The Arms Race and Command Economies since 1945 373New models of old weapons with improved performance capa
bilities were disturbing enough to the world’s power balances. The
further possibility that some device of a quite different kind might
suddenly open a new avenue for paralyzing violence also pre
vented the world’s great powers from settling down to any stable,
trusting accommodation with one another. Breakthroughs in chemical
or biological warfare might at any time create an end run around the
atomic balance of terror. But what seemed particularly promising for
the 1980s were various kinds of “death rays” traveling with the speed
of light. Such beams, launched from space vehicles, might be expected
to intercept incoming missiles, or perhaps even destroy them in their
launch sites. The merest glimmer of such a possibility introduced a
profound instability in the balance of terror that had prevailed since
the 1960s.
Clearly, competition for strategic advantage by dint of some new
breakthrough in the design of a secret weapon was impossible to
exorcise in a world where rival states feared one another. Mounting
costs, as successive generations of weapons became more and more
elaborate, constituted a brake of sorts. But interested parties, seeking
new contracts in the USA or assignment of new resources of man
power and materiel in the USSR, could always point with alarm to
research and development efforts undertaken by the other side.
Political managers had somehow to balance demands from the civilian
economy against the ravenous appetite for new resources that military
research and development teams regularly exhibited. Decisions for
and against particular weapons systems and development programs in
the United States often induced a mirror image response in the USSR.
But much remained secret, especially in Russia. The fiscal and moral
uncertainties as well as the technological and engineering uncer
tainties that had manifested themselves so fatefully before World
War I in connection with the Anglo-German naval race^12 haunted
policy makers in both countries. The difference was that the cost of
error had multiplied many times over in the intervening decades.
Space spectaculars tended, perhaps, to disguise the fact that the
arms race was not limited to the USA and USSR, nor were the two
superpowers solely concerned with rockets and atomic warheads.
Table 3 summarizes the extraordinary growth of military expenditure
that took place in the post-World War II decades. These figures are
liable to enormous errors because of budgetary subterfuges and the
arbitrary exchange rates that must be assigned in reducing money
- See above, chap. 8.