Thomas W. Zarzecki - Arms Diffusion: The Spread of Military Innovations in the International System

Edited by
Stuart Bruchey
Alan Nevins Professor Emeritus
Columbia University

S TUART BRUCHEY , General Editor

S OCIAL P ARTNERSHIPS AND S OCIAL R ELATIONS

New Strategies in Workforce and Economic Development

Janet Boguslaw

G ENDERING E THNICITY

Implications for Democracy Assistance

Lori Handrahan

G AY L IFE IN THE F ORMER USSR

Fraternity without Community

Daniel P. Schluter

C HAPTER 1
T HE G LOBAL D IFFUSION OF A RMS

C HAPTER 2
T HE A RMS T RADE , P ROLIFERATION, AND D IFFUSION : A L ITERATURE R EVIEW

C HAPTER 3
D EVELOPING T HEORETICAL M ODELS OF A RMS D IFFUSION : W HY D O A RMS D IFFUSE ?

C HAPTER 4
A RMS D IFFUSION AND THE N ATURE OF M ILITARY I NNOVATION

C HAPTER 5
T HE D IFFUSION OF A RMS : M APPING THE E MPIRICAL T ERRAIN

C HAPTER 6
T ESTING M ODELS OF A RMS D IFFUSION

Summary of Findings

C HAPTER 7
T HE F UTURE OF A RMS D IFFUSION

A PPENDIX A
W EAPON S YSTEMS D ESIGNATIONS AND N OMENCLATURE

A PPENDIX B
C OMBAT A IRCRAFT

A PPENDIX C
A TTACK H ELICOPTERS

A PPENDIX D
M AIN B ATTLE T ANKS

A PPENDIX E
G ROUND -B ASED S URFACE-TO -A IR M ISSILES I: L ONG -R ANGE SAMs

A PPENDIX F
G ROUND -B ASED S URFACE-TO -A IR M ISSILES II: P OINT -D EEENSE SAMs

A PPENDIX G
G ROUND -B ASED S URFACE-TO -A IR M ISSILES III: S HOULDER -F IRED PADs

A PPENDIX H
A NTI -T ANK G UIDED M ISSILES

A PPENDIX I
S TATE D IFFUSION S CORES B Y R EGION

T HE GLOBAL SPREAD OF ADVANCED MILITARY ARMAMENTS CAN BE USEFULLY characterized as a diffusion process, defined as the communication of innovations among the units of a social system over time. But what causes innovations in military technology to diffuse across the international system? The answer to this seemingly basic question is critically important to any understanding of the spread of arms. Despite this, it is rarely posed or addressed in so general and direct a manner. Scholars and policy analysts have written volumes of specific case studies on arms exporters, arms importers, and categories of military technologies. These studies usually contain numerous implicit and explicit explanations of why nations acquire armaments. Many descriptive and prescriptive overviews of the arms trade also attempt to explain the rationale behind arms transfers. However, there have been few if any empirical studies which attempt to systematically measure the rate of the spread of specific arms technologies across the international system as a whole. Fewer still then use this data to test theoretical causal hypotheses. This project attempts to fill this gap in our understanding of the arms proliferation phenomenon.

This chapter is divided into three parts. The first part centers on the significance of the global spread of arms in the post-Cold War era. The changed global strategic environment has clearly placed arms proliferation at the center of current security concerns. I discuss the key factors which have lent it this newfound prominence. The second part details the views of arms spread throughout the Cold War period. I explain how these perspectives evolved over time to accommodate changing global circumstances. The third part outlines how the idea of arms diffusion provides a new framework for analyzing the spread of arms in the post-Cold War era. Arms diffusion is conceived of as a singular global process. This allows it to be tracked, measured, and analyzed in a systematic fashion. A concluding segment outlines the chapters that follow.

Many policy-makers now publically rank the global spread of armaments as one of, if not the most, critical global security issues of the post-Cold War era. U.S. Representative Lee Hamilton (1992, 40) has argued that the greatest security danger of the 1990s is weapons proliferation. Shortly after taking office, the Clinton Administration promised an enormous priority placed on the issue of counter-proliferation (Starr 1993a). And in the view of the Pentagon, the spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons represents a threat nearly as big as the specter of global conflict between Moscow and Washington during the cold war (Weiner 1996).

These views are not restricted to U.S., or even Western, decision-makers. Sergei Kortunov, a Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs official, has described weapons proliferation as the major challenge of the 1990s (Kortunov 1994a). In 1993, then-Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov claimed that tracking international proliferation was a priority task of the Russia Foreign Intelligence Service (Starr 1993b). According to Masahiko Hosokawa, a senior official in Japans Ministry of International Trade and Industry, Japan considers it especially important to restrict arms proliferation in the East Asian region. As a result, Japan planned for the first time to undertake a major regional security initiative to put an export control regime in place in the 1990s (Ebata 1993). Finally, no less multinational a body than the United Nations Security Council issued a congruent statement at the end of its January 1992 summit. It read that proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was a threat to international peace and security (codewords for justifying the use of force), and committed member states] to concerted follow-up actions to strengthen non-proliferation approaches (Roberts 1993, 139).