The Richardson theory of ‘arms races’: themes and variations

The first difficulty facing an enquiry into the Richardson theory, apart from the quirky and unconventional style of Richardson's own presentation of his ideas (and I am emphatically not referring to his use of mathematics), is to decide precisely what the theory refers to. Richardson seems first to formulate his model in terms of the relationship between the rate at which a state acquires additional armaments and the level or stock of armaments at that moment in time in its possession and that of its presumed, probable opponent. He does this, reasonably enough, by connecting the rate at which each state acquires armaments directly and positively to the level of its opponent's stock of armaments and negatively to its own, and to a term independent of the size of stocks.