Although the 18 th century witnessed less bloodshed, the peaceful respites were more like armed standoffs. On the bottom lay resentful subjugated groups like the Irish, Finns, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Croats; formerly dispossessed peoples like the Rumanians, Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbs had recently reestablished minor states for themselves, but longed to expand them.
Other surviving ethnic groups like the Swedes, Danes, Dutch, and Spanish remained peoples with states, but had dropped out of the power struggle. At the top of this hierarchy were the great dominant nation-states, many of them conquerors of other peoples: Great Britain, France , Italy , Germany , Austria-Hungary , Russia , and the Ottoman Empire see map.
Some of these greater nation-states were very powerful, especially Germany, France, and Britain, while the others, especially Ottoman Turkey, worried about catching up or falling out. Whatever their status, all eyed one another warily as they jockeyed for position and began to choose sides and form alliances , seemingly readying themselves for a showdown.
The biggest worry for Suttner and other pacifists, including Swedish explosives manufacturer Alfred Nobel — , was the technological dynamism of the time coupled with the frightening military implications of these material changes.
Reinforcing rival pacifist efforts , the so-called Second International socialist movement also strove to stop the wheels of war from running over the workingmen of the world. But the socialist notion of a general strike — all workers of all nations bringing all industrial production to a total stop if war threatened — would register no more success than pacifistic arbitration proposals. While both movements made it more difficult to expand armies and increase armaments, their inability to cooperate with each other as well as their lack of clout in the citadels of real power meant they were unable to ward off their common nightmare: mechanized mass destruction.
Technology evolved so quickly that historians delineate two Industrial Revolutions: the first from to , and the second after The markets won through war and colonization drove British exports up over fivefold.
The economic pressure to keep up with increasing foreign and domestic demand drove manufacturers to find better means of production. The result was a cluster of remarkable new technologies: coke-fired iron manufacture, reciprocating steam engines, and sulfuric acid mass-produced in lead vats or chambers.
By the mids, however, technologies from the First Industrial Revolution made their way into military operations: steam locomotive-pulled trains for army transport , wrought and cast iron cannons, ironclad steam-powered warships, and increased gunpowder output sulfuric acid was a key ingredient in its production. Steam locomotives transported troops in Prussian army maneuvers as early as , for instance, and army units moved by rail in the War of Italian Unification — , the American Civil War — , and the Wars of German Unification — New machine tools, like lathes and milling machines, improved metal-shaping precision, paving the way for production of breech-loading, rapid-firing rifles and the first machine guns in the United States , Germany, and France.
The obvious connection between industrial and military prowess during the First Industrial Revolution caused nervousness in European capitals as the Second Industrial Revolution swept through Europe before the turn of the 20 th century. Steel replaced iron for many uses; greatly improved machine tools created even more precise metal parts; powerful steam turbines supplanted increasingly inefficient reciprocating engines; more highly concentrated sulfuric acid became available; and oil began to supplement coal as an energy source.
Engineers and scientists also created electrical power and equipment, wireless telegraphs , telephones, and nitrogen-based high explosives. These breakthroughs had the potential to revolutionize the art of warfare by spawning killing machines: repeating rifles shooting twenty to thirty bullets per minute; improved machine guns spewing bullets per minute; semi-recoilless rapid-firing field artillery firing hundreds of shells per hour; and artillery shells packed with extremely powerful nitrogen explosives.
Steam power, steel, electricity, advanced optics, and the new explosives also ushered in early prototypes of the modern battleship. As the Second Industrial Revolution gathered momentum after , it brought automobiles, airships, airplanes, steam turbine-powered ships, and submarines. These new technologies, like earlier advances, challenged army and navy establishments either to adopt the weaponry and determine the best tactical adjustments, or to reject the new devices altogether. Given the power struggle among seven major nations within Europe alone, rejection of new weaponry would prove difficult if just one or two powers adopted a particular device.
This happened early on, when the French adopted semi-recoilless artillery and the Russians and British adopted machine guns see Section 8. But these weapons developments did not affect only the leading European powers. By purchasing the new artillery models, for example, Serbia hoped to stop Turkish or Austrian invaders in their tracks, while lagging major states like Russia and Turkey viewed machine guns and rapid-firing cannons as potential equalizers.
Moreover, nitrogen explosive sea mines, particularly in narrow straits and channels and along coastlines, offered once formidable naval nations like Turkey a nearly impassable defense, but Germany also planned to even the odds against naval giant Britain by luring the enemy over mines.
Rapid technological change disrupted business-as-usual routines in military establishments, forcing hard-fought debates about the worth of military devices yet untested in war, followed by many controversial decisions to adopt weaponry that, once taken, often went beyond tactical issues to affect operational, strategic, and even national policy thinking.
