy Group.        

“Many of us in the infrastructure field had been anticipating this for some time,” Golding writes in an analysis on LinkedIn . “That’s because the AI hype cycle has been working overtime. NVIDIA’s leadership - and everyone else - has been extolling the world changing aspect of AI. And changing the world isn’t cheap - it's a hundreds of billions of dollars endeavor which will produce tens of trillions in returns … eventually.

“And therein lies the problem. The investment timeline for Goldman and for many of the private equity firms in the sector, is mismatched with the reality of paradigm-shifting technologies. The actual timeline for really transformative AI is 5 to 10 years, during which there will be a LOT of investment and a LOT of technological advancement, with accompanying shifts in our society and economy.

“The good news is, the hyperscalers won’t get cold feet quite so easily,” Golding concludes. “Goldman is the first and won’t be the last to have a shortfall of intestinal fortitude. But there are plenty of others who will take the risk and adjust their investment strategy accordingly.”

Keep pace with the fast-moving world of data centers and cloud computing by connecting with Data Center Frontier on  LinkedIn , following us on  X/Twitter  and  Facebook , and signing up for our weekly newsletters using the form below.

Rich Miller

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How to cite ChatGPT

Use discount code STYLEBLOG15 for 15% off APA Style print products with free shipping in the United States.

We, the APA Style team, are not robots. We can all pass a CAPTCHA test , and we know our roles in a Turing test . And, like so many nonrobot human beings this year, we’ve spent a fair amount of time reading, learning, and thinking about issues related to large language models, artificial intelligence (AI), AI-generated text, and specifically ChatGPT . We’ve also been gathering opinions and feedback about the use and citation of ChatGPT. Thank you to everyone who has contributed and shared ideas, opinions, research, and feedback.

In this post, I discuss situations where students and researchers use ChatGPT to create text and to facilitate their research, not to write the full text of their paper or manuscript. We know instructors have differing opinions about how or even whether students should use ChatGPT, and we’ll be continuing to collect feedback about instructor and student questions. As always, defer to instructor guidelines when writing student papers. For more about guidelines and policies about student and author use of ChatGPT, see the last section of this post.

Quoting or reproducing the text created by ChatGPT in your paper

If you’ve used ChatGPT or other AI tools in your research, describe how you used the tool in your Method section or in a comparable section of your paper. For literature reviews or other types of essays or response or reaction papers, you might describe how you used the tool in your introduction. In your text, provide the prompt you used and then any portion of the relevant text that was generated in response.

Unfortunately, the results of a ChatGPT “chat” are not retrievable by other readers, and although nonretrievable data or quotations in APA Style papers are usually cited as personal communications , with ChatGPT-generated text there is no person communicating. Quoting ChatGPT’s text from a chat session is therefore more like sharing an algorithm’s output; thus, credit the author of the algorithm with a reference list entry and the corresponding in-text citation.

When prompted with “Is the left brain right brain divide real or a metaphor?” the ChatGPT-generated text indicated that although the two brain hemispheres are somewhat specialized, “the notation that people can be characterized as ‘left-brained’ or ‘right-brained’ is considered to be an oversimplification and a popular myth” (OpenAI, 2023).

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat

You may also put the full text of long responses from ChatGPT in an appendix of your paper or in online supplemental materials, so readers have access to the exact text that was generated. It is particularly important to document the exact text created because ChatGPT will generate a unique response in each chat session, even if given the same prompt. If you create appendices or supplemental materials, remember that each should be called out at least once in the body of your APA Style paper.

When given a follow-up prompt of “What is a more accurate representation?” the ChatGPT-generated text indicated that “different brain regions work together to support various cognitive processes” and “the functional specialization of different regions can change in response to experience and environmental factors” (OpenAI, 2023; see Appendix A for the full transcript).

Creating a reference to ChatGPT or other AI models and software

The in-text citations and references above are adapted from the reference template for software in Section 10.10 of the Publication Manual (American Psychological Association, 2020, Chapter 10). Although here we focus on ChatGPT, because these guidelines are based on the software template, they can be adapted to note the use of other large language models (e.g., Bard), algorithms, and similar software.

The reference and in-text citations for ChatGPT are formatted as follows:

• Parenthetical citation: (OpenAI, 2023)
• Narrative citation: OpenAI (2023)

Let’s break that reference down and look at the four elements (author, date, title, and source):

Author: The author of the model is OpenAI.

Date: The date is the year of the version you used. Following the template in Section 10.10, you need to include only the year, not the exact date. The version number provides the specific date information a reader might need.

Title: The name of the model is “ChatGPT,” so that serves as the title and is italicized in your reference, as shown in the template. Although OpenAI labels unique iterations (i.e., ChatGPT-3, ChatGPT-4), they are using “ChatGPT” as the general name of the model, with updates identified with version numbers.

The version number is included after the title in parentheses. The format for the version number in ChatGPT references includes the date because that is how OpenAI is labeling the versions. Different large language models or software might use different version numbering; use the version number in the format the author or publisher provides, which may be a numbering system (e.g., Version 2.0) or other methods.

Bracketed text is used in references for additional descriptions when they are needed to help a reader understand what’s being cited. References for a number of common sources, such as journal articles and books, do not include bracketed descriptions, but things outside of the typical peer-reviewed system often do. In the case of a reference for ChatGPT, provide the descriptor “Large language model” in square brackets. OpenAI describes ChatGPT-4 as a “large multimodal model,” so that description may be provided instead if you are using ChatGPT-4. Later versions and software or models from other companies may need different descriptions, based on how the publishers describe the model. The goal of the bracketed text is to briefly describe the kind of model to your reader.

Source: When the publisher name and the author name are the same, do not repeat the publisher name in the source element of the reference, and move directly to the URL. This is the case for ChatGPT. The URL for ChatGPT is https://chat.openai.com/chat . For other models or products for which you may create a reference, use the URL that links as directly as possible to the source (i.e., the page where you can access the model, not the publisher’s homepage).

Other questions about citing ChatGPT

You may have noticed the confidence with which ChatGPT described the ideas of brain lateralization and how the brain operates, without citing any sources. I asked for a list of sources to support those claims and ChatGPT provided five references—four of which I was able to find online. The fifth does not seem to be a real article; the digital object identifier given for that reference belongs to a different article, and I was not able to find any article with the authors, date, title, and source details that ChatGPT provided. Authors using ChatGPT or similar AI tools for research should consider making this scrutiny of the primary sources a standard process. If the sources are real, accurate, and relevant, it may be better to read those original sources to learn from that research and paraphrase or quote from those articles, as applicable, than to use the model’s interpretation of them.

We’ve also received a number of other questions about ChatGPT. Should students be allowed to use it? What guidelines should instructors create for students using AI? Does using AI-generated text constitute plagiarism? Should authors who use ChatGPT credit ChatGPT or OpenAI in their byline? What are the copyright implications ?

On these questions, researchers, editors, instructors, and others are actively debating and creating parameters and guidelines. Many of you have sent us feedback, and we encourage you to continue to do so in the comments below. We will also study the policies and procedures being established by instructors, publishers, and academic institutions, with a goal of creating guidelines that reflect the many real-world applications of AI-generated text.

For questions about manuscript byline credit, plagiarism, and related ChatGPT and AI topics, the APA Style team is seeking the recommendations of APA Journals editors. APA Style guidelines based on those recommendations will be posted on this blog and on the APA Style site later this year.

Update: APA Journals has published policies on the use of generative AI in scholarly materials .

We, the APA Style team humans, appreciate your patience as we navigate these unique challenges and new ways of thinking about how authors, researchers, and students learn, write, and work with new technologies.

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

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