essay based on arms race

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 16, 2023 | Original: October 14, 2009

An arms race occurs when two or more countries increase the size and quality of military resources to gain military and political superiority over one another. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union is perhaps the largest and most expensive arms race in history; however, others have occurred, often with dire consequences. Whether an arms race increases or decreases the risk of war remains debatable: some analysts agree with Sir Edward Grey , Britain's foreign secretary at the start of World War I , who stated "The moral is obvious; it is that great armaments lead inevitably to war."

Dreadnought Arms Race

With the Industrial Revolution came new weaponry, including vastly improved warships. In the late nineteenth century, France and Russia built powerful armies and challenged the spread of British colonialism. In response, Great Britain shored up its Royal Navy to control the seas.

Britain managed to work out its arms race with France and Russia with two separate treaties. But Germany had also drastically increased its military budget and might, building a large navy to contest Britain’s naval dominance in hopes of becoming a world power.

In turn, Britain further expanded the Royal Navy and built more advanced and powerful battlecruisers, including the 1906 HMS Dreadnought , a technically advanced type of warship that set the standard for naval architecture.

Not to be outdone, Germany produced its own fleet of dreadnought-class warships, and the standoff continued with both sides fearing a naval attack from the other and building bigger and better ships.

Germany couldn’t keep up, however, and Britain won the so-called Anglo-German Arms Race . The conflict didn’t cause World War I, but it did help to increase distrust and tensions between Germany, Britain and other European powers.

Arms Control Efforts Fail

After World War I, many countries showed an interest in arms control. President Woodrow Wilson led the way by making it a key point in his famous 1918 Fourteen Points speech, wherein he laid out his vision for postwar peace.

At the Washington Naval Conference (1921-1922), the United States, Britain and Japan signed a treaty to restrict arms, but in the mid-1930s Japan chose not to renew the agreement. Moreover, Germany violated the Treaty of Versailles and began to rearm.

This started a new arms race in Europe between Germany, France and Britain—and in the Pacific between Japan and the United States—which continued into World War II .

Nuclear Arms Race

Though the United States and the Soviet Union were tentative allies during World War II, their alliance soured after Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945.

The United States cast a wary eye over the Soviet Union’s quest for world dominance as they expanded their power and influence over Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union resented the United States’ geopolitical interference and America’s own arms buildup.

Further fueling the flame of distrust, the United States didn’t tell the Soviet Union they planned to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, although the United States informed them they had created such a bomb.

To help discourage Soviet communist expansion, the United States built more atomic weaponry. But in 1949, the Soviets tested their own atomic bomb, and the Cold War nuclear arms race was on.

The United States responded in 1952 by testing the highly destructive hydrogen “superbomb,” and the Soviet Union followed suit in 1953. Four years later, both countries tested their first intercontinental ballistic missiles and the arms race rose to a terrifying new level.

Cold War Arms Race Heads to Space

The Soviet’s launch of the first Sputnik satellite on October 4, 1957, stunned and concerned the United States and the rest of the world, as it took the Cold War arms race soon became the Space Race .

President Dwight D. Eisenhower tried to tone down the rhetoric over the success of the launch, while he streamed federal funds into the U.S. space program to prevent being left behind.

After a series of mishaps and failures, the United States successfully launched its first satellite into space on January 31, 1958, and the Space Race continued as both countries researched new technology to create more powerful weapons and surveillance technologies.

Missile Gap

Throughout the 1950s, the United States became convinced that the Soviet Union had better missile capability that, if launched, could not be defended against. This theory, known as the Missile Gap, was eventually disproved by the CIA but not before causing grave concern to U.S. officials.

Many politicians used the Missile Gap as a talking point in the 1960 presidential election. Yet, in fact, U.S. missile power was superior to that of the Soviet Union at the time. Over the next three decades, however, both countries grew their arsenals to well over 10,000 warheads.

Cuban Missile Crisis

The Cold War arms race came to a tipping point in 1962 after the John F. Kennedy administration’s failed attempt to overthrow Cuba’s premier Fidel Castro , and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev implemented a secret agreement to place Soviet warheads in Cuba to deter future coup attempts.

After U.S. intelligence observed missile bases under construction in Cuba, they enforced a blockade on the country and demanded the Soviet Union demolish the bases and remove any nuclear weapons. The tense Cuban Missile Crisis standoff ensued and came to a head as Kennedy and Khrushchev exchanged letters and made demands.

The crisis ended peacefully; however, both sides and the American public had fearfully braced for nuclear war and began to question the need for weapons that guaranteed “mutually assured destruction.”

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Arms Races Continue

The Cold War ended in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall . But years earlier, in 1987, the United States and the Soviet Union had signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) to limit the scope and reach of all types of missiles.

Other treaties such as the START 1 treaty in 1991 and the New START treaty in 2011 aimed to further reduce both nations’ ballistic weapons capabilities.

The United States withdrew from the INF treaty in 2019, however, believing that Russia was non-compliant. Though the Cold War between the United States and Russia is over, many argue the arms race is not.

Other countries have beefed up their military might and are in a modern-day arms race or poised to enter one, including India and Pakistan, North Korea and South Korea , and Iran and China .

Herman, Steve. US Leaves INF Treaty, Says Russia ‘Solely Responsible.’ VOA. Hundley, Tom. Pakistan and India: The Real Nuclear Challenge. Pulitzer Center. Sputnik, 1957. U.S. Department of State: Office of the Historian. The Reader’s Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

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The Cold War arms race: a dangerous game of brinksmanship

The Cold War was a time of great political tension, fear, and paranoia, marked by a fierce competition between two superpowers - the United States and the Soviet Union.

At the center of this rivalry was the arms race, a race to build the most advanced and destructive weapons.

The two sides poured billions of dollars into research and development, pushing the limits of military technology and engaging in a dangerous game of brinksmanship. 

What was the 'arms race'?

The arms race was a period of intense competition between two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, during the Cold War.

It was a competition to build up military capabilities, particularly in nuclear weapons and delivery systems, as both sides sought to maintain a balance of power.

This competition led to a massive buildup of nuclear arsenals, with both sides developing increasingly powerful and sophisticated weapons.

The arms race also extended to other areas of military technology, including tanks, aircraft, and other weapons systems. 

What caused this competition?

The arms race was primarily caused by the intense political and ideological rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Both sides saw themselves as competing for global dominance, and military power was seen as a key tool in achieving that dominance.

The arms race was also fueled by a deep sense of mistrust and suspicion, with both sides believing that the other was seeking to gain an advantage militarily.

The development of nuclear weapons by both the United States and the Soviet Union also contributed to the arms race, as each side sought to maintain a balance of power in order to deter the other from launching a nuclear attack. 

How it all began

The historical background to the arms race can be traced back to the aftermath of World War II, which left the United States and the Soviet Union as the two dominant superpowers in the world.

The end of the war marked the beginning of a new era of international relations, characterized by intense political and ideological competition between the two sides.

The United States and the Soviet Union had different visions for the post-war world, with the US advocating for capitalism and democracy, while the Soviet Union promoted communism and socialism.

Tensions between the two sides quickly escalated, with each side viewing the other as a threat to its own security and way of life.

The development of nuclear weapons in the 1940s added a new dimension to the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The US had developed the atomic bomb during the war, and in 1949 the Soviet Union successfully tested its own atomic bomb.

This marked the beginning of a new era in which both sides sought to develop increasingly powerful and sophisticated nuclear weapons in order to maintain a balance of power.

The increasing investment by both sides

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the arms race escalated as both sides developed ever more advanced nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

The United States developed the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), a long-range missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead anywhere in the world.

The Soviet Union responded by developing its own ICBMs, and also built a large fleet of nuclear submarines capable of launching missiles from underwater.

The arms race also extended to other areas of military technology. Both sides developed new aircraft, tanks, and other weapons systems, each trying to gain an advantage over the other.

The United States and its NATO allies built up a large military presence in Europe, while the Soviet Union maintained a large standing army and deployed troops in various parts of the world.

How it all came to an end

The arms race had a profound impact on both sides. The United States and Soviet Union spent billions of dollars on military research and development, diverting resources away from other areas such as education, healthcare, and social welfare.

The constant threat of nuclear war also created a climate of fear and anxiety, as people on both sides of the Iron Curtain lived with the constant possibility of a catastrophic global conflict.

In the 1980s, the arms race reached its peak as the United States and Soviet Union built up their nuclear arsenals to unprecedented levels.

However, the enormous cost of maintaining these arsenals, coupled with the growing recognition of the dangers of nuclear war, eventually led to a shift in priorities.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the United States and Soviet Union began to negotiate arms control agreements, culminating in the signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) in 1991.

Implications for the modern world

The arms race during the Cold War was a defining feature of the era, shaping international relations and global politics for decades.

While it had a profound impact on both the United States and Soviet Union, it also had broader implications for the world as a whole, raising questions about the role of military power in international affairs and the importance of diplomacy and arms control in preventing conflict.

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9 9 The Development of the Arms Race and How We Think About It

• Published: December 2012
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This chapter addresses the development of the arms race and how we think about it. It consists of three parts. In part one, the author argues that there is an emerging consensus among the students of arms races on three important points: arms races are caused primarily by inter-state rivalry, are not self-sustained processes immune to political direction, and cannot be either sufficient or necessary causes of war. Part two is devoted to the questions of whether the Cold War was essentially an arms race and, if not, what the US-Soviet military competition was actually about. Finally, in part three, the apparent fading role of arms races in the post-Cold War era is discussed. It is argued that the picture is probably not as bright as it appears to be because inter-state rivalry may no longer be the crucial factor to look for as far as arms races is concerned.

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Article contents

Arms races: an assessment of conceptual and theoretical challenges.

• Toby J. Rider Toby J. Rider Department of Political Science, Texas Tech University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.528
• Published online: 27 July 2017

An “arms race” is a competition over the quality or quantity of military capabilities between states in the international system. The arms race phenomenon has received considerable attention from scholars over many decades because of the ubiquity, throughout history, of states building arms as a means of deterring enemies, but disagreement persists over whether that policy is effective at avoiding war.

The Latin phrase si vis pacem, para bellum , meaning “if you want peace, prepare for war,” dates back to the Roman Empire but the sentiment is likely much older. That states should rapidly build up their militaries in the face of potential threats is a common thread that runs through much of the modern international relations scholarship influenced by realism and deterrence theory. Meeting force with force, the logic went, was the only way to ensure the security or survival of the sovereign state. These states faced a paradox, however, best articulated by the “security dilemma.” Anything a state does in the name of defense, like a rapid military buildup, decreases the security of other states and will be viewed with hostile intent. This set up a debate over competing expectations regarding the relationship between arms races and war (peace). On one hand, deterrence theory posits that rapid arming is necessary to raise the cost of an adversary attacking and, consequently, preserves peace. On the other hand, the spiral model argues that the reality of the security dilemma means that arming produces mistrust, hostility and, thus, increases the likelihood of war. Scholars set out to test these competing hypotheses using large data sets and statistical techniques, but there was widespread disagreement on how to measure arms races, appropriate research design, and the statistical findings were somewhat mixed.

Critics of this approach to studying arms races note a number of important weaknesses. First, scholars primarily focus on the consequences of arms races—whether they lead to war or peace—at the expense of understanding the causes. Those who advance this position believe that a theory of arms race onset might well inform our understanding of their consequences. Second, security dilemma, taken as the primary motivation for arms races, suffers from significant logical flaws. Third, assessment of the arms race-war relationship consists of comparative theory tests of deterrence theory and spiral model, yet these ideas are underdeveloped and expectations oversimplified. More recently, scholarship has shifted the focus from the consequences of arms races to developing theories and empirical tests of their causes. These efforts have been informed by insights from bargaining models of war, and their application to this context holds promise for better future understanding of both the causes and consequences of arms races.

• security dilemma
• spiral model
• deterrence theory
• uncertainty
• interstate war
• empirical international relations theory

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Arms Races

Introduction, general overviews.

• General Quantitative Studies
• Modeling the Causes of Arms Races
• Arms Races as Cause of War
• World War I
• Interwar Period
• Nuclear Arms Race
• Contemporary and Emerging Arms Races

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Arms Races by David Atkinson LAST REVIEWED: 02 March 2011 LAST MODIFIED: 02 March 2011 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199743292-0002

Arms races are an abiding feature of international relations. Despite the subject’s apparent straightforwardness, however, the scholarship has yet to produce one universally accepted definition. At the most basic level, scholars agree that an arms race is an intense armaments competition between two or more rival states, which can manifest itself either qualitatively (technological advancements) or quantitatively (numerical superiority), and which may or may not result in war. There are also unresolved debates concerning the relative influence of domestic or international factors, and disagreement over whether arms races constitute an effective deterrent or actually instigate interstate violence. In the broadest sense, arms race scholars generally investigate how, why, and under what circumstances arms races develop, and with what consequences. Much of the scholarship further investigates how arms races can be precluded, managed, measured, and resolved. The subject is resolutely interdisciplinary, and this is both its strength and its weakness. Researchers from international relations, political science, economics, history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and international law have all contributed to a vibrant and often profitable debate. Too often, however, scholars do not cross interdisciplinary boundaries to engage with one another. The scale, scope, and complexity of the literature will therefore excite some new researchers, and frustrate and bewilder others. Its quantitative and empirical orientation will also inhibit uninitiated undergraduate and graduate students.

