Policy Components of Arms Competition
American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 385-406, August 1983
12 Pages Posted: 23 Jul 2007
Abstract
This report suggests and justifies a simple approach to arms competitions, wherein arms competitions are viewed as disaggregated competition between pairs of weapons systems for executing mutually incompatible policy goals. This approach is derived from a decision theoretic model of armament choice, in which military decision makers make trade-offs between alternative strategies of weapons deployment to achieve national foreign policy objectives. Data representing a cross section of the U.S. and USSR military arsenals are employed in a quasi first-difference two-stage least squared analysis to provide evidence for the propositions of the model and this approach.
Keywords: arms, arms competition, armament choice, foreign policy, United States, USSR
JEL Classification: C31, C70, D78, H56
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation