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The term arms race in its original usage describes a competition between two or more parties for military supremacy. Each party competes to produce larger numbers of weapons, greater armies, or superior military technology in a technological escalation.

Perhaps the most prominent instance of such a competition was the rapid development by the United States and the Soviet Union of more and better nuclear weapons during the Cold War (see: nuclear arms race). The Soviet Union devoted their command economy to the arms race and, with the deployment of the SS-18 in the late 1970s, achieved first strike parity. However, the strain of competition against the great spending power of the United States created enormous economic problems during Mikhail Gorbachev's attempt at konversiya, the transition to a consumer based, mixed economy, and hastened the collapse of The Soviet Union. Because the two powers were competing with one another instead of aiming for a predefined goal, both nations soon acquired a huge capacity for overkill, famously described by Carl Sagan with the analogy of "two men standing waist deep in gasoline; one with three matches, the other with five."

Another prime example of an arms race is during the period leading up to World War I. Several European nations competed to build up their military capacities, and this arms race is thought to be one of the many causes of the war.

Lewis Fry Richardson made an arms race model, trying to retrodict World War I, where he showed how two countries would go to war if more money was spent in the arms race than in trade.

More generically, the term "arms race" is also used to describe any competition where there is no absolute goal, only the relative goal of staying ahead of the other competitors. Evolutionary arms races is predators evolving more effective means to catch prey while their prey evolves more effective means of evasion. This is sometimes called the Red Queen effect. In addition to predators, parasites can force their hosts into an arms race.

In technology, there are close analogues to the arms races between parasites and hosts, such as the arms race between computer virus writers and anti-virus software writers, or spammers against Internet Service Providers and E-mail software writers.

• Cold War
• Missile Technology Control Regime
• Nuclear arms race
• Space race
• HMS Dreadnought (1906)
• Dreadnought (book)