| Publication |
2010.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Arms races, in which competitors attempt to improve their military power in relation to each other, vary in the competitors' propensity to diplomatically seek arms restraint. To assist empirical understanding of the incidence of arms restraint, this essay compares the Soviet-American nuclear arms competition in which such restraint was ample and long-standing, with a 19th-century Anglo-French naval competition in which arms diplomacy was completely absent. In a preliminary probe, three independent variables are applied to explain this variance, each logically linked to arms restraint and to self-help: (1) use or non-use of force equivalence to compare military forces; (2) use or non-use of national intelligence to reduce strategic uncertainty; and (3) linkage or non-linkage of the competition with the rival's overall diplomatic relationship. The conclusion is that only the last of these variables accounts significantly for the differences in diplomatic effort; the naval rivalry was largely disconnected from the Anglo-French geopolitical relationship, while the superpower competition was strongly linked to the larger superpower diplomatic framework. This conclusion is applied to the contemporary North Korean-American and Pakistan-India arms competitions.
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