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Abstract: Until recently, the "arms race" locution designates a competition between two or more actors to achieve military superiority. Each actor was making efforts to have a larger army, to produce many weapons or to develop superior military technology. Currently, the arms race is manifested as a process of action-reaction developed into a continuous spiral that ends when no more can be supported by the available resources. Most cases in the years after the World War II showed that this arms race represents the most obvious manifestation of "the spiral of insecurity".
Keywords: arms race, military development, security policies, use of resources.
When the state makes efforts to be able to defend itself, to ensure security, it either get too much (may initiate aggression, which threatens other states) or too little (other countries feeling threatened will increase their military power, which will increase insecurity to the first state). In other words, the action of military development of an actor is perceived by other actors as threat and, therefore, they seek themselves to increase their military power as reaction to counterbalance the action of the other, which will lead to accumulation of more military power of the former actor. This process can go on indefinitely in a continuous spiral.
However, the action of a state to enhance security by extending its military power can lead concomitantly to the security reducing of its rivals. Therefore, the need for security of a state often involves its tendency to keep potential rivals at a level of acceptable military development.
The reverse of such actions will undoubtedly increase the adversaries' efforts to strengthen their military power and therefore threaten even more the security of the respective state. The mathematical model developed by Richardson1, in the early 60s, shows that the rate of increase in the level of armaments of each party involved in a certain period of time, it is simply a function that depends on the rate of increase in armaments of the rivals in the previous period. Moreover, the involved actors tend to prepare for the worst case scenario of aggression. So, to feel safe, they will develop/acquire so many weapons as they allow by both financial and material resources at their disposal, as well as...