The study of arms races can be a complicated and abstruse topic, especially for nonexperts, but a number of general overviews provide insights that will benefit both the novice and the specialist. Hammond 1993 is the most accessible, thorough, and broad introductory survey. It is ideally suited for undergraduate and graduate students. Glaser 2000 provides another extremely useful overview of the subject and suggests topics for future research. Downs 1991 and Buzan and Herring 1998 will prove equally comprehensible to new researchers, as they simplify complicated ideas and offer insightful critiques of the literature from which all scholars will profit. Huntington 1958 is essential reading for all students of arms races, and its straightforward style is particularly appealing. Jervis 1976 is another classic study with significant findings for arms-race theorists. It provides an especially eloquent analysis of deterrence and spiral theory. Bull 1987 is a collection of the author’s most influential and important essays on the subject and will also help to orient new researchers. Finally, Isard 1988 is a must-read for quantitative scholars in the peace-science and conflict-resolution field, although it is not for the inexperienced researcher.

Bull, Hedley. Hedley Bull on Arms Control . Edited by Robert O’Neill and David N. Schwartz. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987.

This collection of Bull’s important writings on nuclear arms race and arms control charts his intellectual development. All scholars of the subject must come to terms with Bull’s insights; this is a good place to start.

Buzan, Barry, and Eric Herring. The Arms Dynamic in World Politics . Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998.

This extremely useful and updated primer on arms races addresses the role of technological revolutions, especially weapons of mass destruction. Very good on deterrence, with effective, clear outlines of opposing models, especially external factors (action-reaction models) and internal factors (domestic-structure model). Suitable for undergraduate and graduate students.

Downs, George W. “Arms Races and War.” In Behavior, Society, and Nuclear War . Vol. 2. Edited by Philip E. Tetlock, Jo L. Husbands, Robert Jervis, Paul C. Stern, and Charles Tilly, 73–109. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

This essential introduction to the question of whether arms races lead to war provides a detailed survey and analysis of this literature, highlights ongoing debates, and pinpoints theoretical and methodological shortcomings. Downs rightly calls for greater intermethodological dialogue.

Glaser, Charles L. “The Causes and Consequences of Arms Races.” Annual Review of Political Science 3 (June 2000): 251–276.

DOI: 10.1146/annurev.polisci.3.1.251

A valuable review of the arms-race literature, especially concerned with the question of arms races and war. Argues that the literature overemphasizes external factors; scholarship requires deeper analysis of internal causes. Assesses positive and negative consequences of arms races and concludes that more research is needed on when states should rationally engage in arms races.

Hammond, Grant T. Plowshares into Swords: Arms Races in International Politics, 1840–1991 . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993.

The most accessible, wide-ranging, and useful introductory survey, clearly written and organized, taking a chronological and thematic approach. Deftly explores definitions, causes, and implications. Helpful bibliography for further research. Highly recommended for beginning researchers.

Huntington, Samuel P. “Arms Races: Prerequisites and Results.” Public Policy 8.1 (1958): 41–86.

One of the first systematic studies, this posits an inverse relationship between arms-race length and probability of war. Longer arms races tend to have a stabilizing influence on international politics; quantitative arms races are more likely to result in war than qualitative ones. Essential reading for arms-races scholars of any level.

Isard, Walter. Arms Races, Arms Control, and Conflict Analysis: Contributions from Peace Science and Peace Economics . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

An important, broad collection of interdisciplinary essays, offering a useful survey of various cognitive, behavioral, and “traditional” arms-race models, interpretations, and principles, with a heavy quantitative focus. Though occasionally opaque and challenging for novice researchers, it is especially significant for its seminal contribution to peace-science and conflict-management/resolution research.

Jervis, Robert. Perception and Misperception in International Politics . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976.

This is a classic in international-relations theory for its innovation and insights. It blends psychology and foreign policy and offers exceptional and lucid analysis of the debate between deterrence theorists and spiral theorists. Uses historical examples as support.

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THE CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF ARMS RACES

This chapter reviews the literature on causes of arms races, their consequences , and when a state should build up arms and engage in an arms race if necessary. The literature tends to equate external causes with threats; the chapter argues for a broader understanding that includes all causes of rational arming behavior. Internal causes of arms races are then understood to be factors within the state that lead it to adopt suboptimal policies. Although the causes and consequences of arms races are usually dealt with separately, in fact they are closely connected. When a state engages in an arms race because this is its best option, the state is acting rationally, the causes of the arms race are external, and the arms race has no consequences of its own. In contrast, when a state arms because domestic interests have distorted its policy, the arms race produces negative consequences. Research on the consequences of arms races has been hindered by the lack of a fully developed theory of when a state should race; progress on defensive realism is helping to fill this gap.

Related Papers

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

Journal of Strategic Studies

William R. Thompson

Security Dialogue

Matthew Evangelista

Allan Anders Balsgaard

We analyze a dynamic arms race model where states decide whether to acquire arms or cooperate in each period. States prefer to cooperate when the adversary cooperates but fear that the adversary is an aggressive type who prefers to arm. Uncertainty about intentions gives rise to a fear of being left behind in the arms race. Baliga and Sjöström (2004, 2012) show that this fear can lead to an arms race through a negative spiral of mutually reinforcing, pessimistic expectations. We show how the destabilizing effect of the fear of being left behind is countered by a fear of setting off an arms race. Our model provides a competing explanation for the remarkable absence of widespread nuclear proliferation during the post-war period and offers a warning against adopting excessively pacifistic foreign policy doctrines. ∗Email: [email protected] ̇.

Keith Krause

The topic for this panel of the SIPRI Nobel Symposium deals with two distinct but related issues: the prospects for arms control after post-conflict peace settlements, and the challenges posed to the development of arms control and security-building mechanisms by sub-state or non-state actors.

Global Journal of Social Sciences

Abdulmajid M Na'inna

Historically, arms races generate a great deal of interest both in the academia and policy circles for a variety of reasons. They are widely believed to have significant consequences for states' security. In the debate over their consequences, one side holds that arms races increase the probability of war by undermining military stability and straining political relations. The opposing view holds that engaging in an arms race is often a state's best option for avoiding war when faced with an aggressive adversary. The 21 st Century is witnessing the return of arms race amongst states. Coupling with the advancements in technology, the menace of arms race in the 21st Century, therefore, if not curtailed could lead to war more devastating than witnessed in the last century. Using basic content analysis the study revealed that the 21 st Century arms races are mainly in the area of nuclear weapons, hypersonic missiles, missile defence, cyber-warfare, and space weaponisation. The arms races are prominently amongst the world"s great powers such as the United States of America, Russia, and China as well as developing states like Iran and North Korea. This study discovered that nuclear weapons are still at the forefront of arms race in the 21 st Century, despite efforts to reduce their role in global affairs and to negotiate further reductions in quantity. Also, states like the USA, China, and Russia are exploiting the advantage of speed and manoeuvrability to engage in arms race in hypersonic missiles. This has prompted nations to compete in the development of missile defences in order to counter the present missile threats. Furthermore, in anticipation for future warfare, nations such as the USA, China, and Russia are in arms race to weaponsise space by deploying space to space, earth to space and space to earth weapons, where appropriate. War in the 21 st Century could in turn lead to more human, material, and environmental casualties due to the latest advancement in technologies and modernisation of existing weapons and associated equipments. Consequently, measures are needed to ensure that arms races in the 21 st Century, if not eliminated, are reduced to the barest minimum in order to promote international peace and security. Renewed commitments on existing arms control measures, formulation of new arms control measures, and the complete elimination of nuclear weapons are the measures that could be considered.

IPRI journal (Print)

Sufian Ullah

Jacek Kugler

So much has been done in the name of nuclear deterrence, so much destructive power built by ourselves and the Russians that it may seem rather late in the day, not to say absurd, to wonder whether or not mutual deterrence really occurs and ask what evidence can be adduced to prove it. Yet such a question may be essential

David Kinsella

The acquisition and use of military power are perhaps the most studied subjects in the field of international relations, mainly because they have been common occurrences throughout history. It is surprising, then, that the concepts of militar­ ism and militarization are not sufficiently well defined to command a consensus among scholars as to their meaning, let alone their causes and consequences. And as other chapters in this volume clearly document, militarism and militari­ zation are concepts that are relevant to social relations in realms other than formal inter­ state relations, which has made conceptual clarity that much more difficult to achieve. But my focus in this chapter is indeed inter­ state relations, with special attention to the impact of the global arms trade on the militarization of developing states and on those states’ use of military force – behaviour that may, in some cases, derive from state policies fairly described as outgrowths of militarism. The notion tha...

Ernest Yanarella

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Strategy and Arms Races: The Case of the Great War

Antulio j. echevarria ii.

British Mark I male tank Somme 25 September 1916 Ernest Brooks, via Wikimedia Commons

The centennial of 1914 has given rise to a great many publications, some insightful, some less so concerning the causes and consequences of the First World War. It has also renewed the perpetual debate over the value of history for present-day soldiers and diplomats. Can an understanding of what really happened in the run up to 1914 help us avoid a similar catastrophe a century later? One answer is a loud and unequivocal no: history holds few, if any, lessons because the conditions of the past will never be replicated to the degree necessary to make those lessons applicable again. The proverbial “devil is in the details,” and the nature of those details makes it unwise to transfer insights from one time and place to another. It is not easy to “get history right” in any case; we are, one hundred years later, still correcting our understanding of what happened in 1914. So, how can we have any confidence in whatever history decides to teach us? The contrary answer is an equally vocal yes: some, perhaps most human knowledge is believed to be generalizable; entire academic disciplines are in fact founded on that assumption. History’s details notwithstanding, humans and their political, military, social, and economic institutions are said to have behaved in similar ways over time, and these generate continuities which can prove instructive. In other words, for proponents of this view, it is not necessary for all past conditions to be replicated, only those that matter. It is not even necessary for the next war to be yet another “Great War,” only that it be both sudden and avoidable.

Perhaps a more reasonable answer to the debate is both yes and no: neither devilish details nor virtuous continuities hold sway over the past; history is about both. It may well be a devilish virtue to know how to use one to improve our understanding of the other. In any case, human knowledge, whether drawn from the humanities or the sciences, has always been imperfect and has always required revision. Imperfect knowledge is probably the state of nature, and yet empires have risen and fallen on less. Nonetheless, the events of the past are too important, too dear in terms of the human suffering they inflicted, not to examine them. If, as Socrates reportedly said, the unexamined life is not worth living; then the examination of lives, our own and others’, has value, even if our conclusions are neither universal nor final.

One such “life” requiring closer examination is the phenomenon of an arms race, that is, a competition among rival powers to keep pace with, or surpass, one another militarily. The literature concerning such competitions is extensive, and much of it contends arms races take on “lives” of their own. They create a sense of urgency within political and military leaders, causing them to act in ways that are not always in their or their states’ best interests, while at the same time blinding these leaders to the full range of options available to them.[i] In some cases, arms races are said to exercise more “agency” than human actors, since they are the cause rather than the effect.

The Great War is viewed as one of the classic examples of this phenomenon. Germany’s two key decisions are said to have been driven by fear of falling behind the Entente in the armaments race then underway. The first of these decisions was to back Austria-Hungary fully with the infamous “blank check” during the July crisis; the second was to launch a “preemptive” attack against France in August 1914.[ii]

However, a closer look at some of history’s details suggests this arms race was driven by another force or cause, namely, the great powers’ use of the strategies of deterrence and coercion (or armed diplomacy) to intimidate or outmaneuver their rivals. Each of these strategies was a traditional and essential part of great power politics. In the thirty years or so before the outbreak of the First World War, these strategies, or rather the great powers’ use (or misuse) of them, caused the arms race to escalate at various times. Put differently, political and military leaders saw the arms buildups not just as threats or security dilemmas, but as opportunities; the arms race was as much a tool of policy, as was the potential or actual use of force. As a consequence, state armaments programs became more like the grammar to policy’s logic.

Strategy is nothing if it is not the art of reducing our adversary’s physical capacity and willingness to resist, and continuing to do so until our aim is achieved.[iii] This holds true for any level of strategy, and whether we are at peace or at war; strategy can be effective in either environment, as well as the gray area between them. For purposes of this essay, deterrence is simply making people decide not to do something, such as launching an attack or smuggling illegal substances across our borders. The converse of deterrence is coercion, which is simply compelling people to do a particular thing, such as conceding territories or privileges.[iv] Deterrence requires being strong enough to make an adversary believe an act of aggression will be defeated or will cost more than it gains. Coercion, or armed diplomacy, implies using force to intimidate, punish, or deny.[v] In the decades prior to the First World War, armed diplomacy sometimes took the form of threatening an adversary by mobilizing one’s forces, conducting maneuvers or training exercises at or near a rival’s borders, or ratcheting up one’s armaments’ programs.

The arms race that preceded the Great War is a particularly interesting case study as it involves naval, land, and—for the first time—air power. It played out in obvious quantitative dimensions, as well as some less visible qualitative ones. It also benefited from the full infrastructure and techniques of the Industrial Revolution, as well as the late nineteenth-century Technological Revolution which spurred innovation on an unprecedented scale. It was, unquestionably, the world’s first modern arms race.[vi] Two examples serve to illustrate how deterrence and coercive diplomacy worked through the medium of an armaments program.

The first is Great Britain’s naval bill of 1889 which formally announced the two-power standard—meaning the Royal Navy would maintain a fighting power at least equal to the strength of any two other countries. Historians agree the bill was aimed at deterring rivals from competing for naval supremacy. At the time, the Royal Navy was already as strong as the next two largest navies, the French and Russian. However, both countries increased their naval expenditures in direct response to British measures. Britain, in turn, added 3 more battleships to its original target of 10, and by implementing a new five-year plan designed to add 12 additional battleships and 20 cruisers by the end of the century.

