The Global Arms Race and Efforts for Disarmament

Every year, the world spends a staggering amount of money preparing for war. In 2024, global military expenditure climbed to a record $2,718 billion, the steepest annual rise since the end of the Cold War. To put that in perspective, the figure stood at roughly $1.75 trillion in 2012, which means spending on armies, missiles, and weapons systems has grown by more than 50 percent in just over a decade. This relentless accumulation of weapons, known as the arms race, sits in direct tension with the world’s stated goal of peace. This post examines what the arms race is, why it continues to accelerate, and how the United Nations and the international community have tried to slow it down through disarmament.

What is an arms race? 🔗

An arms race is a competition between states to build up military capability faster than their rivals. When one country expands its arsenal, neighbours and rivals feel compelled to do the same. This creates a spiral in which each side keeps adding weapons not necessarily to attack, but to avoid being left vulnerable. The classic example is the Cold War nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, but arms races happen at the conventional level too, in the buildup of tanks, fighter jets, submarines, and missiles.

The driving logic is the “security dilemma.” Measures one state takes to feel safer often make its neighbours feel less safe, prompting them to arm in response. The result is that everyone spends more, yet no one ends up more secure. This dynamic is visible in recent figures: SIPRI reports that for the second consecutive year, military spending rose in all five of the world’s geographical regions, reflecting heightened tensions almost everywhere.

Why spending keeps climbing 🔗

The single biggest driver in recent years has been armed conflict. The Russia-Ukraine war pushed Russia’s military spending up by 38 percent in a single year, while conflicts in West Asia drove a sharp rise in the Middle East. Closer to home, India remains one of the world’s largest military spenders. The top five spenders, the United States, China, Russia, Germany, and India, together accounted for 60 percent of the global total.

This points to a sobering reality for any student of international politics: the resources poured into weapons are resources not spent on health, education, and development. The UN Secretary-General has warned that this surge is directly undermining progress on the Sustainable Development Goals, with projections suggesting global military expenditure could reach between $4.7 and $6.6 trillion by 2035 if current trends hold.

What disarmament means 🔗

Disarmament is the effort to reduce, limit, or eliminate weapons. It is the deliberate attempt to reverse the arms race spiral. It is useful to distinguish between a few related ideas. Disarmament aims at actually getting rid of weapons. Arms control is more modest, setting agreed limits on how many weapons states may hold or how they may be used. Non-proliferation focuses on stopping weapons, especially nuclear ones, from spreading to new states. In practice, most international agreements blend these goals.

Disarmament is rarely about one country giving up its weapons unilaterally. Because of the security dilemma, states will only reduce arsenals if they trust that others are doing the same. This is why verification, the ability to check whether everyone is keeping their promises, lies at the heart of every serious disarmament treaty.

The UN and the architecture of disarmament 🔗

The United Nations has placed disarmament at the centre of its mission since its founding. Through decades of negotiation, the international community has built several multilateral treaties aimed at regulating, restricting, or eliminating certain categories of weapons. These cover nuclear, chemical, biological, and conventional arms. Within the UN, the First Committee of the General Assembly handles disarmament and international security, while the Office for Disarmament Affairs coordinates the wider effort.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 🔗

The cornerstone of the nuclear order is the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, or NPT, which opened for signature in 1968 and entered into force in 1970. Its three goals are to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy, and to pursue nuclear disarmament. With 191 states having joined, more countries have ratified the NPT than any other arms limitation agreement, making it the most widely accepted treaty of its kind.

India is notable here as one of a small group of countries that has never signed the NPT. India’s position is that the treaty is discriminatory because it divides the world into nuclear “haves” and “have-nots,” locking in the privileges of the five recognised nuclear-weapon states while asking everyone else to permanently forgo the option. This long-standing critique is an important part of how the disarmament debate plays out for students examining international institutions.

The Chemical Weapons Convention 🔗

One of the genuine success stories of disarmament is the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which opened for signature in 1993 and entered into force in April 1997 with an elaborate verification regime. What makes the CWC significant is that, unlike earlier agreements that only banned the use of chemical weapons, it prohibits their development, production, stockpiling, acquisition, transfer, and use altogether. It is overseen by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, and the world’s largest stockpiles, held by the United States and Russia, have been brought under its rules. The CWC shows that, with strong verification, a whole class of weapons can be placed under near-universal prohibition.

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty 🔗

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) was adopted in 1996 and bans all nuclear test explosions, supported by a global monitoring system that can detect blasts anywhere on Earth. Yet the CTBT illustrates the frustrating gap between ambition and reality. Despite being signed by most countries, the treaty has still not entered into force because a specific list of key states, including India, must ratify it first, and several have not. The treaty therefore exists in a kind of legal limbo, widely respected in practice but never formally binding.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons 🔗

The most recent addition is the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), adopted in 2017. It grew out of deep concern about the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons. The TPNW seeks a complete ban, but none of the nuclear-armed states have joined it, which limits its practical force while still building moral and political pressure.

