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Most arms races have occurred in the modern era. One of the first arms races occurred in the pre- World War I era from the 1890s to 1914 where the five Great Power s of Europe ( Germany , Austria-Hungary , the Russian Empire , France , and the United Kingdom ) were locked in an all-out military buildup, ranging from land armies, Conscription , and Artillery to Battleship s and competition between each country's Mobilization speed. France reached a mobilization speed of just three days. At one point, it was estimated Germany could become fully war ready in only two days. Perhaps the best known arms race of this era was the naval one between the United Kingdom and the German Empire , during which the Royal Navy and the High Seas Fleet spent millions on the development and construction of Dreadnought s and other types of Warship s. One significant recent example was the race to develop more and better ). Carl Sagan once famously described the Overkill in this arms race with the analogy of "two men standing waist deep in gasoline; one with three matches, the other with five." The Soviet Union devoted their Command Economy to the arms race and with the deployment of the SS-18 in the late 1970s achieved first strike superiority. However, the strain of competition against the great spending power of the United States created enormous economic problems during Mikhail Gorbachev 's attempt at Konversiya , the transition to a consumer based, mixed economy, and hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union. The term "arms race" is used generically to describe any competition where there is no absolute goal, only the relative goal of staying ahead of the other competitors. Evolutionary Arms Race s are common occurrences, ''e.g.'' predators evolving more effective means to catch prey while their prey evolves more effective means of evasion. This is sometimes called the Red Queen effect. In addition to predators, Parasite s can force their hosts into an arms race. In technology, there are close analogues to the arms races between parasites and hosts, such as the arms race between Computer Virus writers and anti-virus software writers, or Spammers against Internet Service Provider s and E-mail software writers. Such analogies are not fully accurate as they describe situations where absolute, not necessarilly relative, gains are the important metric. Lewis Fry Richardson made an arms race model, trying to Retrodict World War I , where he showed how two countries would go to war if more money was spent in the arms race than in trade. There is an interesting economic idea here, but since the model was made after the war, it did not have the prophetic power it might have had. SEE ALSO I heart Kasey Khane |
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