The Japanese and Americans, too, soon entered the race in part to protect their own maritime interests and in part to aspire to great power status.[viii] By 1905, the Japanese navy listed 6 battleships, 17 cruisers, 24 destroyers, and over 60 torpedo boats.[ix] By 1898, the United States had expanded its navy from a handful of obsolete vessels to a modern fleet of 6 battleships, 2 armored cruisers, and several light cruisers.[x] The US victory in Spanish-American War had essentially established America as the preeminent power from the Philippines to the Caribbean.

By 1906, Jane’s Fighting Ships , a popular yet authoritative military science publication, ranked Britain first among major naval powers; the United States, France, Japan, Germany, Russia, Italy, and Austria-Hungary followed in order.[xi] By 1913, Jane’s Fighting Ships still ranked Britain first by a wide margin; however, Germany had moved into second, displacing the United States, which dropped to third; France and Japan were tied for fourth; while Russia, Italy, and Austria-Hungary had fallen much lower.[xii] In other words, the bill of 1889 had indeed set in motion a naval arms race; but the dynamics driving it were as much the desire for great power status as insecurity. The British empire had meant to discourage competition by setting the bar too high for others to reach; but at the same time it had enhanced the prestige associated with being a great power, and thus encouraged competition.

The second example concerns coercion. Undoubtedly, the most infamous instance is the so-called risk theory ( Risikogedanke ) introduced by Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, Secretary of State of the Imperial Naval Office in the years before the Great War. Tirpitz’s intent was to intimidate Britain into a power-sharing relationship that might include access to bases and other markets by building a fleet strong enough to pose an unacceptable risk to London’s overseas interests.[xiii] It was hoped such a relationship would enhance German influence and prestige, a metaphorical “place in the sun.” It was also hoped a ratio of 2:3 German to British capital ships would suffice. Accordingly, Germany’s naval bill of 1898 appropriated funds for a navy of 19 battleships, 42 cruisers, and sundry supporting vessels; this bill was followed two years later by a second that set a seventeen-year deadline for building a fleet of 2 flagships, 36 battleships, and 45 cruisers.[xiv]

However, as historians have noted, the assumptions underpinning Tirpitz’s theory were too rigid for the fluid nature of the strategic environment. His first assumption was that Germany’s growing industrial capacity could successfully challenge Britain’s and achieve a 2:3 shipbuilding ratio. That belief was reasonable given Britain’s substantial cost outlays in the Second Boer War (1898-1902), and Germany’s skyrocketing economic growth: between 1889 and 1913, its gross national product had doubled, while that of Britain had grown by only two-thirds.[xv] By 1914, Germany was second only to the United States in industrial power. Even so, it struggled to match Britain’s vast ship-building complex. Second, Tirpitz assumed Britain would not become allies with another naval power, given its express goal to maintain naval supremacy relative to the two-power standard. However, London did conclude an alliance with Japan in 1902, which would endure until 1921 and engaged the Russians in a formal entente in 1907. These arrangements essentially secured the Royal Navy’s flanks in the western Pacific and in the Mediterranean Sea and invalidated the risk theory. Third, Tirpitz did not take into account the bleed-over demands that would come from the arms race’s land and air dimensions, each of which required increasing expenditures and detracted from Germany’s ability to keep pace with Britain in ship building.[xvi]

By mid-1913, the naval arms race between Britain and Germany ended, albeit rather anticlimactically; the Kaiserreich had failed to coerce its way to a “place in the sun,” as it desired.[xvii] While Germany had moved into second place in surface ships, it had not achieved its strategic goals.[xviii] Several opportunities for formal arms-control agreements between Germany and Britain arose between 1906 and 1912; these included the 1907 Hague conference, British efforts to negotiate an understanding from 1908 to 1911, and the Haldane mission of 1912.[xix] However, as is so often the case when one party senses a better bargain can be had by holding out, no formal agreement was reached; instead, Germany had “coerced” Britain into a stronger position.

A few more examples show how coercion or armed diplomacy helped “spike” the arms race. During the Bosnian Crisis of 1908-09, Austria and Serbia each attempted intimidate the other by initiating partial mobilizations and military demonstrations. In the end, the Russians and Serbs backed down, but it was largely because they had that they resolved to be stronger next time, and thus added to their arms expenditures. Germany attempted to use armed diplomacy during the First and Second Moroccan Crises, 1905 and 1911, respectively; but succeeded in merely rallying other states to stand against her. Stung by their humiliation in the Second Moroccan Crisis, Germany’s leaders resolved to be stronger next time, and the Reichstag subsequently passed two army bills (1912 and 1913), which collectively added 166,000 troops to the army and authorized several technological, organizational, and logistical improvements.[xx] These measures were as much a reaction to Germany’s run of diplomatic setbacks from 1905 to 1911, perhaps more, than her concern over Russia’s military resurgence.[xxi] She and the other powers had every reason to believe armed diplomacy would remain a viable strategic tool for the foreseeable future. It was only prudent to ensure that instrument was as strong as possible.

Conclusions

This brief examination of the “life” of the arms race that preceded the Great War shows that it was less a cause than an effect. The strategies driving it were developed and used by the political and military leaders of the day. It may well be that further research will revise this knowledge by showing how, in other times, and other circumstances, the players involved were controlled by, as much as they controlled, the very arms races they put in motion. However, that was not the case with the world’s first modern arms race. This time the devilish details win.

Today, we assume the goal of deterrence is to preserve peace, and the goal of coercion is to get something short of going to war for it; but that was not always true of either strategy.[xxii] “A state’s aim with either strategy was just as likely to be a stronger position and greater influence, and it may well have been prepared to back up its maneuvering with the actual use of force, despite the era’s concerns that war might soon become “impossible.” The great powers, and those that were not great but wished themselves to be thought of as such, played much the same game of intimidation and coercion as they had for generations. One key difference by the dawn of the twentieth century was that they now played that game with some new pieces. However, the same rules still applied. The strategies of deterrence and coercion were instruments of policy every bit as much as armed conflict. It was great power politics, even if not all the players were great. In 1914, just as always, some of the players misjudged others, misread situations, overplayed their hands, and otherwise mismanaged the game they were playing. That is one continuity not likely to be undone by history’s details.

[i] Compare: Toby J. Rider, Michael G. Findley, and Paul F. Diehl, “Just Part of the Game? Arms Races, Rivalry, and War,” Journal of Peace Research 48, no. 1 (January 2011): 85-100; Joseph Maiolo, Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941 (New York, 2010); Craig Etcheson, Arms Race Theory: Strategy and Structure of Behavior (New York, 1989); Paul M. Kennedy, ed., The War Plans of the Great Powers, 1880-1914 (Boston, 1985); Teresa Clair Smith, “Arms Race Instability and War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 24 (June 1980): 253-84; A.J.P. Taylor, How Wars Begin (London, 1979); Lewis F. Richardson, Arms and Insecurity (Pacific Grove, CA, 1960); Samuel Huntington, “The Arms Race Phenomena,” Public Policy (1958): 1-20. [ii] Annika Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War (Cambridge and New York, 2001); Niall Fergusson, Pity of War (New York, 1999); David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of the War: Europe, 1904-1914 (Oxford, 1996); David G. Herrmann, The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War (Princeton, 1996). Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War (New York, 1992); A.J.P. Taylor, War by Time-Table: How the First World War Began (London, 1969). Recent interpretations prefer contingent explanations over causal ones; representative is Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York, 2014). [iii] For further elaboration, see Antulio J. Echevarria II, Military Strategy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, forthcoming). [iv] See Daniel Byman and Matthew Waxman, The Dynamics of Coercion: American Foreign Policy and the Limits of Military Might (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2002). Four types of deterrence are commonly recognized: direct, discouraging an attack on oneself; extended, dissuading an attack on a friend; general, deterring a potential but not imminent threat; and immediate, dissuading an imminent threat. Paul K. Huth, Extended Deterrence and the Prevention of War (Yale: Yale University, 1991). [v] Some define coercive diplomacy as a form of mediation or negotiation, and thus as an alternative to war rather than a type of military strategy. Alexander L. George, Forceful Persuasion: Coercive Diplomacy as an Alternative to War (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 1997). [vi] Antulio J. Echevarria II, “The Arms Race: Qualitative and Quantitative Aspects,” in War. Volume IV: War and the Modern World, Roger Chickering, Dennis Showalter, and Hans van de Ven, eds., (Cambridge, 2012), 163-80. [vii] Compare: JonTesuro Sumida, In Defense of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology, and British Naval policy 1889-1914 (Annapolis, 2014); Lawrence Sondhaus, Naval Warfare, 1815-1914 (New York, 2001), 161; Roger Parkinson, The Late Victorian Navy: The Pre-Dreadnought Era and the Origins of the First World War (Suffolk, 2008). Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London, 1991 [1976]). The bill added 10 battleships, 42 cruisers, and 18 torpedo gunships to be built over the next five years. [viii] Japan’s naval victory over the Chinese established it as Asia’s preeminent power. US Secretary of the Navy, Hilary A. Herbert, remarked that “Japan had leaped, almost at one bound, to a place among the great nations of the earth.” S. C. M. Paine, The Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895: Power, Perceptions, and Primacy (Cambridge, 2003), 3. [ix] David C. Evans and Mark R. Peattie, Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887–1941 (Annapolis, MD, 1997); R.M. Connaughton, The War of the Rising Sun and the Tumbling Bear—A Military History of the Russo-Japanese War 1904–5 (London, 1988); J.N. Westwood, Russia against Japan, 1904-1905: A New Look at the Russo-Japanese War (Albany, 1986). [x] Al Nofi, The Spanish-American War 1898 (Conshohocken, PA, 1996), 100-11. [xi] Fred T. Jane, Jane’s Fighting Ships (New York, 1906-07). In the same year, the naval arms race took a qualitative turn when the British commissioned the HMS Dreadnought, which rendered all previous designs obsolete, including some 50 capital ships already in service in the Royal Navy. In 1905, a state-of-the-art battleship displaced 13,000 tons, and was armed with four 12-inch guns with a range of 6,000 yards. The HMS Dreadnought displaced 18,000 tons, was armed with ten 12-inch guns, and could reach speeds of 21 knots. Nicholas Lambert, Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution (Columbia, 2002). [xii] Fred T. Jane, Jane’s Fighting Ships (New York, 1912-13). [xiii] Paul M. Kennedy, “Tirpitz, England, and the Second Navy Law of 1900: A Strategical Critique,” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 8 (1970): 38; Mombauer, “German War Plans,” 66. [xiv] Annika Mombauer, “German War Plans,” in War Planning 1914, Richard F. Hamilton and Holger Herwig, eds., (Cambridge, 2010), 65-66; Michael Epkenhans, “Wilhelm II and ‘His’ Navy, 1888-1918,” in The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm II’s Role in Imperial Germany, Annika Mombauer and Wilhelm Deist, eds., (Cambridge, 2003); and Die Wilhelminische Flottenrüstung, 1908-1914. Weltmachtstreben, Industrieller Fortschritt, Soziale Integration (Munich, 1991). Rolf Hobson, Imperialism at Sea: Naval Strategic Thought, the Ideology of Sea Power, and the Tirpitz Plan, 1875-1914 (Boston, 2002). [xv] While steel production grew by 350 percent in Britain, it increased almost 1,500 percent in Germany (and by more than 8,600 percent in the United States); coal output rose by 650 percent in Germany, compared to 250 percent in Britain. S.B. Clough, The Economic Development of Western Civilization (New York, 1959), 377, 385; W.O. Henderson, The Rise of German Industrial Power, 1834-1914 (Berkeley, 1975), 233-4; B.R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics 1750-1970 (London, 1975), 818-26. [xvi] In fact, the Reich’s production of heavy battleships actually declined after 1912, as the focus of German armaments shifted to land power via the army bills of 1912 and 1913. German investments in fixed-wing aircraft also skyrocketed, increasing from 36,000 marks in 1909 to 26 million marks by 1914.John H. Morrow, German Airpower in World War I (Lincoln, 1982), 7. [xvii] Germany had put into service 46 capital ships (17 dreadnoughts, 21 pre-dreadnoughts, and 9 cruisers); however, Britain had built 103 capital ships (29 dreadnoughts, 40 pre-dreadnoughts, and 34 cruisers). Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860-1914 (London, 1987). [xviii] Furthermore, it had fallen behind in other areas, such as submarines. By 1914, Britain had 88 submarines; the French owned 76; the United States had 32; and the Kaiserreich had produced only 22, the bulk of which were by then obsolete. Robert Hutchinson, Jane’s Submarines: War Beneath the Waves from 1776 to the Present Day (New York, 2005). [xix] John H. Maurer, “Arms Control and the Anglo-German Naval Race before World War I: Lessons for Today?” Political Science Quarterly 112 (1997): 285-306. [xx] Herrmann, Arming of Europe, 161-66; for more context see Gordon Craig, Germany 1866-1945 (Oxford, 1978); Hew Strachan, The First World War. Vol. I: To Arms (Oxford, 2004), 1-34. [xxi] In fact, the Russian military recovered relatively quickly given its losses in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), the fracturing caused by revolution of 1905, and the chaos induced by the mutiny within its officer corps. Dennis Showalter, Tannenberg: Clash of Empires (Hamden, 1991), 125-38. [xxii] Hence, the famous quote: “If you want peace, be prepared for war.” (Si vis pacem, para bellum). Its origins are unclear, but it is usually attributed to the Roman military writer Flavius Vegetius Renatus.

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World History Project - Origins to the Present

Course: world history project - origins to the present   >   unit 7.