Nuclear-weapon-free zones 🔗

Alongside global treaties, the UN has encouraged regional agreements that declare entire areas off-limits to nuclear weapons. The first of these was the Treaty of Tlatelolco, which created a nuclear-weapon-free zone across Latin America and the Caribbean. Similar zones now cover Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Africa, and the South Pacific.

These zones matter because they reduce the geographic spread of nuclear danger and give regional groups of states a shared commitment to keep their neighbourhood free of the world’s deadliest weapons. They are also a reminder that disarmament does not have to be global to be meaningful; progress can be built region by region.

The illegal arms trade and conventional weapons 🔗

While nuclear weapons dominate headlines, it is conventional weapons, especially small arms and light weapons, that cause the vast majority of deaths in today’s conflicts. Rifles, machine guns, and ammunition are cheap, portable, and easy to smuggle, which makes them the weapons of choice in civil wars, insurgencies, and organised crime.

The illicit trade in these weapons is a major obstacle to peace. UN officials have stressed that illicit and unregulated arms transfers can instigate, fuel, and prolong conflict, armed violence, terrorism, and crime, and destabilise entire regions. Weapons that leak out of legal supply chains end up arming groups that no government can fully control, turning local disputes into prolonged wars.

The Arms Trade Treaty 🔗

To tackle this, the General Assembly adopted the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) in 2013. It establishes common international standards for the import, export, and transfer of conventional weapons, aiming to keep arms from flowing to those who would use them for atrocities or to fuel conflict. Many states hailed it as a breakthrough, with one delegate calling it the greatest achievement in international law in the recent past. Alongside the ATT, the UN runs a Programme of Action on small arms, which asks states to track and control their weapons stockpiles.

Why disarmament remains so difficult 🔗

Despite this dense web of treaties, the arms race continues to accelerate. Several reasons explain the gap between intention and outcome. First, treaties depend on trust and verification, and in a tense world, states are reluctant to disarm while rivals remain armed. Second, the most powerful weapons, nuclear arsenals, are held by exactly the states least willing to give them up, since these weapons are seen as the ultimate guarantee of security. Third, the global arms industry is economically powerful, and weapons exports are a source of profit and political influence.

The peaceful use of nuclear energy adds another layer of complexity. The NPT promises non-nuclear states access to civilian nuclear technology in exchange for forgoing weapons. But the same technology that powers reactors can, in the wrong hands, be diverted toward weapons, which is why agencies like the International Atomic Energy Agency play a constant monitoring role. Balancing the right to peaceful energy against the risk of proliferation is one of the hardest problems in this field.

A fragile but real progress 🔗

It would be easy to conclude that disarmament has failed given record military spending. That would be too pessimistic. The Chemical Weapons Convention has nearly eliminated an entire class of weapons. Nuclear-weapon-free zones now cover large parts of the globe. The number of nuclear weapons worldwide is far below Cold War peaks. These achievements show that international institutions, working patiently over decades, can change state behaviour.

The challenge is that progress in disarmament is slow and reversible, while the pressures driving the arms race, fear, rivalry, and conflict, can intensify quickly. The work of the UN and its treaties is therefore less about winning a final victory and more about holding the line, keeping channels of negotiation open, and gradually building norms that make weapons less acceptable.

What do you think? If India’s long-standing objection is that treaties like the NPT are discriminatory, what kind of disarmament framework would be fair enough to win the support of every nation? And as global military spending hits record highs year after year, do you believe international institutions can realistically reverse the arms race, or only manage to slow it down?

References

1. https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2025/unprecedented-rise-global-military-expenditure-european-and-middle-east-spending-surges
2. https://www.sipri.org/publications/2025/sipri-fact-sheets/trends-world-military-expenditure-2024
3. https://theglobalobservatory.org/2025/10/soaring-global-military-spending-is-sidelining-the-sdgs/
4. https://un.org/en/global-issues/disarmament
5. https://disarmament.unoda.org/en/our-work/weapons-mass-destruction/nuclear-weapons/treaty-non-proliferation-nuclear-weapons
6. https://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/resources/fact-sheets/treaties
7. https://disarmament.unoda.org/en/our-work/weapons-mass-destruction/nuclear-weapons/treaty-prohibition-nuclear-weapons
8. https://press.un.org/en/2021/gadis3670.doc.htm
9. https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15252.doc.htm
10. https://press.un.org/en/2013/gadis3478.doc.htm