Recent historians have dubbed this technology-driven assessment and decision-making process the Revolution in Military Affairs RMA. In all of the cases discussed in this article, technology was the engine driving an increasingly frantic armaments competition, even though the fuel or underlying cause and determinant of this interstate friction remained the deeply rooted rivalries and national security anxieties among these states.
By the early s, the squaring-off process among the Great Powers of Europe had resulted in two powerful alliances. Great Britain remained neutral , as did Turkey, weakened but still valuable as an ally. Although none of these alliances were set in stone, Tables 1 and 2 show the quantitative army and navy strengths should war have broken out in with these alliances intact. Table 1: Army Strength, with Estimates in Italics [11].
Table 2: Naval Strength, with Estimates in Italics [12]. These tables clearly indicate an intense armaments competition between the powers.
The typical main armament was four inch guns. There were also analogous armaments developments on land in the early s. After decades of trial and error, all armies of the European Great Powers possessed weapons made possible by first-wave technologies of the Second Industrial Revolution coming to Europe after the mids.
The results of this RMA — a competition somewhat less fraught for armies at this particular time — saw military establishments moving their divisions by rail according to intricate timetables; deploying recoiling, rifled steel cannon see photograph firing shells packed with nitrogen explosive; and equipping infantrymen with improved semi-automatic magazine rifles see photograph.
Although arms competition was ongoing, and pacifists and socialists justifiably feared the build-up of arms, the armaments race did not necessarily threaten war between the two alliances around War clouds had gathered and blown over many times over recent decades, but they were mainly due to colonial incidents tied to Britain and did not threaten to hurl the European alliances into war. By the early s, moreover, neither alliance needed to fear being overpowered by its enemies.
The alliances were also fairly well-balanced on land. The giant Russian army gave the Franco-Russian Alliance a numerical advantage on a potential eastern front, and Russia was the only continental army equipped with machine guns in ; each division boasted three eight-gun batteries. But the Russian army was poorly led, as the Russo-Japanese War would demonstrate, and their divisions had much less artillery support than German and Austro-Hungarian units.
Similar parity would exist on a potential western front. Although Germany needed to send some army corps east, Italian forces would more than make up the shortfall—assuming, of course, that Italy remained loyal to the alliance. The German army also deployed far more field guns per corps than the French versus ninety-two , possessed howitzers for high angle fire, and may have had a slight advantage in heavier-caliber guns. France, on the other hand, was the only continental artillery equipped with semi-recoilless, rapid-firing field artillery.
The famous French millimeter gun see photograph also boasted shields and a 1,meter longer range than the German field artillery piece. In short, none of the alliance leaders felt they lagged behind enemies and needed to catch up.
They had no reason to believe an attack was imminent, but were confident that if one came they were well-equipped for success in battle. Adding Britain, the great imperial power of this era, to the international relations equation in Europe circa projects a far less stable image. Table 2 shows that if Britain had abandoned its decades-old policy of neutrality in Europe and joined one alliance bloc or the other, enemy navies would have been overwhelmed.
It was small see Table 1 , but professional and well-equipped. Like other European armies outside France, the British army had not yet introduced quick-firing field pieces, but it did deploy twenty-four machine guns per division; this added over 14, bullets per minute to the rapid fire of 12, crack infantrymen. Because commitment of the British army to one side or the other could spell victory on land for that bloc, any change in British foreign policy would generate anxiety and have destabilizing consequences.
During the late s and early s, Britain felt threatened by both continental alliance blocs. The rapid construction of German battleships as a result of the ambitious plans of Imperial Naval Office Chief Alfred von Tirpitz certainly worried the English leadership, especially after two rounds of talks in and failed to produce a naval agreement or alliance between Britain and Germany.
At the turn of the century, the best British battleships were stationed at Gibraltar and Malta in the event of war against its age-old rival France. In fact, Russia probably worried Britain the most until Japan nearly annihilated the Russian fleet in and , revolutionary disturbances further enervated Russia in , and Germany jolted Europe by trying to bully its way into French Morocco in see Section 5. Already by , nevertheless, Britain had concluded that Germany represented a great enough threat to warrant certain preparatory measures.
That April, for instance, Britain and France signed an agreement recognizing their mutual interests in North Africa. By Russia had committed the bulk of its military resources to a costly war it would not win. Fifteen battleships were lost, and for a time it seemed the Russian monarchy too would be lost to revolutionary forces.
Germany chose this moment, when Russia could provide only minimal assistance, to provoke a crisis with France. German leaders were unsettled by the newly cordial relations between Britain and France, having so far assumed that these perennial enemies would remain so, thereby giving Germany ample time to build up its fleet and leverage Britain into an alliance on German terms.