• WATCH: A Closer Look at a WWI Gas Hood
• WATCH: Trench Weapons and Trench Warfare in WWI
• WATCH: The Atmosphere and Climate
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• READ: Authoritarianism in Japan
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• WATCH: Decolonization and the Cold War - Through a Caribbean Lens
• WATCH: Decolonization and the Cold War through an Asian Lens
• READ: Apartheid
• READ: The Oil Revolution

READ: Arms Race, Space Race

• READ: Non-State Terrorism
• READ: Conflicts Between Countries since 1945
• READ: Connecting Decolonization in Africa and the US Civil Rights Movement
• READ: Modern Latin America
• READ: Political Decolonization, c.1945–1997
• READ: The Course of the First World War
• READ: Art and the World Wars
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• READ: Movements to End Racial Injustice

Arms Race, Space Race

The effects could well be called unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous and terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred...[It was a] strong, sustained awesome roar which warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to The Almighty.

Doomsday devices

A mad race to armageddon, cuban missile crisis and non-proliferation, a race to the stars, racing against ourselves.

“This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization… This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”

• Stalin actually knew about the Americans’ nuclear weapons program before Truman. Soviet spies funneled information to the Kremlin while Truman was a U.S. senator and unaware of the project. Truman did not become vice president until the 1944 election. He then became president when Roosevelt died in April of 1945.
• In 2012, Voyager became the first man-made craft to leave our solar system.

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Arms race essay.

This example Arms Race Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

An arms race is generally understood as a process of competitive acquisition of weaponry. The domestic and international forces driving an arms race may be as era-defining as global ideological rivalry or as idiosyncratic as the preferences of an admiral’s spouse, but evidence of hostility between the racers is a definitional requirement, usually including an assertion on each side that the buildups are necessary because of the growing arsenal of the opponent.

Arms racers are often pairs of nation-states, but interactive arming may occur also between alliances, within nation-states, between armed services, within armed services, or among nonstate actors. One example of complex interactions among more than two nation-states is trilateral arming among China, the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war era. Arms racing may precede war, substitute for war, or grow out of unresolved issues following war, but as a rule, weapons production during wartime is not considered arms racing.

Races are identified by the names of the participants (e.g., U.S.-Soviet Arms Race) as well as by the nature of the weaponry (e.g., the nuclear arms race). Arms races also may be distinguished according to whether they are essentially qualitative or quantitative. Qualitative arms racing means that participants compete to develop higher quality, more effective arsenals. Qualitative races are characterized by weapons whose accuracy, range, and lethality change quickly and by rapid research and development of new weapons technologies. Quantitative racing is competition in numbers of existing weaponry. Arms control specialists find that quantitative races are easier to limit by agreement than qualitative races. Rapidly moving qualitative races also facilitate agreement, but only in obsolescent technologies.

Conceptualizations

Arms races are conceptualized in several ways. One view is that arms racing can be understood as a mechanistic process like the motion of billiard balls but capable of generating unanticipated and undesired effects such as World War I (1914–1918), or a nuclear war catalyzed by a crisis. Other analysts see arms racing as tacit but intelligent communication, in which acquisition of weapons systems becomes a coded conversation. This view assumes that adversaries know and understand each other’s political goals and that new weaponry becomes reasonably well known on both sides, perhaps by open testing.

A policy instrument conceptualization views arms racing as a device to achieve political-economic goals, foreign and domestic, deliberately and rationally. Arms racing also may be conceived as a less rational result of internal bureaucratic forces: domestic political and economic bargaining, competition among military services, incremental decision making, and failure to discard old programs, such as the U.S. horse cavalry. In this view the arms buildup is a result of a military industrial complex grafted onto the legislature. Large-scale weapons systems are seen as fruit of a patronage system and may have little to do with the outside world. Choice of adversary is then mostly a historical accident and may be altered to meet domestic political, including electoral, needs.

Some scholars, such as Brian Eslea (1985), understand arms racing in part or in whole as an aberrant consequence of psychological pressures on decision making, so that racing is propelled by misperception, genuine psychopathology, or imperatives of gender on decision making. Larger theoretical arguments about interstate conflict dynamics have posited a role for competitive armaments processes in catastrophe theory, in the intersection of competition for resources and political alliances as well as in escalation of disputes to crises and thence to war. The fact that arms races often originate in or precipitate territorial disputes leads to the inclusion of contiguity (close proximity, usually understood as a shared border) and geostrategic data in many explanations.

Examples Of Arms Races

Soviet Union-United States, 1948–1989

Israel-rejectionist states, various dates; e.g., 1957–1966

India-Pakistan, various; 1957–1964

Chile-Peru, 1868–1879

England-Germany, 1898–1914

Are Arms Races Risky?

Under what circumstances is arms racing dangerous? When is it stabilizing? Deterrence theorists assert that some arms races contribute to conflict stabilization, hence to peace (deterrence stability). Intriligator and Brito argue (1984) that for some constellations of weaponry, racing leads to peace. Power equilibrium hypotheses and power transition arguments also can be developed in which military power is used to restore balance and order. Similar arguments apply to horizontal proliferation as potentially stabilizing. Racing also may preserve peace at least temporarily by substituting another arena for competition.

However, arms races may be deterrence-stable (in the sense that ratios of weapons remain constant while the arsenals grow), while being neither mechanically stable, nor crisis-stable. Arms races may then be war precursors in the long term because mechanical instability can occur within deterrence stability or other forms of stability.

Some types of arms races are probably more hazardous than others. Observers cannot avoid the conclusion that racing in weapons of mass destruction (WMD)—chemical, biological, nuclear, radiological—is inherently dangerous. Arms racing in nuclear weapons is risky even if tightly controlled, simply because of the inevitable environmental contamination before, during, and after the arms race, and because of the risks of accidental detonation, loss, theft, and diversion. As weapons proliferate, into whose hands they may devolve becomes a more urgent question. The specter of the “terrorist” use of WMD looms large, but it should not obscure the risk that status quo powers themselves may not be reasonable users of WMD.

Does arms racing itself risk interstate war? Arms racing may be perilous because it can be a method of maximizing arsenals before initiating a war (risk of a long and severe war). Alternatively, arms racing may be misunderstood by a potential adversary as signaling imminent attack when none is intended (risk of an accidental war). Arms racing from a position of notable inferiority may even invite preemptive attack (deterrence failure).

Arms racing is not typical nation-state behavior. Scholars come to contrasting conclusions about the political consequences of arms racing, depending on variations in their original assumptions, definitions of terms, conceptualizations, and initial political conditions. Outcomes are affected by dynamic factors such as power transitions and the type and form of the race and by specifics such as the nature of the weaponry, as well as the risks taken in deployment, such as instituting automatic launch-on-warning mechanisms. On balance, the risk posed by arms racing in general cannot be given a single answer.

The social science term arms racing, understood as unstable escalatory processes, is now established in the natural sciences as well, especially in the context of evolutionary theory. In biology, arms racing is understood as an interactive process of adaptive defense and offense, against pathogens, parasites or predators. For instance, in a predator-prey pair, racing prey animals evolve resistance to predator toxins, while predators evolve more effective poisons, capturing the social science concepts of dyadic relationships and action-reaction spirals.

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• Intriligator, Michael, and Dagobert Brito. “Can Arms Races Lead to the Outbreak of War?” Journal of Conflict Resolution 28 (March 1984): 63–84.
• Klare, Michael. “The Next Great Arms Race.” Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer 1993): 136–152.
• Mintz, Alex, and Michael D.Ward. “The Political Economy of Military Spending in Israel.” American Political Science Review 83 (June 1989): 521–533.
• Richardson, Lewis F. Arms and Insecurity: A Mathematical Study of the Causes and Origins of War. Pittsburgh: Boxwood, 1960.
• Singer, J. David, and Melvin Small. “Alliance Aggregation and the Onset of War 1815–1945.” In Quantitative International Politics: Insights and Evidence, edited by J. David Singer, 247–286. New York: Free Press, 1968.
• Smith,T. C. “Arms Race Instability and War.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 24 (June 1980): 253–284.
• Wallace, Michael. “Armaments and Escalation:Two Competing Hypotheses.” International Studies Quarterly 26 (March 1982): 37–56.
• Wright, Quincy. A Study of War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942.
• York, Herbert. Race to Oblivion. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.
• Zinnes, Dina A. “The Expression and Perception of Hostility in Pre-war Crisis: 1914.”
• In Quantitative International Politics: Insights and Evidence, edited by J. David Singer, 85–119. New York: Free Press, 1968.
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The Hastings Center

Bioethics Forum Essay

How to avoid a genetic arms race.

A quiet biological revolution in warfare is underway. The genome is emerging as a new domain of conflict. The level of destruction that only nuclear weapons could previously achieve is fast becoming as accessible as a cyberattack.

Now for the bad news. Great power conflicts and proxy wars are back. The rules-based world order crumbles while an unpredictable–and potentially unstable–multipolar one emerges.

Rapidly accelerating breakthroughs in our ability to change the genes of organisms are generating medically thrilling possibilities. They are also generating novel capabilities for biological weapons, a form of warfare that has been largely abandoned for decades. Take the recent AI-enabled advancements in gene-editing , construction of artificial viral vectors for human genome remodeling, protein folding , and the creation of custom proteins . Far outpacing the regulatory environment, these advances are facilitating the weaponization and delivery of harmful bioagents–overcoming impediments that previously made biological weapons impractical.

Speculation about “genetic weapons” capable of singling out specific groups for infection dates back to the 1970s. In 2012, Vladimir Putin mused publicly about weapons that could be “as effective as nuclear” but “more ‘acceptable’ from the political and military perspective.” He predicted that nuclear weapons would, over the next half- century, become eclipsed by “fundamentally new instruments for achieving political and strategic goals.” The future of war, he said, is “based on new physical principles,” including “genetic” science.

The 2020 edition of Science of Military Strategy , an authoritative textbook published by China’s National Defense University, considers how biotechnology could serve as “a brand new territory for the expansion of national security” with “the use of new biological weapons, bioterrorism attacks, large-scale epidemic infections, specific ethnic genetic attacks, the purposeful genetic modification of the ecological environment, food and industrial products, and the use of environmental factors.”

Although its intelligence community’s 2016 worldwide assessment described genome editing as a potential “weapon of mass destruction,” the United States has been slow and reluctant to face the new challenge. One reason is that it is not clear what this challenge is, how bad it actually is, and what requires immediate attention.

Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology , a report by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine developed at the behest of the U.S. Department of Defense, has since its publication in 2018 been the main guide to understanding probable biological threats. It advised paying more attention to the possibility of recreating known pathogenic viruses, making existing bacteria more dangerous, and making harmful biochemicals via in situ synthesis. It was not without blind spots, however. For example, it considered gene drives only as applied directly to humans, ignoring the more indirect strategic applications, such as agricultural.

In his recent book , zoologist Mathew Cobb admits to being most concerned about gene drives and human genome editing, in addition to pathogen manipulation. A recent RAND report directs attention also to the Internet of Bodies (internet-connected smart consumers and medical devices) and genomic surveillance and enhancement.

Nor is the generation of basic genetic data simply the province of sophisticated laboratories. Many elaborate datasets are open source and online, facilitating scientific exchange. Although most genetic data are de-identified, future technologies may be able to re-identify them. The Biden administration appreciates this threat. On  February 28, the president signed an executive order seeking to prevent the sale of bulk sensitive personal data. The executive order has a legal basis in the National Emergencies Act and International Emergency Economic Powers Act and notes the need to “protect United States persons’ sensitive personal health data and human genomic data from the threat identified in this order.” That threat is the “continuing effort of certain countries of concern to access Americans’ sensitive personal data.”

Amid the apparent collapse of the post-World War II rules-based order, one of the worst things that could happen is a genetic arms race for which international conventions are unprepared. The Biologic and Toxin Weapons Convention bans proliferation of bioagents and toxins that have no peaceful use, but it has no formal verification regime system. There was at least one alleged case of noncompliance by the Soviet Union in 1981 involving a weaponized fungus, far from the exquisite genomic targeting that may eventually be practicable.

The convergence of genetic technologies and intense competition among highly motivated actors along with historic geopolitical shifts requires the attention of the international life sciences community and bioethicists to establish guidance for what was once a threat in the realm of science fiction.

Yelena Biberman, PhD, is an associate professor of political science at Skidmore College.

Jonathan D. Moreno, PhD, is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor of Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania and a Hastings Center fellow. @jonathanmoreno.bsky.social

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Version 1.0

Last updated 08 october 2014, arms race prior to 1914, armament policy.

New weapons produced during the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s heightened existing tensions among European nations as countries strove to outpace their enemies technologically. This armaments race accelerated in the decade before 1914 as the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy squared off against the Triple Entente of France, Russia, and Britain. Germany’s fears of increases in Russian armaments, and British fears of the German naval buildup, contributed heavily to the outbreak and spread of the First World War in 1914.

Table of Contents

• 1 Introduction
• 2.1 Europe’s Warlike Tendencies
• 2.2 Technological Change and New Weaponry
• 3.1 Alliances and Neutrals
• 3.2 The Wider Focus: A European Military Equilibrium in 1903-1904?
• 4 The Diplomatic Revolution, 1904–1907
• 5 The Great Naval Race, 1906-1914
• 6.1 War Scares in the Balkans and Morocco
• 6.2 Localized War Comes to Europe
• 7 Army Weapons and Troop Expansion, 1904–1914
• 8.1 German Fears about Russia
• 8.2 The Naval Race and Britain’s Declaration of War
• 8.3 The Naval Race and Turkey’s Entry into the War

Selected Bibliography

Introduction ↑.

In early 1914, British First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill (1874–1965) observed that “the world is arming as it has never armed before.” Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey (1862–1933) agreed, lamenting that “excessive expenditure on armaments, carried to an extensive degree, must lead to a catastrophe,” and adding that he saw “very little to be done” [1] to prevent the impending cataclysm. After the First World War and its nearly 40 million casualties, beliefs among anti-war activists strengthened that the armaments race had caused the worst war in history, and that arms reductions remained the best guarantor of peace. The League of Nations tried to achieve this goal from 1926 to 1935, but it ultimately failed.

