Policy Components of Arms Competitions

The purpose of this paper is to suggest and justify a simple approach to arms competitions, wherein arms competitions are viewed as disaggregated competitions between pairs of weapons systems for the execution of mutually incompatible policy goals. This approach is derived from a decision theoretic model of armament choice, wherein military force level decision makers make tradeoffs between alternative strategies of weapons deployment for the achievement of national foreign policy objectives. Data representing a cross-section of the US and USSR military arsenals is employed in a quasi-first difference two stage least squares analysis to evidence the propositions of the model and this approach.