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Lensman Arms Race
(aka: Sky Shattering Arms Race)

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"First we got The Bomb and that was good
'Cause we love peace and motherhood
Then Russia got The Bomb, but that's okay
'Cause the balance of power's maintained that way!
Who's next?"

This is what happens when countries attempt to build a Bigger Stick or prove that My Kung-Fu Is Stronger Than Yours.

If a military conflict goes on for any appreciable length of time in a high-tech setting, each side will be struggling to become and remain stronger than the other — often by producing better equipment and weapons. As one side advances technologically, the other feels the need to keep pace, and then to go even further to get an advantage. Sometimes, this process of Serial Escalation goes way over the top (especially with Soviet Superscience).

Truth in Television, naturally, with the decades-long Cold War between the USA and the Soviet Union as the Trope Codifier and the inspiration for many Arms Races in fiction. As a result, these Arms Races usually have rapid inventions of Nuclear Weapons-parallels, Space Weaponry, Mutually Assured Destruction, and other Cold War-era tropes. The Trope Namer is E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman novels. Over the course of a decades-long struggle (that was only the surface of a deeper, eons-old war between cosmic beings using mortals as pawns), Civilization and Boskone went from ordinary starship battles to star-powered lasers, antimatter bombs, planets used as missiles, antimatter planets used as missiles, faster-than-light missiles, faster-than-light antimatter planet missiles...

If somebody tries to argue that arms races are evidence that competition and the constant drive to survive and kill each other more effectively motivates humanity's progress, they are likely to be a Social Darwinist.

"Moore's Law" is this trope applied specifically to computer technology, stating that roughly every eighteen monthsnote , we see a doubling of transistor density (and thus hardware capabilities).

If the factions aren't actually inventing their new stuff, but recovering ancient Lost Technology, it's an Archaeological Arms Race.

See also: Plot Leveling, So Last Season, Sorting Algorithm of Evil, Serial Escalation, Space Cold War.

Not to be confused with the rather less bloody Escalating War.


Example subpages:

Other examples:

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    Comic Books 
  • Transformers: Animated comic "Everything Must Go". It is based on the Dr. Seuss book The Sneetches, just replace the Sneetches with Lugnut and Blitzwing, the merchant with Swindle, and the stars on their stomaches with every other weapon in Transformers mythos. This ends with the destruction of New Kaon, after which Lugnut and Blitzwing catch on and rip Swindle apart.
  • IDW's Transformers fiction treats Combiners as an equivalent to nuclear arms. The first, Monstructor, is a horrific abomination that was sealed away by Omega Supreme, and when the Decepticons learn about it, they pull out all the stops to try and acquire him in order to make their own. The Autobots, meanwhile, are so concerned about this happening they're willing to abandon Earth to Megatron to reclaim Monstructor.
    • In The Transformers: All Hail Megatron, the Decepticon have in fact managed to build their own Combiner, Devestator, who requires the aforementioned Omega Supreme to stop. In the follow-up series, Swindle's creation of Menasor is treated as the equivalent to an illegal nuclear weapon.
    • The follow up series, The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye and The Transformers: Robots in Disguise, both show that the Decepticons have in fact been after the secrets to combining since the war began, and it's part of the reason Megatron approached Shockwave in the first place. And the Decepticons aren't above the odd unethical experiments to get it, even causing one or two 'Cons to defect in disgust. The metaphor is taken to its conclusion when the Autobots finally get their own combiner, Superion, and it's played as an Oh, Crap! moment.
  • Ultimate Marvel
    • This is a major plot point in The Ultimates, crossed with Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke. After the public debut of the Ultimates, various foreign nations begin trying put together their own teams of superhumans, such as Alpha Flight and the Liberators. The final arc by Mark Millar has the Ultimates racing to stop military dictatorships like North Korea from developing their own superhumans.
    • Ultimate Vision: The Gah Lak Tus module has destroyed the bombers. Colonel Fury, orders?
      Nick Fury: As grandma Fury used to say, back in the day, when in doubt, escalate.
  • Comes up if you read a lot of X-Men.
    • Of the original five members, the strongest hero, Beast, had the strength of a gorilla. Over several decades, the "strongest hero" title has passed around to Colossus (who can fight The Incredible Hulk), Rogue (during a time where she could fight the Hulk and fly), Phoenix (who could destroy minds and eat suns), Namor (able to fight the Hulk and fly, plus half a century of combat experience and an army of monsters on call), Magneto (who can break the planet if he wants), and others. Beast himself has gotten much stronger, once casually mentioning the ability to bench press 70 tons, and this still doesn't put him anywhere near top-tier. Meanwhile their enemies have followed suit: the Sentinels began as mere 12-foot-tall rebel robots; they gained teleportation, have created duplicate heroes, got used by cyborg hate groups, have grown big enough to kill whole countries or small enough to mimic an illness in mutants.
    • In X-Factor (2024), it's shown that after the fall of Krakoa the governments of the world entered a new cold war in which they're trying to get as many mutants on their payroll as possible, with the latest iteration of X-Factor being the U.S. government's attempt.