Historians today do not explain the outbreak of war in 1914 as simply the result of international tensions caused by the arms race. Myriad factors contributed to the First World War: notions of ethnic/racial superiority and the right — even obligation — to dominate others, mixed contradictorily with fears of relative societal decline; an exaggerated need to express manliness through war; a deeply rooted and glorified militaristic culture; and the pressures of domestic protest movements, which militarists sought to dissipate by re-channeling these tensions outward against foreign enemies. [2] This article assesses the role of the pre-1914 armaments competition, among many other factors, in helping to bring about the First World War.

The methods applied are empirical, comparative, and based on the synthesis of other historians’ work. In general, this article agrees with seminal studies emphasizing the role of land armaments by David Stevenson, David G. Herrmann, and Annika Mombauer , [3] which find evidence of causation amidst an exacerbated crisis atmosphere before 1914, as well as works on naval armaments by Arthur J. Marder, Volker R. Berghahn, Paul M. Kennedy, Robert K. Massie, and Matthew S. Seligmann , [4] which point to more indirect armaments-related causes. I also rely, but less so, on the naval studies of Jon Sumida and Nicholas Lambert. [5] However, this article argues that the Anglo-German naval race in particular played a direct role in converting a European war into a World War by dragging Britain into the conflagration and indirectly influencing Turkey to cast the iron dice and go to war. Britain and Turkey’s entry into war rapidly spread the fighting to other parts of the world.

This article maintains, furthermore, that the pre-1914 armaments race was a product of broader technological forces at work in Europe since the mid-1800s, and that this wave of new technologies and the weapons it spawned were themselves products of a war-oriented culture embedded much more deeply in European history.

Technological Change and New Weaponry in the Context of European “Militarism” [6] ↑

Europe’s warlike tendencies ↑.

Historian Laurence Lafore titled his classic analysis of the coming of war in 1914 aptly: The Long Fuse . [7] Indeed the underlying causes of the conflict were rooted deeply in European history. One late 19 th -century scholar identified only 230 years of peace over three strife-torn millennia stretching back to antiquity, which included only two years without war in the 17 th century. Although the 18 th century witnessed less bloodshed, the peaceful respites were more like armed standoffs. “Every sovereign keeps in readiness all the armies he would need if his people were in danger of extermination,” wrote the venerable Charles-Louis Montesquieu (1689–1755) . [8]

The continent’s ethnic diversity and centuries-long struggles among feuding peoples had spawned a distinct ethnic hierarchy by the mid-to-late 1800s. On the bottom lay resentful subjugated groups like the Irish, Finns, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Croats; formerly dispossessed peoples like the Rumanians, Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbs had recently reestablished minor states for themselves, but longed to expand them. Other surviving ethnic groups like the Swedes, Danes, Dutch, and Spanish remained peoples with states, but had dropped out of the power struggle.

At the top of this hierarchy were the great dominant nation-states, many of them conquerors of other peoples: Great Britain, France , Italy , Germany , Austria-Hungary , Russia , and the Ottoman Empire ( see map ). Some of these greater nation-states were very powerful, especially Germany, France, and Britain, while the others, especially Ottoman Turkey, worried about catching up or falling out. Whatever their status, all eyed one another warily as they jockeyed for position and began to choose sides and form alliances , seemingly readying themselves for a showdown.

Pacifists like Austrian noblewoman Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914) feared this process of squaring off and the “remnants of the old barbarism” in Europe. She condemned “the rage of one people against another” [9] that threatened modern civilization. The biggest worry for Suttner and other pacifists, including Swedish explosives manufacturer Alfred Nobel (1833–1896) , was the technological dynamism of the time coupled with the frightening military implications of these material changes. To avoid a military-technological Armageddon, the pacifist movement unsuccessfully advanced the idea of substituting arbitration procedures for the traditional “final arbiter”: war.

Reinforcing rival pacifist efforts , the so-called Second International socialist movement also strove to stop the wheels of war from running over the workingmen of the world. But the socialist notion of a general strike — all workers of all nations bringing all industrial production to a total stop if war threatened — would register no more success than pacifistic arbitration proposals. While both movements made it more difficult to expand armies and increase armaments, their inability to cooperate with each other as well as their lack of clout in the citadels of real power meant they were unable to ward off their common nightmare: mechanized mass destruction.

Technological Change and New Weaponry ↑

Technology evolved so quickly that historians delineate two Industrial Revolutions: the first from 1750 to 1850, and the second after 1850. The first transformation, an almost exclusively British affair, was closely aligned with Europe’s hawkish culture. In addition to its American and Caribbean colonies in the 1700s, Britain added Canada , Florida, South Africa , and India . The markets won through war and colonization drove British exports up over fivefold. The economic pressure to keep up with increasing foreign and domestic demand drove manufacturers to find better means of production. The result was a cluster of remarkable new technologies: coke-fired iron manufacture, reciprocating steam engines, and sulfuric acid mass-produced in lead vats or chambers.

Initially, Britain’s Industrial Revolution only indirectly benefited the nation militarily, mainly through a rising national income which the government accessed via taxes and loans used for more of the existing weaponry. By the mid-1800s, however, technologies from the First Industrial Revolution made their way into military operations: steam locomotive-pulled trains for army transport , wrought and cast iron cannons, ironclad steam-powered warships, and increased gunpowder output (sulfuric acid was a key ingredient in its production).

By this time, other nations were anxious not to be left behind in Europe’s hostile atmosphere, and thus scrambled to acquire these technologies. Steam locomotives transported troops in Prussian army maneuvers as early as 1839, for instance, and army units moved by rail in the War of Italian Unification (1859–1860), the American Civil War (1861–1865), and the Wars of German Unification (1864–1871). New machine tools, like lathes and milling machines, improved metal-shaping precision, paving the way for production of breech-loading, rapid-firing rifles and the first machine guns in the United States , Germany, and France.

The obvious connection between industrial and military prowess during the First Industrial Revolution caused nervousness in European capitals as the Second Industrial Revolution swept through Europe before the turn of the 20 th century. Steel replaced iron for many uses; greatly improved machine tools created even more precise metal parts; powerful steam turbines supplanted increasingly inefficient reciprocating engines; more highly concentrated sulfuric acid became available; and oil began to supplement coal as an energy source. Engineers and scientists also created electrical power and equipment, wireless telegraphs , telephones, and nitrogen-based high explosives.

These breakthroughs had the potential to revolutionize the art of warfare by spawning killing machines: repeating rifles shooting twenty to thirty bullets per minute; improved machine guns spewing 600 bullets per minute; semi-recoilless rapid-firing field artillery firing hundreds of shells per hour; and artillery shells packed with extremely powerful nitrogen explosives. Steam power, steel, electricity, advanced optics, and the new explosives also ushered in early prototypes of the modern battleship. As the Second Industrial Revolution gathered momentum after 1900, it brought automobiles, airships, airplanes, steam turbine-powered ships, and submarines. These new technologies, like earlier advances, challenged army and navy establishments either to adopt the weaponry and determine the best tactical adjustments, or to reject the new devices altogether.

Given the power struggle among seven major nations within Europe alone, rejection of new weaponry would prove difficult if just one or two powers adopted a particular device. This happened early on, when the French adopted semi-recoilless artillery and the Russians and British adopted machine guns (see Section 8). But these weapons developments did not affect only the leading European powers. By purchasing the new artillery models, for example, Serbia hoped to stop Turkish or Austrian invaders in their tracks, while lagging major states like Russia and Turkey viewed machine guns and rapid-firing cannons as potential equalizers. Moreover, nitrogen explosive sea mines, particularly in narrow straits and channels and along coastlines, offered once formidable naval nations like Turkey a nearly impassable defense, but Germany also planned to even the odds against naval giant Britain by luring the enemy over mines. The submarine represented another good example of shortcut to victory against countries with more and bigger surface vessels; this was the nightmare, in fact, of Britain’s Royal Navy when France took the lead in submarine construction around 1900, and after 1906 when Germany followed suit.

Rapid technological change disrupted business-as-usual routines in military establishments, forcing hard-fought debates about the worth of military devices yet untested in war, followed by many controversial decisions to adopt weaponry that, once taken, often went beyond tactical issues to affect operational, strategic, and even national policy thinking. Recent historians have dubbed this technology-driven assessment and decision-making process the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). [10] This establishment-rattling RMA became more frenetic in the decade before 1914 as nations reacted not only to another set of technological challenges, but also, nervously, to the reactions by other nations. In all of the cases discussed in this article, technology was the engine driving an increasingly frantic armaments competition, even though the fuel or underlying cause and determinant of this interstate friction remained the deeply rooted rivalries and national security anxieties among these states.

Military Strength on Land and Sea, 1903–1904 ↑

Alliances and neutrals ↑.

By the early 1900s, the squaring-off process among the Great Powers of Europe had resulted in two powerful alliances. The first was the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy (formed from 1879 to 1882). Facing the Triple Alliance was the Franco-Russian Alliance (dating from 1894). Great Britain remained neutral , as did Turkey, weakened but still valuable as an ally. Although none of these alliances were set in stone, Tables 1 and 2 show the quantitative army and navy strengths should war have broken out in 1904 with these alliances intact.

Table 1: Army Strength, 1904 ( with Estimates in Italics ) [11]

Table 2: Naval Strength, 1904 ( with Estimates in Italics ) [12]

These tables clearly indicate an intense armaments competition between the powers. The naval leader, Britain’s Royal Navy, had studied and adopted a succession of new hardware since the passing of the age of sail in the 1860s and finally reached a new state of the art by 1900. This particular RMA was heavily swayed in its final stage by The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), by American historian Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914) . Germany, Russia, and France followed Britain’s lead, building one cutting-edge battleship after another. All twenty-four of Germany’s battleships, for instance, were built after 1890. Three of the newest ships in commission at the time—Germany’s Wittelsbach , France’s Suffren ( see photograph ), and Russia’s Revitzan ( see illustration )—all displaced around 12,000 tons, hit top speeds of eighteen knots propelled by coal-fired triple expansion reciprocating steam engines, had similar thickness of armor, and carried twenty primary and secondary guns of roughly equivalent caliber and overall weight of shell. The typical main armament was four 12-inch guns.

There were also analogous armaments developments on land in the early 1900s. After decades of trial and error, all armies of the European Great Powers possessed weapons made possible by first-wave technologies of the Second Industrial Revolution coming to Europe after the mid-1800s. The results of this RMA — a competition somewhat less fraught for armies at this particular time — saw military establishments moving their divisions by rail according to intricate timetables; deploying recoiling, rifled steel cannon ( see photograph ) firing shells packed with nitrogen explosive; and equipping infantrymen with improved semi-automatic magazine rifles ( see photograph ).

Although arms competition was ongoing, and pacifists and socialists justifiably feared the build-up of arms, the armaments race did not necessarily threaten war between the two alliances around 1904. Neither side had been rattling sabers against the other, nor had any “war scares” involving the two alliances occurred since the Balkan and Franco-German crises of the 1880s. War clouds had gathered and blown over many times over recent decades, but they were mainly due to colonial incidents tied to Britain and did not threaten to hurl the European alliances into war. [13] Finally, although naval construction was indeed frenetic, historian David G. Herrmann rightly describes the army increases as a “steady peacetime development,” with military leaders “more conscious of the constraints they faced than of any imperative for rapid expansion.” [14]

By the early 1900s, moreover, neither alliance needed to fear being overpowered by its enemies. On the naval side, both alliances possessed the same technology, as explained earlier, but also had nearly the same number of battleships—the Franco-Russian Alliance’s thirty-nine to the Triple Powers’ thirty-four. The balance tips slightly toward the Triple Alliance when considering the fact that Russia’s three completed Black Sea behemoths had no easy passage through Turkish waters to the Mediterranean, and that six of its big capital ships were stationed in the Far East, leaving only eleven in the Baltic Sea near the European theater.

The alliances were also fairly well-balanced on land. The giant Russian army gave the Franco-Russian Alliance a numerical advantage on a potential eastern front, and Russia was the only continental army equipped with machine guns in 1903; each division boasted three eight-gun batteries. But the Russian army was poorly led, as the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) would demonstrate, and their divisions had much less artillery support than German and Austro-Hungarian units. Similar parity would exist on a potential western front. Although Germany needed to send some army corps east, Italian forces would more than make up the shortfall—assuming, of course, that Italy remained loyal to the alliance. The German army also deployed far more field guns per corps than the French (144 versus ninety-two), possessed howitzers for high angle fire, and may have had a slight advantage in heavier-caliber guns. France, on the other hand, was the only continental artillery equipped with semi-recoilless, rapid-firing field artillery. The famous French 75-millimeter gun ( see photograph ) also boasted shields and a 1,000-meter longer range than the German field artillery piece.

In short, none of the alliance leaders felt they lagged behind enemies and needed to catch up. They had no reason to believe an attack was imminent, but were confident that if one came they were well-equipped for success in battle.

The Wider Focus: A European Military Equilibrium in 1903-1904? ↑

Adding Britain, the great imperial power of this era, to the international relations equation in Europe circa 1904 projects a far less stable image. Table 2 shows that if Britain had abandoned its decades-old policy of neutrality in Europe and joined one alliance bloc or the other, enemy navies would have been overwhelmed. The British army also could have upset Europe’s balance. It was small (see Table 1), but professional and well-equipped. Like other European armies outside France, the British army had not yet introduced quick-firing field pieces, but it did deploy twenty-four machine guns per division; this added over 14,000 bullets per minute to the rapid fire of 12,000 crack infantrymen. Because commitment of the British army to one side or the other could spell victory on land for that bloc, any change in British foreign policy would generate anxiety and have destabilizing consequences.

