Policy Components of Arms Competition

This report suggests and justifies a simple approach to arms competitions, wherein arms competitions are viewed as disaggregated competitions 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 squares analysis to provide evidence for the propositions of the model and this approach.