Suchergebnisse

"To Arms, To Arms: What Do We Know About Arms Races?" published on by Oxford University Press.

The most widely used theoretical framework in international relations is realism. Realism takes many forms, and there have been hundreds of writings on the topic. In the United States, the two most popular exemplars of realism are Morgenthau (Morgenthau & Thompson, 1985; original 1948) and Waltz (1979). There is no systematic attempt to incorporate civil wars into the realist framework. In this paper, we use a computer simulation to explore the impact of a state's civil war experience on its interstate war experience. The results suggest that a state's civil war experience can have an impact on its interstate war experience.

The empirical literature on arms races has often failed to find strong evidence of the existence of arms races among "obvious" dyads. In this article it is argued that if we assume that decision makers use simple rules and concentrate on the weapons stock of their rivals, we can produce highly accurate models. These premises are tested by examining the size of the British navy from 1860 to 1913. The results offer support for this line of argument.

The defense of Western Europe from a Soviet/Warsaw Pact attack has been a major preoccupation of U.S. national security decision makers for the past 40 years. It has recently received renewed attention in the wake of the INF Treaty. This paper presents a tool for analyzing NATO's ability to stop a Warsaw Pact blitzkrieg without the use of nuclear weapons: a computer simulation. The model is based on the earlier work of Joshua Epstein. After the essence of a blitzkrieg and the model are described, several scenarios are explored using both. The results of the blitzkrieg model, while not as optimistic as those of Epstein, do offer some hope for NATO's ability to stop the Warsaw Pact.