During the late 1890s and early 1900s, Britain felt threatened by both continental alliance blocs. The rapid construction of German battleships as a result of the ambitious plans of Imperial Naval Office Chief Alfred von Tirpitz (1849-1930) certainly worried the English leadership, especially after two rounds of talks in 1898 and 1901 failed to produce a naval agreement or alliance between Britain and Germany. In 1902, naval intelligence also identified Germany’s new, fast luxury liners, cruising at twenty-three knots and constructed for rapid conversion to surface commerce raiders, as predators that, according to Director of Naval Intelligence Prince Louis of Battenberg (1854–1921) , “could seriously interrupt our trans-Atlantic imports.” [15] But the Franco-Russian Alliance generated even more anxiety. At the turn of the century, the best British battleships were stationed at Gibraltar and Malta in the event of war against its age-old rival France. That same year, moreover, Britain signed a military alliance with Japan , reckoning, mainly, that the six state-of-the-art Japanese battleships would provide a counterweight to Russia’s Far Eastern squadron of six battleships. In fact, Russia probably worried Britain the most until Japan nearly annihilated the Russian fleet in 1904 and 1905, revolutionary disturbances further enervated Russia in 1905 , and Germany jolted Europe by trying to bully its way into French Morocco in 1905 (see Section 5).

Already by 1904, nevertheless, Britain had concluded that Germany represented a great enough threat to warrant certain preparatory measures. That April, for instance, Britain and France signed an agreement recognizing their mutual interests in North Africa. The agreement’s primary purpose was to bolster British imperial interests by eliminating the possibility of a French threat in North Africa; it also strove to facilitate the two nations’ solidarity against Germany, however, by avoiding conflict with one another. Later in the year, First Sea Lord John “Jacky” Fisher (1841–1920) began to shift Mediterranean and Far Eastern battleships to home waters, while also accelerating plans for naval bases in Scotland. Although the first measure aimed to save money by de-commissioning older warships and placing them into a reserve force, and the second created a base for operations against Russia’s large Baltic fleet, both were also steps to brace for any eventual naval conflict with Germany. In late 1904, finally, Fisher began to design the HMS Dreadnought , a new super battleship that would have nothing to fear, and another new class of powerful and even faster ships, the “battle cruisers.” These innovative projects reflected the same British need to remain flexible facing all potential enemies.

The Diplomatic Revolution, 1904–1907 ↑

In February 1904, the Japanese attacked the Russian naval installation at Port Arthur in southern Manchuria. By 1905 Russia had committed the bulk of its military resources to a costly war it would not win. Fifteen battleships were lost, and for a time it seemed the Russian monarchy too would be lost to revolutionary forces. Germany chose this moment, when Russia could provide only minimal assistance, to provoke a crisis with France. German leaders were unsettled by the newly cordial relations between Britain and France, having so far assumed that these perennial enemies would remain so, thereby giving Germany ample time to build up its fleet and leverage Britain into an alliance on German terms. To poach Britain from France, Germany demanded its own economic and strategic rights in Morocco, which London and Paris had recognized in 1904 as an exclusively French sphere of influence. France would either be diplomatically humiliated or defeated militarily, thus demonstrating to Britain the need to kowtow to Europe’s strongman.

The Moroccan Crisis was the first war scare in eighteen years with the potential to plunge the whole continent into war. It finally blew over in 1906 with no German gains and without triggering war. It was nevertheless a significant turning point in European international relations. France and Britain, far from being driven apart, were pushed closer together, each more aware now of the diplomatic and military need of the other given the potential threat Germany posed. Staff talks between the two armies began with the goal of coordinating the passage of a British expeditionary force across the Channel to help defend France. For the first time in 1905 the British army war-gamed this eventuality. The admiralty followed suit, drawing up its first operational plans for a war against Germany — not for a North Sea clash, but for a long-distance blockade that Fisher dubbed “our great anti-German weapon.” [16] In 1906, moreover, Britain acceded to American President Theodore Roosevelt’s (1858–1919) “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which assigned to the United States policing rights for foreign investments in Latin America, including those of the largest investor there, Britain. Fisher then began shifting British naval forces from the Caribbean to home squadrons. In 1907, finally, London settled all outstanding differences with Russia in central Asia. Similar to the 1904 agreement with France, the goal was to insure the empire’s jewel, India, against Russian attack, as well as to facilitate solidarity against Germany. The “Triple Entente” of France, Russia, and Great Britain had come into being. It was not a formal alliance between all three countries, but a significant development nonetheless—and the battle lines of the First World War had come more clearly into focus.

The Great Naval Race, 1906-1914 ↑

In February 1906, while Europe’s diplomatic sands shifted alarmingly against Germany and the Triple Alliance, the Royal Navy launched the Dreadnought , commissioning it in December. Heretofore state-of-the-art battleships were now disparagingly dubbed “pre-dreadnoughts.” The new ship displaced nearly 18,000 tons, not 12,000; was driven by steam turbines, not reciprocating engines; was capable of twenty-one knots, not eighteen; bristled with ten 12-inch rifles, not four; and was coal-fired but designed to convert to oil, a much more efficient fuel. The Dreadnought made all competing vessels obsolete and forced other nations, especially Germany, into a desperate race to catch up.

But Fisher was not finished. He rushed the design and funding for another revolutionary ship—under discussion since the early 1900s—through the admiralty and parliament. Known as the battle cruiser, it had similar dimensions and armament to a battleship, but one less turret and less armor. The reduced weight allowed the turbines to push the ship at over twenty-five knots. Battle cruisers were designed to chase down the non-turbine light and heavy cruisers of enemy nations preying on worldwide British commerce. Their other mandate was to be the big fast cats that would catch the “German greyhounds,” [17] the easily converted luxury liners with 6-inch and 4-inch guns to be unleashed on British shipping lanes. Fisher enthusiastically envisioned the battle cruisers guarding the empire and routes to it, not lining up for battle in the North Sea — but before long the heavy armament of these ships proved too tempting for admirals who wanted greater weight of shell in the battle fleet. In 1908, three battle cruisers, Invincible ( see photograph ), Inflexible , and Indomitable joined the Royal Navy. Three larger dreadnoughts, Bellerophon , Superb , and Temeraire , followed in 1909.

Germany had to respond or be left extremely vulnerable to British sea power. By 1910, four German dreadnoughts ( see photograph )— Nassau , Westfalen , Rheinland , and Posen —had taken up station. They were somewhat heavier (19,000–20,000 tons), a bit slower (at nineteen-twenty knots), but just as powerful, possessing twelve 11-inch guns and two inches more armor belt. Germany’s first battle cruiser, Von der Tann , also joined the High Seas Fleet that year. Slightly superior to Britain’s Invincibles , it had eight 11-inch guns, thicker armor, and twenty-seven knot speed.

Now the race was on. Military and public opinion in both countries grew obsessed with the nightmare scenario of an enemy fleet sneaking into the North Sea and attacking ships caught unaware and unmaneuverable at anchor, and then bombarding helpless coastal towns.

This mutual fear lessened chances of negotiating an end to the race. As early as 1908, British Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George (1863–1945) told the German ambassador that “every Englishman would spend his last penny to preserve” [18] his country’s naval supremacy. In 1909 Germany offered to slow down shipbuilding if Britain first promised to maintain neutrality in any continental conflagration. Britain insisted that the tempo slow first before any political agreement, and that such an agreement could not include a pledge of neutrality that would allow Germany to defeat France and Russia. Talks finally ended in 1912 over these differences and background fears. The negotiating mission to Germany that year of British War Minister Richard Burdon Haldane (1856-1928) did not result in German agreement to decelerate naval spending. As British Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith (1852–1928) put it, “Nothing, I believe, will meet [Germany’s] purpose which falls short of a promise on our part of neutrality, a promise we cannot give.” [19]

And so, rather than slowing, the shipbuilding pace accelerated ( see illustration ). By 1914 Britain had completed or laid down an additional twenty-three dreadnoughts and seven battle cruisers. Both types were larger, faster, and more powerful. The Queen Elizabeth Class battleships ( see photograph ) begun in 1913, for example, carried eight 15-inch guns, while the new battle cruisers boasted eight 13.5-inch cannons. Germany, struggling to keep up with Britain’s torrid pace, answered with fifteen new dreadnoughts, completed or laid down, and six battle cruisers. Both types, like their British counterparts, were larger, faster, and more powerful. Thus the two dreadnoughts laid down in 1913 also had eight 15-inch guns.

Innovations in naval technology offered Germany an opportunity to close the gap with Britain’s larger fleet. Although the RMA process of responding to new technological possibilities had produced a seemingly superior naval state of the art by 1904, HMS Dreadnought and the Invincible Class battle cruisers forced naval tacticians to repeat the whole process and ascend higher up the study/response curve. This time, study was warranted not just for the design of faster and more powerful ships, but also for gunnery. Indeed, admirals would no longer fight battles at 5,000–10,000 yards, as when Japan crushed a Russian fleet in the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, but rather potentially at 12,000–16,000 yards. Range finding at nine to ten miles, however, presupposed devices and systems enabling shells to hit targets miles beyond what the human eye, or even 1904 state-of-the-art range finders, could achieve. Even though Germany was behind the Royal Navy quantitatively in 1914, the country led Britain in gunnery due to several factors: use of stereoscopic range finders, which enabled operators to plot ranges faster; more experience with centralized fire control, which enabled guns to respond more quickly to moving targets; and superior training of fire controllers to cope with the steep inclination of shells at long range and the frequent alteration of course by enemy ships. German ships “always work with big and rapid alterations of range, and exercise firing while turning,” [20] observed an Austrian naval official. These advances represented another example of military technology offering weaker powers an equalizer (see Section 3). Although this advantage offered much consolation, such technical superiority could not completely allay German anxiety over falling behind.

There was a near inevitability to Germany having fewer ships. For one thing, Britain enjoyed access to income and wealth taxes at the national level, while Germany’s unusual tax structure limited Berlin to taxes on consumption until the first taxes on wealth were levied in 1913–1914, forcing the government to borrow the funds for half of its new dreadnoughts. Even more of a disadvantage, Germany’s army expenditure constrained naval outlays, whereas Britain’s did not. Thus Germany spent 101.8 million pounds on its military in 1913, allotting 78.3 million to the army and 23.8 million to the navy, while Britain’s defense spending totaled 77.1 million, with overall naval expenditure of 48.8 million - double the German level. Germany’s shipbuilding budgets actually fell 15 percent after 1911 due to rapidly rising army spending.

The conviction that sea power, as Mahan had written, could very well decide any struggle compelled the allies of Britain and Germany to enter the frenetic naval race too. Table 3 shows naval strengths, expenditures, and spending increases since the onset of the dreadnought revolution.

Table 3: Dreadnought Battleships and Battle Cruisers, 1914–1915 [21]

These figures indicate that the Royal Navy, however wary it remained of the German challenge, possessed a commanding lead over the High Seas Fleet in 1914 - in ship numbers if not gunnery. This numerical lead would shrink only slightly with newly commissioned ships in 1915 and 1916.Darkening Germany’s prospects further was the fact that Russia and France, both entering the dreadnought competition late, were in the process of extending the overall lead of the Triple Entente to fifty-seven to forty-four by 1916–1917.

This increasingly adverse trend spiked Triple Alliance nervousness about the immediate foreseeable future of 1916 to 1917. The prospect of fighting the Triple Entente was daunting, but German naval leaders, for one, felt better about fighting sooner rather than later. Thus Germany’s fleet father, Tirpitz, worried in October 1913 that Britain’s lead, combined with a shift in German parliamentary funding from navy to army, would leave “the whole fleet policy [of overtaking Britain] in vain.” Tirpitz’s most recent biographer, Patrick J. Kelly, writes that “this sober realism was followed by a fatalistic expression that Germany,” lacking an alternative, “might have to roll the dice in a war.” The chief’s top aide, Eduard von Capelle (1855–1931) , agreed in May 1914. The advantages of the Royal Navy, coupled with the prospect of a wide, long-distance blockade of Germany, “force us in even higher measure than before to throw all upon the offensive.” [22] Obviously, he was thinking of a desperate gamble, a “ Flucht nach vorn ” (“retreat toward the front”). As explained in Section 7, naval leaders in Rome and Vienna, worried about the twelve big ships the French had laid down or budgeted (Table 3), were whistling a variation on this sooner-rather-than-later tune when they considered the Mediterranean situation.

Anxiety was not limited, however, to the Triple Alliance. Indeed, limiting the focus to 1914 alone shows that Austria-Hungary and Italy had built more big vessels for their ally than France and Russia had done thus far for Britain – seven capital ships to four. If Turkey’s two dreadnoughts, completed at great expense in Britain in the summer of 1914, were, perchance, added to the Triple Alliance column, the ratio was nine to four, and the overall lead of the Entente narrowed to only eight ships, an uncomfortably small margin in British eyes. An even more worrisome scenario to British military leaders: what would the thirty-one dreadnoughts and battle cruisers of the Triple Alliance (plus Turkey) do to the mere four state-of-the-art battleships of the French and Russian navies if British politicians, perchance, opted for neutrality?

International Crises and Shooting Wars, 1908-1913 ↑

War scares in the balkans and morocco ↑.