    Fan Works 
  • The Butcher Bird has the pirate alliance known as The Wild Hunt kick one off against the World Government Navy, with Bio-Augmentation and new weapons (including modern-style firearms) changing the balance of power in a previously Age of Sail setting.
  • Child of the Storm has this, in large part because of its MCU basis, but also in large part because Doctor Strange is manipulating events to prepare Earth to take on Thanos. As in canon, the Tesseract was used to produce weapons by HYDRA and later by SHIELD (that didn't work), while SHIELD also had Alan Scott, allied with the First Class of X-Men (Xavier, Sean Cassidy, and Hank McCoy), contemporary with other factions such as Weapon X (Wolverine and Sabretooth), the Red Room's Winter Guard (led by Natasha and the Winter Soldier), and a pre Heel–Face Turn Magneto. Then, in the 21st century, the Avengers Initiative kicked off (eventually gaining Loki as a member), while Iron Man style suits proliferated, and thanks to Jane's New Bifrost tech, Earth has de facto interstellar travel. In response, HYDRA dug up the Darkhold and the Winter Soldier, started using dimension-manipulating tech and stolen Vibranium, and enlisted an Omnicidal Maniac necromancer from the Nine Realms called Gravemoss.
    • In the sequel, the Red Room get in on the dimension manipulating act, along with major league genetic warfare, while MI13, Britain's spooky secret service, have got in on the act with a monstrously powerful vibranium-hulled Helicarrier of their own called the Valiant that's capable of going toe to toe with a dragon that's known for destroying planets. Meanwhile, the Avengers' de facto roster and allies expands to include War Machine, Doctor Strange, Wanda Maximoff, Harry Dresden, and Magneto. Meanwhile, the X-Men have Storm, a fully powered Jean Grey, Scott Summers, , and Remy LeBeau a.k.a. Gambit a.k.a. Remy Summers. All in the space of five years, if that.
    • Even Harry's friend group, repeatedly indicated to include a number of proto Young Avengers, not only has Carol Danvers a Super-Soldier, Uhtred - a young Asgardian warrior, a teenage Wonder Woman, and young Flash in Jean-Paul Beaubier, but also Maddie Pryor, and a certain Clark Kent.
  • Sudden Contact: The aftermath of the Great War leads to the breakdown of relative peace in both Citadel space and the Koprulu sector, leading to the development of, among others, newly advanced powered armors and the Waygate system, a pseudo Mass Relay system.
  • In Pokémon Reset Bloodlines, the Trainer and Ranger nations are grouped together in formal alliances, the T.A.T.O (Trainer-Aligned Treaty Organization), and the Ranger Union (known also as the Fall City Pact), and there's a lot of tension between them. A sidestory has Belmondo attempting to recruit Clemont for a think tank based on Lumiose University to develop weaponry to deploy against the Rangers, but Clemont's father Meyer refuses.
  • A lot of Code Geass fanfics, especially those that redo the entire series, has this happen due to the fact that Lelouch is able to get Rakshata early, or in the case of The Black Emperor, is able to develop his own prototypes.
  • Fallout: Equestria: In the backstory, when the war started the world had just started producing firearms. By the end of the war they had Powered Armor, PipBucks that could cast a number of minor but useful spells, StealthBucks, non-pegasi flight, Artificial Intelligence, Brain Uploading, Wetware CPUs, Bio-Augmentation, were starting to crack true transponyism, and of course the megaspells. These were all developed over a few decades. Even hundreds of years after the apocalypse, with most of the technology lost, the scavengers in the Wasteland still have a higher tech level than the ponies before the war.
  • In Innocence Once Lost side story "Enemy Unknown," this gets deconstructed by showing the consequences of trying to reverse-engineer technology you know nothing about. Several Pony technicians studying human technology die in accidents that a human tech with basic knowledge would know to avoid, such as one trying to pull out a high voltage wire with his mouth, or some ponies putting what turns out to be a barrel of fuel next to a fire because they can't read human warning labels. Several of their discoveries don't have any practical aplications: they can't use human guns with hooves, and their research into human Super Serum shows most of them either don't work on ponies, don't do anything useful, or are useful but would be unethical.
  • In The Smurfs That Canon Forgot, Scaredy and his faction adopt increasingly severe methods to protect themselves and Smurf Village in the wake of Papa and the other displaced smurfs abruptly disappearing. While this violence deters some of the adversaries who'd expected them to be easy pickings with their leader gone, others (like Gargamel) up their efforts, leading to both sides resorting to increasingly desperate measures. It takes Gargamel losing a hand to a malfunctioning defense mechanism for things to calm down.

