Policy Components of Arms Competition

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.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 12

Keywords: arms, arms competition, armament choice, foreign policy, United States, USSR

JEL Classification: C31, C70, D78, H56

Accepted Paper Series