European stability, a tenuous proposition for centuries, quickly unraveled after 1904. The Moroccan crisis of 1905–1906 and the accompanying diplomatic revolution were followed immediately by an escalating naval race of frightening proportions. Then, in 1908, the year Germany launched SMS Nassau , Austria-Hungary annexed the former Turkish province of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Nearly 50 percent Serbian in ethnicity, Bosnia had long been eyed by expansion-minded, adjacent Serbia, which mobilized and called on Slav protector Russia for assistance during the ensuing annexation crisis. Germany backed its Germanic cousins in Vienna, however, and forced Russia, still lamed from the Japanese war, to back down in 1909. This compelled Serbia to acquiesce too, but both Russia and Serbia wanted racial revenge, swearing they would not back down again the next time.

Two years later, Europe again came to the brink of war. In July 1911 a German gunboat anchored in a French Moroccan port, provoking another crisis. The war scare reverberated all summer, each side speaking of insults to national honor and the need to fight. It finally blew over in October without triggering the widely anticipated showdown between alliance blocs.

Like the First Moroccan Crisis, however, serious consequences followed. In Germany, the Navy League, a pressure group for naval expansion, agitated for more ships. Furthermore, a new organization, the Army League, founded in 1912, similarly made propaganda for a massive increase in men and weapons. All patriots questioned whether Wilhelm II, German Emperor (1859–1941) was competently leading the nation and race. Feeling this pressure, the beleaguered emperor swore that next time, “I won’t chicken out.” [23]

As their respective army staffs had done in 1905 and 1906, French and British naval officials now planned coordinated efforts against Germany. Britain would remove its newest pre-dreadnought battleships from the Mediterranean – these improved non-dreadnought vessels continued to be commissioned well into the dreadnought/battle cruiser epoch – leaving only pre-dreadnoughts of 1903–1904 vintage there, but these too would sail home if war erupted. The shift allowed Britain to maximize its combined dreadnought and pre-dreadnought strength at home. France would let Britain protect the Channel, while taking primary responsibility for the Mediterranean itself. Political pressure eventually forced Churchill to reinforce the region with three battle cruisers, but enemies would still have naval superiority in an economically and strategically vital area that included the Suez Canal.

Preparing to seize upon this opportunity amidst rapidly rising tensions in Europe (see also Section 7.2), the Italian and Austro-Hungarian naval staffs in 1913 negotiated intricate operational plans for sea battle in the Mediterranean, the first such plans for this alliance. They intended to defeat the French and the remaining British ships in detail, block the transport of French troops from North Africa to the European theater, and then land Italian divisions in southern France. A German battle cruiser ( SMS Goeben ), supported by Italian light cruisers, would interdict the French transports. Both sides were confident of victory in 1914 or 1915, but no later, given the anticipated completion of French dreadnoughts from mid-1915 through 1917. In 1914, for example, no fewer than thirty-three mostly pre-dreadnought Triple Alliance capital ships (i.e. battleships and heavy/armored cruisers) would confront the twenty-four of France and Britain, prompting Paul G. Halpern to conclude that the Triple Alliance “at the very least posed a serious challenge” [24] to its Mediterranean adversaries. Realizing these operational plans, it is important to note, depended first and foremost on the politicians, not the admirals, in Rome.

Localized War Comes to Europe ↑

In 1908 Young Turk rebels forced Abdülhamid II, Sultan of the Turks (1842–1918) to share power, finally deposing him in 1909. Their goal was to refortify the Ottoman Empire, once the greatest power in Europe’s power struggle. Much like Britain ending its neutrality over the course of 1902 to 1907, this agenda proved extremely destabilizing. Thus the chaos unleashed by Austria-Hungary’s seizure of Bosnia-Herzegovina occurred in part because of the perceived need to take it before Turkey was strong enough to prevent annexation and deny Vienna a strategic advantage on Serbia .

In 1911, similarly, Italy seized Turkish Tripoli (Libya) before Turkey would be strong enough to defend it. To Italy’s surprise, however, the Turks decided to fight. Rome had to wage an unexpectedly difficult campaign requiring the mobilization of 100,000 soldiers and its entire navy. Briefly in late 1911, fighting spread to Constantinople (Istanbul), causing the first casualties on European soil between major European powers since the Russo-Turkish War of 1877. In October 1912, Turkey sued for peace and ceded Tripoli to Italy.

That same year, international crisis and the threat of war spread to Ottoman-controlled territories in the Balkans, where ethnic relations simmered due to the Young Turks’ newfound determination to strengthen their authority there. Although Turkish authorities began cracking down on Muslims and Christians alike in Albania , Kosovo, Macedonia , and Thrace, nationalists in the adjacent independent states of Serbia, Montenegro , Greece , and Bulgaria grew fearful of an impending “extermination” of Christians by Muslims throughout the region. The four small states formed the Balkan League to eliminate the perceived Muslim threat, seize territory from Turkey, and prevent Austria-Hungary from expanding out of Bosnia. The alliance attacked Turkey with 500,000 soldiers in October 1912.

As the Turks retreated from the Balkans, casualties rose shockingly. With Turkish authority crumbling, Christian soldiers and civilians lashed out at Muslims, hanging “spies” and murdering, raping, and burning down villages as payback for the long, brutal Ottoman rule. Although peace finally came in May 1913, war soon broke out again when Bulgaria attacked its former ally Serbia. Greek, Serbian, and Rumanian troops easily defeated the Bulgarians, again perpetrating atrocities against civilians.

The Balkan Wars of 1912 to 1913 could have sparked a European war by pulling in Austria-Hungary, followed in all probability by Russia, Germany, France, and perhaps Britain too. Although both conflicts remained localized, tensions rose, prompting European armies to redouble their armament efforts and brace themselves for the seemingly inevitable wider war.

Army Weapons and Troop Expansion, 1904–1914 ↑

As noted in Section 4.1, the Great Powers had embarked on their RMA and adopted considerable new military technology by 1904. In the decade after 1904, however, these same armies stumbled over themselves in a much more frantic RMA competition with their enemies as second-wave technologies of the Second Industrial Revolution appeared on the military stage.

Only France had adopted semi-recoilless field guns ( see postcard ) by 1904, but Britain, Germany, and Austria-Hungary had them by 1908, followed by Russia, Turkey, and finally Italy. Like those of Russia and Britain before 1904, other armies rapidly deployed twenty-four machine guns ( see photograph ) per division as the years drew on anxiously to 1914; the Turks fell behind after their Balkan debacle, allotting only twelve per division. The Germans initially resisted the machine gun imperative; one leading member of the General Staff, Erich Ludendorff (1865–1937), was proud that he could distinguish between “humbug” [25] and potentially beneficial weapons. Soon enough, however, the Germans followed suit lest they be outgunned. Non-rigid airships ( see photograph ), rigid Zeppelins ( see photograph ), and the first airplanes ( see photograph ) took up station, first experimentally at annual maneuvers and then over battle lines in the shooting wars of 1911 to 1913. Furthermore, telephones and wireless kits, joined by military automobiles, had begun in embryonic form to displace horses as the means of communication and transportation. Few decades in the history of warfare have witnessed as much weapons-related innovative scurrying as the decade before the First World War.

For the most part, however, this was a sort of publicly quiet technological competition that occurred beyond the earshot of the general public, most parliamentary deputies, and even some of the better-informed military beat journalists, who all remained fixated on the numbers of infantry divisions and battleships, not so much on the specifics of the deadly new gadgetry that would accompany the troopers and sailors into battle. Just as with these outsiders, however, even better-informed insiders harbored nagging anxieties about the rapid army and navy buildups, for no expert could know for sure whether tactical and operational adjustments—each side’s RMA—would work well in war.

Table 4: Triple Entente Peacetime Army Strength (with Index Numbers to show percentage changes) [26]

Table 5: Army Expenditures (in Millions of Pounds Sterling, Current Prices, with Index Numbers to show percentage changes), 1904–1914 [27]

Table 6: Triple Alliance and Turkey Peacetime Army Strength (with Index Numbers to show percentage changes) [28]

Table 7: Army Expenditures (in Millions of Pounds Sterling, Current Prices, with Index Numbers to show percentage changes), 1904–1913 [29]

Shifting now from qualitative to quantitative issues, Tables 4-7 show that army strengths remained fairly steady after 1904 until the tension-packed years right before 1914, when the numbers spiked. This trend was very apparent with archrivals France and Germany, but also with Austria-Hungary, the land of the double-headed eagle, which rapidly built up its armaments after 1912, keeping the growing Kingdom of Serbia in view to the south while also fixing a gaze on the Russian giant to the east. The Russian numbers increased dramatically in 1905 as war with Japan escalated, and subsequent years reflected St. Petersburg’s desperate attempts to rebuild. The Turkish figures that exist point to a somewhat smaller but better-funded (and better-equipped) army by 1912 and its subsequent collapse after defeat in 1912–1913. Great Britain, ruler of the waves, was clearly more concerned with naval expansion than army increases, although 1908 to 1913 witnessed a 5 percent increase.

Especially evident in these tables, however, is the behind-the-scenes “quiet” arms race: the consistently more rapid annual increase of new weapon expenditures in the inflation-free environment of pre-1914. Indeed, as explained earlier, one killing device after another was adopted by armies whose fear of being left behind outweighed any skepticism. Thus, shut off from public view, where military planners planned and better-informed political leaders calculated, weapons competition was anything but quiet. It is also striking that the expenditure buildup of the Triple Alliance was more dramatic than the Triple Entente, at least in 1912 and 1913. The qualitative buildup in Italy was the quickest of all, as machine guns, new artillery models, airplanes, and airships were adopted. Would the Turkish War be followed by another regional conflict, this time against France, or Austria-Hungary? Only Italy was expanding its armaments faster than Germany, and close behind those two was Austria-Hungary.

This trend forced France and Russia to respond. France raised army strength nearly 40 percent to 850,000 in 1914 - passing Germany at 811,000 - mainly by extending tours of duty from two to three years in 1913. With more increases in the following years, Germany would fall even farther behind. While still possessing the superior 75-mm gun, France also cut into Germany’s by now extensive lead in heavier caliber field artillery. The number of 155-mm field guns rose to 104, versus 400 German 150-mm pieces, which had to cover two fronts.

The Russian “Great Program” of June 1914 proved more worrisome in Berlin, however, for peacetime army size would rise 45 percent to 1,885,000 by 1917. Russian forces would also improve qualitatively by expanding rapid-firing field guns to 8,358, dwarfing Germany’s total of 6,004 in 1914. Chief of the German General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke (1848-1916) , was somewhat consoled that artillery strength per corps would still be greater, but all things considered, writes Norman Stone, “the pointers for the future were unmistakable.” [30]

It was no surprise, therefore, that Moltke grew increasingly anxious, pressing Minister of War Erich von Falkenhayn (1861–1922) for another troop increase. Moltke even changed his mind from the year before, backing Ludendorff and Army League radicals who believed that only universal conscription, which already existed on paper but not yet in practice, could save the day. It became clear in May 1914 that no further increase could be squeezed out of a stingy parliament whose Left wanted no more consumer taxes, and whose Right was bitterly protesting the new 1913 federal taxes on wealth. In response, Moltke pleaded with the Kaiser :

Getting nowhere with his plea made Moltke - one who had no illusions about the ferocity of modern warfare - eager to sound the tocsins while the odds favored Germany. “If only things would finally boil over,” he declared in early June 1914. “We are ready—the sooner, the better for us.” [31]

Conclusion: The Armaments Race and the Coming of the First World War ↑

Moltke would soon get his wish. On 28 June 1914, Bosnian Serb terrorists   assassinated   Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria-Este (1863-1914) , heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. The transparent involvement of Serbian officials led to war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia a month later. When Russia mobilized its army to aid Serbia, a Slavic ally, Germany also mobilized, declaring war on Russia, and then France, in early August. Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914. The First World War had begun.

German Fears about Russia ↑

Traditional histories have rightly pointed to German war plans to defeat France before shifting troops east as a major cause of the wider European war, for German generals could not wait to attack in the west once Russia mobilized in the east. Recent seminal works by David Stevenson, David G. Herrmann, and Annika Mombauer have refined this discussion by emphasizing the desire of Moltke and other leading military and civilian officials to exploit the July Crisis in order to wage a “sooner the better” preventative war.

Mombauer’s research is particularly rich in documentation. She cites the report of the Saxon military attaché in Berlin, who had spoken with Moltke’s deputy on 3 July 1914:

Viktor Naumann (1865-1927) , a well-informed journalist, had the same impression:

Later in the month, the Saxon attaché again reported Moltke saying: “We would never again find a situation as favorable as now, when neither France nor Russia had completed the extension of their army organizations.” An aide to German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg (1856–1921) heard the chancellor express these same worries about “Russia’s increasing [armaments] demands and amazing potential—in a few years no longer possible to fend off.” After the war, Bethmann Hollweg admitted, “Yes, by God, in a way it was a preventative war,” for military leaders had “declared that [in 1914] it was still possible [to fight the war] without being defeated, in two years’ time no longer!” [32]

There was, of course, still the kaiser to convince. Against his better judgment and gentler instincts, this time he did not back away from the conflict. Looking at the question of responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914 from an armaments perspective, Germany’s share of the guilt definitely increases.

The Naval Race and Britain’s Declaration of War ↑

“What really determines the foreign policy of this country is sea power,” [33] Foreign Secretary Grey declared in 1911, succinctly identifying Britain’s national interest in aligning with the Triple Entente. In 1914, similarly, nagging fears about Triple Alliance sea power induced Britain’s policy decision for belligerency, for neutrality would have allowed Germany to sweep the seas of French vessels. Afterwards, Germany would be so powerful that the Royal Navy could not stop its rival from establishing European and worldwide supremacy. In July, Grey’s assistant, Sir Eyre Crowe (1864–1925), stated:

Grey used the same reasoning for war before the House of Commons:

Like Germany, Britain’s imperial interests dictated fighting, and the sooner, the better.

