One cannot understand the international politics of arms control without taking into account the domestic political forces which have a stake in maintaining large defence expenditure. Analyse these force which help in promoting international arms races. (1993)
The classical explanation of arms races is action–reaction: Lewis Fry Richardson modelled each state’s armament as a response to its rival’s, the arms-race face of the security dilemma. The statement adds a second engine located inside the arming state. In his farewell address of January 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex: a permanent arms sector that generates political weight whether or not the external threat justifies it.
The domestic forces
- Defence industry. Contractors hold concentrated, organised interests in continuing procurement, against a diffuse public interest in restraint, the collective-action asymmetry Mancur Olson described. Lobbying, campaign finance and the “revolving door” between services, ministries and firms blur the line between public need and private profit.
- Legislators and constituencies. Production is spread across many electoral districts, so cancelling a weapon becomes a local employment decision in dozens of places, which explains why programmes outlive their rationale.
- Military bureaucracy and inter-service rivalry. Graham T. Allison’s bureaucratic politics model (Essence of Decision, 1971) shows budgets as the real object of contest. Each service claims a share of new missions, and the American triad is partly a bureaucratic settlement.
- Scientific and technological establishment. Laboratories develop what is possible and a mission is found afterwards; multiple warheads, missile defence and hypersonics began this way. Mary Kaldor’s The Baroque Arsenal (1981) described ever costlier refinements of the same systems.
- Threat inflation. Intelligence and defence analysts pay a career price for underestimating an adversary but none for overestimating one, so assessments tilt to the worst case; the “missile gap” of 1960 was the classic instance.
- Political leaders and ideology. Appearing strong wins elections, and Jack Snyder’s Myths of Empire (1991) shows how coalitions of interest groups logroll expansionist policies.
- Structural readings. C. Wright Mills’s power elite (1956) fused corporate, military and political leadership; Marxists such as Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy saw military spending as a prop for monopoly capitalism; Dieter Senghaas called arms dynamics “autistic”, driven more by internal momentum than by the rival’s moves.
How they shape arms control
- Agreements are bought with new programmes: the 1963 Partial Test Ban came with military “safeguards” for continued underground testing, and the 2010 New START ratification with commitments to fund nuclear modernisation.
- Domestic coalitions stall or kill treaties: the US Senate rejected the CTBT in 1999.
- Current evidence. World military spending reached a record $2,887 billion in 2025 (SIPRI); the US Congressional Budget Office projects $946 billion for American nuclear forces in 2025–34; all nine nuclear states are modernising at once, which action–reaction alone cannot explain.
- India. Itty Abraham (1992) described a “strategic enclave” of civilian scientists who shaped military technology, and Scott D. Sagan’s domestic-politics model (1996) reads the 1974 test partly through that establishment. Today India, the fifth-largest spender at $92.1 billion, ties defence to Atmanirbhar Bharat and exports.
Limits of the argument
Domestic forces amplify rather than create races. Spending fell sharply after the Cold War despite industrial resistance, and European rearmament (NATO’s 5% target for 2035) answers a real Russian threat; realists keep external danger as the first cause.
Conclusion
Arms races have two engines: external rivalry and a domestic political economy with a stake in permanent armament. Arms control succeeds only when it addresses both, through transparency, legislative oversight, conversion of defence industry and treaties that reassure domestic as well as foreign constituencies.