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.