I could use the USA and the USSR as examples, but there is really no need to mention specific nations. Weapons manufactured by companies in any of the advanced industrial countries may end up being bought by any of a wide variety of nations. The existence of a successful offensive weapon, such as the Exocet type of surface skimming missile, tends to 'invite' the invention of an effective counter, for instance a radio jamming device to 'confuse' the control system of the missile. The counter is more likely than not to be manufactured by an enemy country, but it could be manufactured by the same country, even by the same company! No company, after all, is better equipped to design a jamming device for a particular missile than the company that made the missile in the first place. There is nothing inherently improbable about the same company producing both and selling them to opposite sides in a war. I am cynical enough to suspect that it probably happens, and it vividly illustrates the point about equipment improving while its net effectiveness stands still land its costs increase) .
From my present point of view the question of whether the manufacturers on opposite sides of a human arms race are enemies of each other or identical with each other is irrelevant, and interestingly so. What matters is that, regardless of their manufacturers, the devices themselves are enemies of each other in the special sense I have defined in this chapter. The missile, and its specific jamming device, are enemies of each other in that success in one is synonymous with failure in the other. Whether their designers are also enemies of each other is irrelevant, although it will probably be easier to assume that they are.
So far I have discussed the example of the missile and its specific antidote without stressing the evolutionary, progressive aspect, which is, after all, the main reason for bringing it into this chapter. The point here is that not only does the present design of a missile invite, or call forth, a suitable antidote, say a radio jamming device. The antimissile device, in its turn, invites an improvement in the design of the missile, an improvement that specifically counters the antidote, an anti-antimissile device. It is almost as though each improvement in the missile stimulates the next improvement in itself, via its effect on the antidote. Improvement in equipment feeds on itself. This is a recipe for explosive, runaway evolution.
