Anavalarms race is a situation in which two or more countries continuously construct warships that are consistently more powerful than warships built by the other country built in the previous years. These races often lead to high tension and near-wars, if not outright conflict.

Examples include:

• TheAustro-Italian ironclad arms race between theKingdom of Italy and theAustrian Empire (and laterAustria-Hungary) from 1860 to 1885.
• TheArgentine–Chilean naval arms race betweenArgentina andChile from 1887 to 1902.
• TheSouth American dreadnought race between Argentina,Brazil and Chile from 1907 to 1914.
• TheAnglo-German naval arms race, between Imperial Germany and the United Kingdom from 1898 to 1912.
• TheCold Warnuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, which involved both land and naval nuclear expansion.

• Naval warfare
• Technological races