To poach Britain from France, Germany demanded its own economic and strategic rights in Morocco, which London and Paris had recognized in as an exclusively French sphere of influence.
The Moroccan Crisis was the first war scare in eighteen years with the potential to plunge the whole continent into war. It finally blew over in with no German gains and without triggering war. It was nevertheless a significant turning point in European international relations. France and Britain, far from being driven apart, were pushed closer together, each more aware now of the diplomatic and military need of the other given the potential threat Germany posed.
Staff talks between the two armies began with the goal of coordinating the passage of a British expeditionary force across the Channel to help defend France. For the first time in the British army war-gamed this eventuality. Fisher then began shifting British naval forces from the Caribbean to home squadrons. In , finally, London settled all outstanding differences with Russia in central Asia. It was not a formal alliance between all three countries, but a significant development nonetheless—and the battle lines of the First World War had come more clearly into focus.
The Dreadnought made all competing vessels obsolete and forced other nations, especially Germany, into a desperate race to catch up. But Fisher was not finished. He rushed the design and funding for another revolutionary ship—under discussion since the early s—through the admiralty and parliament. Known as the battle cruiser, it had similar dimensions and armament to a battleship, but one less turret and less armor. The reduced weight allowed the turbines to push the ship at over twenty-five knots.
Battle cruisers were designed to chase down the non-turbine light and heavy cruisers of enemy nations preying on worldwide British commerce.
Fisher enthusiastically envisioned the battle cruisers guarding the empire and routes to it, not lining up for battle in the North Sea — but before long the heavy armament of these ships proved too tempting for admirals who wanted greater weight of shell in the battle fleet. In , three battle cruisers, Invincible see photograph , Inflexible , and Indomitable joined the Royal Navy.
Three larger dreadnoughts, Bellerophon , Superb , and Temeraire , followed in Germany had to respond or be left extremely vulnerable to British sea power. By , four German dreadnoughts see photograph — Nassau , Westfalen , Rheinland , and Posen —had taken up station. They were somewhat heavier 19,—20, tons , a bit slower at nineteen-twenty knots , but just as powerful, possessing twelve inch guns and two inches more armor belt. Now the race was on.
Military and public opinion in both countries grew obsessed with the nightmare scenario of an enemy fleet sneaking into the North Sea and attacking ships caught unaware and unmaneuverable at anchor, and then bombarding helpless coastal towns. This mutual fear lessened chances of negotiating an end to the race. In Germany offered to slow down shipbuilding if Britain first promised to maintain neutrality in any continental conflagration.
Britain insisted that the tempo slow first before any political agreement, and that such an agreement could not include a pledge of neutrality that would allow Germany to defeat France and Russia. Talks finally ended in over these differences and background fears. The negotiating mission to Germany that year of British War Minister Richard Burdon Haldane did not result in German agreement to decelerate naval spending.
And so, rather than slowing, the shipbuilding pace accelerated see illustration. By Britain had completed or laid down an additional twenty-three dreadnoughts and seven battle cruisers. Both types were larger, faster, and more powerful. The Queen Elizabeth Class battleships see photograph begun in , for example, carried eight inch guns, while the new battle cruisers boasted eight Both types, like their British counterparts, were larger, faster, and more powerful.
Thus the two dreadnoughts laid down in also had eight inch guns. This time, study was warranted not just for the design of faster and more powerful ships, but also for gunnery.
Indeed, admirals would no longer fight battles at 5,—10, yards, as when Japan crushed a Russian fleet in the Battle of Tsushima in , but rather potentially at 12,—16, yards. Range finding at nine to ten miles, however, presupposed devices and systems enabling shells to hit targets miles beyond what the human eye, or even state-of-the-art range finders, could achieve.
Even though Germany was behind the Royal Navy quantitatively in , the country led Britain in gunnery due to several factors: use of stereoscopic range finders, which enabled operators to plot ranges faster; more experience with centralized fire control, which enabled guns to respond more quickly to moving targets; and superior training of fire controllers to cope with the steep inclination of shells at long range and the frequent alteration of course by enemy ships.
These advances represented another example of military technology offering weaker powers an equalizer see Section 3. Although this advantage offered much consolation, such technical superiority could not completely allay German anxiety over falling behind. There was a near inevitability to Germany having fewer ships. Thus Germany spent The conviction that sea power, as Mahan had written, could very well decide any struggle compelled the allies of Britain and Germany to enter the frenetic naval race too.
Table 3 shows naval strengths, expenditures, and spending increases since the onset of the dreadnought revolution.
