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An arms race occurs when two or more groups compete in military superiority.[1] It consists of a competition between two or more states to have superior armed forces, concerning production of weapons, the growth of a military, and the aim of superior military technology.[2] Unlike a sporting race, which constitutes a specific event with winning interpretable as the outcome of a singular project, arms races constitute spiralling systems of on-going and potentially open-ended behavior.[3]
The existing scholarly literature is divided as to whether arms races correlate with war.[4] International-relations scholars explain arms races in terms of the security dilemma, engineering spiral models, states with revisionist aims, and deterrence models.[4][5][6]
For the purpose of this study an arms race is understood as the participation of two or more nation-states in apparently competitive or interactive increases in quantity or quality of war material and/or persons under arms.