World Arms Race

Report Outline
Accelerated Competition in Armaments
Foreign Relations and Military Policy
Failure of Efforts to Limit Armaments
Special Focus

Accelerated Competition in Armaments

Objective and Hazards of Western Rearmament

Debate in Congress on appropriations for the national military establishment and for foreign aid has underscored the massive scope of the rearmament program of the United States and its allies. It has likewise brought renewed expression of fears as to the final outcome of the arms race into which the western nations have been swept, seemingly without choice. And it has given occasion for fresh warnings of the probable economic consequences of attempting to carry for long the burden of arms expenditures on the current scale.

Communist military aggression in Korea produced a sharp change in the tempo and extent of western rearmament but as Secretary of State Acheson recently emphasized, “It was not Korea alone that was the reason for our defense effort.” The basic reason, he pointed out, lay in the “threatening proportions” of Soviet power and the unwillingness of the Kremlin “to work for a stable and peaceful world.” American policy, Acheson said, “seeks to block Soviet expansionism, without war, by building an effective system of collective security and by making it strong,” Until the free nations have “fully repaired their military weakness,” he maintained, “the danger of war and of disintegration will continue.”

Gen. Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has stressed the point that the present rearmament program is designed primarily to meet long-range defense needs and not to provide military forces in being large enough to win a total war. But despite the limited nature of the objective, the sheer size of the effort required to achieve it gives the program an inevitably competitive character in the existing state of world affairs. Although few persons dispute the necessity of repairing the military weakness of the free nations, concern has been voiced lest this new arms race, like others before it, lead only to war.