Table 3: Dreadnought Battleships and Battle Cruisers, — [21]. These figures indicate that the Royal Navy, however wary it remained of the German challenge, possessed a commanding lead over the High Seas Fleet in - in ship numbers if not gunnery. This numerical lead would shrink only slightly with newly commissioned ships in and This increasingly adverse trend spiked Triple Alliance nervousness about the immediate foreseeable future of to The prospect of fighting the Triple Entente was daunting, but German naval leaders, for one, felt better about fighting sooner rather than later.
As explained in Section 7, naval leaders in Rome and Vienna, worried about the twelve big ships the French had laid down or budgeted Table 3 , were whistling a variation on this sooner-rather-than-later tune when they considered the Mediterranean situation.
Anxiety was not limited, however, to the Triple Alliance. Indeed, limiting the focus to alone shows that Austria-Hungary and Italy had built more big vessels for their ally than France and Russia had done thus far for Britain — seven capital ships to four. An even more worrisome scenario to British military leaders: what would the thirty-one dreadnoughts and battle cruisers of the Triple Alliance plus Turkey do to the mere four state-of-the-art battleships of the French and Russian navies if British politicians, perchance, opted for neutrality?
European stability, a tenuous proposition for centuries, quickly unraveled after The Moroccan crisis of — and the accompanying diplomatic revolution were followed immediately by an escalating naval race of frightening proportions.
Nearly 50 percent Serbian in ethnicity, Bosnia had long been eyed by expansion-minded, adjacent Serbia, which mobilized and called on Slav protector Russia for assistance during the ensuing annexation crisis. Germany backed its Germanic cousins in Vienna, however, and forced Russia, still lamed from the Japanese war, to back down in This compelled Serbia to acquiesce too, but both Russia and Serbia wanted racial revenge, swearing they would not back down again the next time.
Two years later, Europe again came to the brink of war. In July a German gunboat anchored in a French Moroccan port, provoking another crisis. The war scare reverberated all summer, each side speaking of insults to national honor and the need to fight. It finally blew over in October without triggering the widely anticipated showdown between alliance blocs. Like the First Moroccan Crisis, however, serious consequences followed.
In Germany, the Navy League, a pressure group for naval expansion, agitated for more ships. Furthermore, a new organization, the Army League, founded in , similarly made propaganda for a massive increase in men and weapons. All patriots questioned whether Wilhelm II, German Emperor — was competently leading the nation and race. As their respective army staffs had done in and , French and British naval officials now planned coordinated efforts against Germany.
The shift allowed Britain to maximize its combined dreadnought and pre-dreadnought strength at home. France would let Britain protect the Channel, while taking primary responsibility for the Mediterranean itself. Political pressure eventually forced Churchill to reinforce the region with three battle cruisers, but enemies would still have naval superiority in an economically and strategically vital area that included the Suez Canal.
Preparing to seize upon this opportunity amidst rapidly rising tensions in Europe see also Section 7. They intended to defeat the French and the remaining British ships in detail, block the transport of French troops from North Africa to the European theater, and then land Italian divisions in southern France. At the Washington Naval Conference , the United States, Britain and Japan signed a treaty to restrict arms, but in the mids Japan chose not to renew the agreement. Moreover, Germany violated the Treaty of Versailles and began to rearm.
To help discourage Soviet communist expansion, the United States built more atomic weaponry. But in , the Soviets tested their own atomic bomb, and the Cold War nuclear arms race was on. Four years later, both countries tested their first intercontinental ballistic missiles and the arms race rose to a terrifying new level.
President Dwight D. After a series of mishaps and failures, the United States successfully launched its first satellite into space on January 31, , and the Space Race continued as both countries researched new technology to create more powerful weapons. Throughout the s, the United States became convinced that the Soviet Union had better missile capability that, if launched, could not be defended against.
Many politicians used the Missile Gap as a talking point in the presidential election. Yet, in fact, U. Over the next three decades, however, both countries grew their arsenals to well over 10, warheads. The Cold War arms race came to a tipping point in after the John F.
After U. The tense Cuban Missile Crisis standoff ensued and came to a head as Kennedy and Khrushchev exchanged letters and made demands. Other countries have beefed up their military might and are in a modern-day arms race or poised to enter one, including India and Pakistan, North Korea and South Korea, Iran and China.
Herman, Steve. Hundley, Tom. Pulitzer Center. Sputnik, Office of the Historian. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. What Was the Missile Gap? Central Intelligence Agency. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. After World War II drew to a close in the midth century, a new conflict began.
Beginning in the late s, space On August 5, , representatives of the United States, Soviet Union and Great Britain signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited the testing of nuclear weapons in outer space, underwater or in the atmosphere. The treaty, which President John F.
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