User:Brian Tomasik/sandbox/ArmsRace

Section to add to Arms race:

Causes

Ted Greenwood identifies four factors that motivate nations to invest in better military technology:

1. Improving effectiveness of weapons systems: making them cheaper, more powerful, require less manual operation, etc.
2. Staying ahead of opponents: If you expect another country might be developing a new technology, you want to design countermeasures to it to avoid being put at risk. This is the most central part of an arms race. Greenwood cites examples like the US improving survivability of its satellites against a Soviet anti-satellite system and the Soviet Union developing ways around a US anti-ballistic missile system.
3. Prestige: Expensive investment in military technology demonstrates ones wealth and power and hence commands respect on the international scene. Similar reasons may motivate civilian space development, funding of high-energy physics, and so on.
4. Preserving stability: Sometimes technologies can actually reduce inclination to exchange blows in war. One reason is that improved monitoring allows for detecting an incoming attack, which enables the attacked country to launch a retaliatory strike; if this weren't possible, countries would be more inclined toward preemption to ensure that they weren't simply wiped out with no chance to respond. Similarly, verification technology is important for making arms-limitation agreements possible.

He goes on to elaborate specific factors why military development is hard to restrain:

1. The US military agencies have a vested interested in promoting the technologies, as do defense companies, and usually these proposals are approved by Congress without many changes. That said, Greenwood warns readers not to assume this is the primary reason for continued arms innovation; it wouldn't persist were there not a strong consensus for it among other elites.
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