Even with the end of the Cold War, the question, Were the United States and the
Soviet Union engaged in an action-reaction arms race? remains important and controversial.
The bulk of empirical mathematical arms race research suggests that the US and USSR were
not so engaged. Indeed, most such research into the matter suggests that US arms acquisitions
were driven overwhelmingly by internal or domestic forces, as were Soviet arms acquisitions.
Given the longstanding political, economic and military rivalry, between the US and USSR,
the finding that they were not engaged in an arms race is perplexing. This is particularly so
with respect to nuclear weapons acquisitions. Orthodox nuclear deterrence theory clearly
posits that the attempt by each side to maintain a balance of nuclear forces with the other and
hence deter the other from launching a first-strike should result in an action-reaction nuclear
arms race. Why, then, does the overwhelming mass of quantitative research suggest that the
opposite was true, in practice, in the US-Soviet case?
The problem, in part, has been that researchers have been using underspecified
mathematical models of action-reaction arms race interaction. The most famous of these
models is Richardson’s 1960 action-reaction model. Researchers have long been aware that
Richardson’s model is underspecified and as such that it may not be capable of revealing the
true nature of US-Soviet military interaction. Since the late 1960s, arms race researchers have attempted to move beyond Richardson’s simple arms race specification. Several new
approaches to arms race analysis have subsequently emerged: the game theoretic approach,
the economic (stock adjustment) approach, and the expectations (adaptive, extrapolative, and
rational) approach. Taken individually, neither of these approaches has, however, yielded
much fruit.
In this dissertation, the game, stock adjustment, and rational expectations approaches
were combined for the first time into a single, more comprehensive, analytical approach and
a new action-reaction arms race model was derived, which we have named the GSR Model.
In addition, it was argued that a new approach was needed for testing arms race models.
Arms races are generally seen as competitions of total armed versus total armed might. Arms
race models have, accordingly, been tested against data on states’ annual military
expenditures. We argued instead that an arms race is made of several subraces, the object of
each subrace being a specific weapons system and a specific counter weapons system,
deployed by an opponent and designed to thwart the former’s political and military effect.
Models should, then, be tested for each subrace in a given arms race, that is, against data on
weapons system-counter weapons system deployment levels. Time frames for the analysis of a given weapons system-counter weapons system competition should be set to accord with
the period in which those systems were dominant in the military calculations of the
competing states.
In effect, we have specified an alternative approach to mathematical arms race
analysis, the micro approach to mathematical arms race analysis. The GSR Model was tested
against data on annual US and Soviet strategic nuclear warhead deployment levels,
— specifically, those onboard ICBMs (1960-71) and submarines (1972-87). The GSR model was
also tested against annual US-Soviet aggregate strategic nuclear warhead deployment data
(ICBM, SLBM and bomber based totals), 1967-84. Estimates of the GSR model suggest that
the US and USSR were in fact engaged in an action-reaction arms race over submarine
launched nuclear warheads. Regression analysis also indicates that the US and USSR strongly
interacted, asymmetrically, over ICBM based nuclear warheads. There appears to have been
no interaction over aggregate warhead deployments. Finally, the implications of these findings
for the maintenance of a stable nuclear deterrent were discussed. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/3230 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Aboughoushe, Adam |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 4289730 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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