THE ART OF THE ARMS RACE
ARMS CONTROL IS DYING, and arms races are roaring back to life. Over the past two decades, key pillars of the superpower arms control regime erected during the Cold War have collapsed, one by one: the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and the Open Skies Treaty. The most important U.S.-Russian agreement that remains, New START, may become a casualty of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. China, meanwhile, is rapidly building up its conventional and nuclear forces as part of a push for dominance in the Pacific and beyond. Around the globe, emerging technologies are promising dramatic advances in military power.
Welcome to a world primed for arms races—a world in which tensions are sharp, the military balance is hotly contested, and there are ever fewer constraints on which kinds and what quantity of weapons great powers can wield. This new world will, in fact, be replete with challenges reminiscent of an earlier era of rivalry. To avoid disaster, the United States must relearn what it knew during the Cold War: how to arms-race well.
To be sure, arms races—in which two or more rivals compete to secure a favorable military balance—have an awful reputation. At best, they are viewed as a mindless accumulation of weapons or the product of a sinister military-industrial complex and, at worst, as a principal cause of spiraling tensions and cataclysmic war. “[T]he United States is piling up armaments which it well knows will never provide for its ultimate safety,” U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower told his National Security Council in 1956, according to a memo of the meeting. “We are piling up these armaments because we do not know what else to do.”
But arms-racing has unfairly gotten a bad name. As the
