To Arms, To Arms: What Do We Know About Arms Races?

Arms races are important phenomenon They can involve the commitment of vast amounts of resources that might otherwise be used to help societies. And arms races can be a cause of war, although there is a debate on how this happens. With the arrival of the behavioral revolution in international relations, the number of quantitative studies of arms races exploded. But with the end of the Cold War, interest in studying arms races declined sharply. This is unfortunate because it is fair to say that most of the important questions involving arms races were not resolved in the empirical work that was done during the period of the Cold War.