Arms race

An arms race occurs when two or more groups compete in military superiority. It consists of a competition between two or more states to have superior armed forces, concerning production of weapons, the growth of a military, and the aim of superior military technology. Unlike a sporting race, which constitutes a specific event with winning interpretable as the outcome of a singular project, arms races constitute spiralling systems of on-going and potentially open-ended behavior. The existing scholarly literature is divided as to whether arms races correlate with war. International-relations scholars explain arms races in terms of the security dilemma, engineering spiral models, states with revisionist aims, and deterrence models. Anglo-German naval arms raceWorld War I naval arms race (disambiguation) and South American dreadnought race From 1897 to 1914, a naval arms race between the United Kingdom and Germany took place. British concern about rapid increase in German naval power resulted in a costly building competition of Dreadnought-class ships. This tense arms race lasted until 1914, when the war broke out. After the war, a new arms race developed among the victorious Allies, which was temporarily ended by the Washington Naval Treaty. In addition to the British and Germans, contemporaneous but smaller naval arms races also broke out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire; the Ottomans and Greece; France and Italy; the United States and Japan in the 1930s; and Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Nuclear arms race This contest of the advancement of offensive nuclear capabilities occurred during the Cold War, an intense period between the Soviet Union and the United States and some other countries. This was one of the main causes that began the Cold War, and perceived advantages of the adversary by both sides (such as the "missile gap" and "bomber gap") led to large spending on armaments and the stockpiling of vast nuclear arsenals. Proxy wars were fought all over the world (e.g.