Towards a Dynamic Two-Theater Model of the East-West Arms Race

In recent years social scientists have advanced a number of arms race models. Broadly speaking, these investigations have yielded two types of models: the earlier, predominantly theoretical approaches of Richardson (1960), Smoker (1963a, b; 1966), Intriligator (1964), Caspary (1967), and Wolfson (1968), and the more recent statistical (econometric) models of Strauss (1971) and Lambelet (1971) which use data on deflated defense expenditures in an effort to quantify the behavioral parameters suggested by theory.’ However, statistical models based on defense expenditures suffer from at least one defect,’ that is, they are by necessity highly aggregated. Since the only available data in general are total defense expenditures, the interaction between the participants in an arms race is implicitly considered to be a homogeneous, undifferentiated, “global” process taking place in one theater only. In particular no distinction is made between the strategic and non-strategic functions of the relevant military establishments; concomitantly the possibility that the confrontation between the protagonists may take place in more than one theater is ignored. In the case of the East-West arms race, it is obvious (if only from the separate SALT and MBFR‘ negotiations) that the distinction between, at least, the strategic and non-strategic forces of the participants is an essential one. This is why defense-expenditure models of the East-West race (such as the one by Strauss 1971) in general cannot be related to