There was an additional reason for haste in putting to sea at battle stations: the possibility that Germany, falling quantitatively behind in the naval race, would disperse some of its fleet overseas. For years, in fact, Germany had discussed doing just this. The idea was championed by Heinrich, Prince of Prussia (1862–1929) , the Kaiser’s younger brother and a high-ranking naval commander. He favored an English-friendly foreign and naval policy, but if war came he thought it wiser to have a portion of the fleet abroad to challenge the British Empire.

Heinrich and his faction registered some success with redeployment of two intimidating battle cruisers, Goeben ( see photograph ) and Moltke , the former to the Mediterranean in 1913, the latter scheduled to reinforce the two fast armored cruisers of Germany’s China squadron in 1914. In late 1913, furthermore, the “Detached Division” put to sea, visiting West Africa and South America before returning in mid-June 1914. The Detached Division included two of the newest dreadnoughts, Kaiser and König Albert . Its commander, Adolf von Trotha (1868–1940) , claimed that in wartime his flotilla would force Britain to redeploy between ten and fifteen ships from home waters to hunt him down, thus altering strength ratios in Germany’s favor in the North Sea.

Indeed, Germany’s overseas experiments influenced Royal Navy actions during the day before Britain’s ultimatum to Germany. With ships already guarding the Channel on 3 August 1914 against a sortie of the High Seas Fleet — the British embassy in Berlin had reported impending “important naval maneuvers”—attention shifted later that night to alleged German plans to put raiders on the trade routes prior to potential hostilities with Britain. To intercept any battle cruisers, converted luxury liners, armed merchant ships, and other “commerce destroyers,” [36] the main battle fleet was ordered into the North Sea and a cruiser squadron headed by the Invincible to assemble at Queenstown, Ireland. A North Sea battle against the entire German fleet if it decided to break out was risky, to be sure; the war could be lost or won in a single afternoon. But it was still not as risky as the nightmare scenario of wild hunts for German raiders while diminished strength in home waters left Britain more vulnerable to German attack and invasion.

The Naval Race and Turkey’s Entry into the War ↑

To further increase the odds of winning this showdown North Sea battle, the Admiralty confiscated two super-dreadnoughts in early August, just days before their Turkish crews, already in Britain, could set sail. The bold coup became a major variable in a formula adding up to Turkish belligerency. Although Constantinople had negotiated an alliance with Germany in late July, this was seen mainly as a German shield against Russia and support during a potential Third Balkan War directed against Greece and Serbia, not a full-fledged entry into war against the entire Triple Entente (which most Young Turks opposed). But Britain’s confiscating act was “one of those incidents,” writes historian Alan Moorehead, that:

Within the Ottoman inner circle triumvirate of Mehmed Talat Pasha (1874-1921) , Ismail Enver Pasha (1881-1922) , and Ahmed Cemal Pasha (1872-1922) , only Enver favored a wild leap into world war in early August. After the ship seizures, however, Cemal’s “mental anguish” over this insult moved him to demand, on the very day the news arrived, that Britain repay the 5 million pounds. Then, on 9 August, he insisted on the impossible: that Britain return the two dreadnoughts themselves “forthwith” [38] if Turkey were to remain neutral in the war. The same day, Constantinople warned Turkish sea captains in Mediterranean harbors that “war with England is not unlikely,” [39] which explains why Enver asked for German help a week later to fortify the Dardanelles. Talat also mobilized his Committee of National Defense to galvanize “the man in the street” in “popular demonstrations and indignations against Britain.” [40] Germany added fuel to the fire by promising to pay the money Turkey lost on the dreadnoughts if the Ottoman Empire joined the war. After Enver asked, moreover, Berlin permitted the battle cruiser Goeben and light cruiser Breslau to enter the Turkish navy as another friendly compensation for the vessels that Britain had taken. Although various factors prolonged the process of declaring belligerency, the Russian ambassador to Turkey reported in early October that the loss of the two warships had inflamed feelings against the Triple Entente, and especially against Britain, in both government circles and “public opinion,” [41] making it all but certain that if and when Turkey entered the fray it would be on Germany’s side. In late October, Enver ordered Goeben to lead Breslau and two pre-dreadnoughts that Turkey had purchased from Germany in 1910 into the Black Sea to bombard the Russian Crimea, thereby triggering war between Turkey and the Triple Entente.

In conclusion, the armaments race both resulted from, and further heightened, tensions among all of the Great Powers in the decade leading up to 1914. It factored especially heavily into the decisions for war in Germany, Britain, and Turkey. The latter two nations’ entry into the war, more than anything else, transformed what was to be a largely European conflict into a genuine world war.

Eric Dorn Brose, Drexel University

Section Editors: Annika Mombauer ; William Mulligan

• ↑ Citations in Steiner, Zara S.: Britain and the Origins of the First World War. New York 2003, p. 216.
• ↑ For a selection of works advancing these arguments, see Dülffer, Jost / Holl, Karl (eds.): Bereitzum Krieg.Kriegsmentalität im wilhelminischen Deutschland 1890-1914, Göttingen 1986; Berghahn, Volker R.: Germany and the Approach of War in 1914. New York 1973); Kehr, Eckart: Der Primat der Innenpolitik. Berlin 1965; Dangerfield, George: The Strange Death of Liberal England 1910-1914. New York 1961; Adams, Michael C. C.: The Great Adventure. Male Desire and the Coming of World War I, Bloomington 1990; Mosse, George L.: The Image of Man. The Creation of Modern Masculinity, Oxford 1996; Chickering, Roger: We Men Who Feel Most German. A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886-1914, Boston 1984; Tuchman, Barbara: The Proud Tower. A Portrait of the World before the War, New York 1966; and Sheehan, James J.: Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe, Boston 2008.
• ↑ Stevenson, David: Armaments and the Coming of War. Europe, 1904-1914, Oxford 1996; Herrmann, David G.: The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War, Princeton 1996; and Mombauer, Annika: Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War, Cambridge, UK 2001.
• ↑ Marder, Arthur J.: From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow. The Royal Navy in the Fisher Era, volume 1, London 1961; Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War 1973; Kennedy, Paul M.: The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism. London 1982; Massie, Robert K.: Dreadnought. Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War, New York 1991; and Seligmann, Matthew S.: The Royal Navy and the German Threat. Admiralty Plans to Protect British Trade in a War Against Germany, Oxford 2012.
• ↑ Sumida, Jon Tetsuro: In Defence of Naval Supremacy. Finance, Technology, and British Naval Policy 1889-1914, London 1993; and Lambert, Nicholas A.: Sir John Fischer’s Naval Revolution. Columbia 1999.
• ↑ For an excellent discussion of the origins and evolution of this term, see Berghahn, Volker R.: Militarism.The History of an International Debate 1861-1979, Cambridge 1984.
• ↑ Lafore, Laurence: The Long Fuse. An Interpretation of the Origins of World War I, Philadelphia 1971.
• ↑ Hammond, Grant T.: Plowshares into Swords. Arms Races in International Politics, 1840-1991, Columbia 1993, p. 103.
• ↑ Brose, Eric Dorn: A History of Europe in the Twentieth Century. New York 2005, p. 8.
• ↑ Knox, MacGregor / Murray, Williamson: Thinking about Revolutions in Warfare, in: Knox, MacGregor / Murray, Williamson (eds.): The Dynamics of Military Revolution 1300-2050.Cambridge, UK 2001, pp. 11–14.
• ↑ Herrmann, Arming of Europe, p. 234; Stevenson, Armaments, p. 8.
• ↑ Halpern, Mediterranean Naval Situation, pp. 370-379; Holger H.Herwig, ‘Luxury’ Fleet: The Imperial German Navy 1888-1918, London 1980, pp. 263, 267; Massie, Dreadnought, p. 462; Stevenson, Armaments, p. 7.
• ↑ See Dülffer, Jost / Kröger, Martin /Wippich, Rolf-Harald (eds.):Vermiedene Kriege. Deeskalation von Konflikten der Grossmächte zwischen Krimkrieg und Erstem Weltkrieg (1856-1914), Munich 1997.
• ↑ Herrmann, Arming of Europe 1996, p. 7.
• ↑ Seligmann, Royal Navy and the German Threat 2012, p. 72.
• ↑ Lambert, Fisher’s Naval Revolution 1999, p. 177.
• ↑ Seligmann, Royal Navy and the German Threat 2012, p. ii. For his analysis of the origins of battle cruisers, and their unfortunate evolution to ships of the line, see pp. 65-88.
• ↑ Massie, Dreadnought 1991, p. 698.
• ↑ Ibid.,p. 817.
• ↑ Sumida, In Defence 1993, p. 302.
• ↑ Halpern, Mediterranean Naval Situation, pp. 370-377; Herwig, ‘Luxury’ Fleet, pp. 273, 277; Stevenson, Armaments, pp. 7-8. See Notes 3-4 and 23
• ↑ Citations in Kelly, Patrick J.: Tirpitz and the Imperial German Navy. Bloomington 2011, pp. 352, 353.
• ↑ Hull, Isabel V.: The Entourage of Kaiser Wilhelm II 1888-1918. New York 1982, p. 238.
• ↑ Halpern, Mediterranean Naval Situation 1971, p. 256. For his analysis, see pp. 220-279, especially pp. 226-233, pp. 255-256, and the Appendix, p. 371.
• ↑ Brose, Eric Dorn: The Kaiser’s Army. The Politics of Military Technology in Germany during the Machine Age, 1870-1918, New York 2001, p. 144.
• ↑ Herrmann, Arming of Europe, p. 234; Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, New York 1989, p. 203; Stevenson, Armaments, 8.
• ↑ Erickson, Edward J.: The Near East and the First World War. Turkey Prepares for War 1913-1914, in: Relevance 9/2 (2000), pp. 3-11; Hermann, Arming of Europe 1996, p. 234; Stevenson, Armaments 1996, p. 8.
• ↑ Stone, Norman: The Eastern Front 1914-1917, London 1998, p. 29.
• ↑ Citations in Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke 2001, pp. 176, 182.
• ↑ Citations in ibid., pp. 187–189, 201.
• ↑ Massie, Dreadnought 1991, p. 592.
• ↑ Crowe’s minutes of 24 July 1914 are printed in Gooch, G. P. et al. (eds.): British Documents on the Origins of the War 1898-1914. London 1926, vol. 11, pp. 81–82.
• ↑ Cited in Grey, Edward (Viscount Grey of Fallodon): Twenty-Five Years 1892-1916. New York 1925, vol. 2, pp. 29-30.
• ↑ Citations in Corbett, Julian S.:Naval Operations to the Battle of the Falklands December 1914.London 1938, pp. 28-32, 40.
• ↑ Moorhead, Alan:Gallipoli.New York 2002, pp. 16-17.
• ↑ Cemal, Ahmad:Memories of a Turkish Statesman. New York 1922, p. 117; and Yasamee, F.A.K.: Ottoman Empire, in: Wilson, Keith (ed.): Decisions for War, 1914. New York 1995, p. 247.
• ↑ Aksakal, Mustafa: The Ottoman Road to War in 1914. The Ottoman Empire and the First World War, Cambridge, UK 2008, p. 109.
• ↑ Ahmad, Feroz: The Young Turks. The Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics 1908-1914, Oxford 1989, p. 162.
• ↑ Aksakal, Ottoman Road to War 2008, p. 135
• Aksakal, Mustafa: The Ottoman road to war in 1914. The Ottoman Empire and the First World War , Cambridge 2008: Cambridge University Press.
• Berghahn, Volker R.: Germany and the approach of war in 1914 , New York 1973: St. Martin's Press.
• Brose, Eric Dorn: The Kaiser's army. The politics of military technology in Germany during the machine age, 1870-1918 , Oxford 2006: Oxford University Press.
• Erickson, Edward J.: The Near East and the First World War. Turkey prepares for war, 1913-1914 , in: Relevance 9/2, 2000, pp. 3-11.
• Halpern, Paul G.: The Mediterranean naval situation, 1908-1914 , Cambridge 1971: Harvard University Press.
• Herrmann, David G.: The arming of Europe and the making of the First World War , Princeton 1996: Princeton University Press.
• Herwig, Holger H.: 'Luxury fleet'. The imperial German navy, 1888-1918 , London; Boston 1980: Allen & Unwin.
• Kennedy, Paul M.: The rise of the Anglo-German antagonism, 1860-1914 , London; Boston 1980: Allen & Unwin.
• Kennedy, Paul M.: The rise and fall of the great powers. Economic change and military conflict from 1500 to 2000 , New York 1987: Random House.
• Kronenbitter, Günther: 'Krieg im Frieden'. Die Führung der k.u.k. Armee und die Großmachtpolitik Österreich-Ungarns 1906-1914 , Munich 2003: Oldenbourg.
• Massie, Robert K.: Dreadnought. Britain, Germany, and the coming of the Great War , New York 1991: Random House.
• McNeill, William Hardy: The pursuit of power. Technology, armed force, and society since A.D. 1000 , Chicago 1982: University of Chicago Press.
• Mombauer, Annika: Helmuth von Moltke and the origins of the First World War , Cambridge; New York 2001: Cambridge University Press.
• Stevenson, David: Armaments and the coming of war. Europe, 1904-1914 , Oxford; New York 1996: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press.
• Williamson, Jr., Samuel R.: Austria-Hungary and the origins of the First World War , New York 1991: St. Martin's Press.

Brose, Eric: Arms Race prior to 1914, Armament Policy , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI : 10.15463/ie1418.10219 .

This text is licensed under: CC by-NC-ND 3.0 Germany - Attribution, Non-commercial, No Derivative Works.

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