    Live Action Film 
  • The Doomsday Weapon from Dr. Strangelove was built by the Soviets to reach an unsurpassable upper hand over the Americans. It's a system that will poison the world's atmosphere for decades if it detects a nuclear attack on Soviet equipment. The Americans would never dare attack them knowing they had such a system. However, General Ripper launches his attack on Russia before the weapon is announced, creating the Foregone Conclusion to the movie. And a nuclear holocaust can't stop the arms race, because now the Americans have to move people into mine shafts as they wait out the radioactivity on the surface. Fearing the Soviets will move more people into mine shafts and have superior numbers when they emerge, Buck Turgidson declares, "We can't allow a mine shaft gap!"
  • In the film The Men Who Stare at Goats, and the book its based on, and in real life, the United States Army started research on new age and psychic powers because they heard Soviets were researching those things as well. The Soviets supposedly started the research because they heard a rumour the Americans has started research...
  • This is going on in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
    • When the Tesseract is introduced in Captain America: The First Avenger it was used to produce weapons by the Red Skull, and when put into the hands of the good guys for the next 70 years it was deemed too dangerous to experiment on. In response to the discovery of Asgardians in Thor, S.H.I.E.L.D. started looking into tapping into the Tesseract again. Asgardian Loki is tasked to retrieve the Tesseract and deliver it to Thanos, in return taking over the planet; to accomplish this, he brings the alien Chitauri army to Earth. When this proved unsuccessful, thanks to the first evocation of the Avengers Initiative, Thanos is informed that Earth is much more dangerous than expected, which only makes him more interested in us. Later films in the MCU introduce more items like the Tesseract and identifies them as the Infinity Gems (actually stones), which reaches a head in Avengers: Infinity War where Earth is a battleground for control of the remaining Infinity Stones.
    • On a smaller scale, Iron Man 2 has the US government trying to take the Iron Man tech because they're afraid other nations will copy and mass-produce it before they can. Stark counters with evidence that enemy nations' attempts at this are failing hilariously, but nonetheless shows that they're trying. Then Ivan Vanko shows up and proves that Tony's not the only genius who can make advanced powered armor tech, adding fuel to the government's arguments. By Iron Man 3 Tony is trying to leapfrog himself, building faulty armors, because of his fear of not being prepared for new threats.
  • Kung Fu Hustle:
    • The Crocodile Gang attacks a police station, beating up the cops. They are attacked when they leave the station by the Axe Gang. Then the Axe Gang intimidates the people of Pig Sty (including the petty criminal protagonist Sing, until three seemingly ordinary tenement residents reveal themselves as kung-fu masters, and defeat the Axe Gang. So the Axe Gang recruits two assassins, who go to Pig Sty and kill the three heroes, but then Landlord and Landlady reveal themselves as even greater masters, and defeat them. So now the Axe Gang recruits the most dangerous master of all, the Beast, who defeats Landlord and Landlady. Now more powerful than the entire Axe Gang, the Beast returns to Pig Sty, but discovers Sing has transformed into a true master.
    • Worth mentioning that Sing, now a redeemed man, ends the cycle of escalation using a technique named after the Buddha, defeating the Beast without killing.
  • The DC Extended Universe has this happening almost instantly, using the dramatic events of Man of Steel as a springboard.
    • Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice shows that having a being as insanely powerful as Superman dramatically alters world politics but also inspires certain individuals to try and provide countermeasures to him. Batman and Lex ended up fighting for control of a large chunk of Kryptonite, the only thing that can harm Superman. By the end of the film it is speculated that something bad is on the horizon, and they'll need to gather a team to face it in Justice League.
    • Suicide Squad suggests that this Boxed Crook team would be another factor in trying to ward off Superman in case he turns against the world. Before Superman the knowledge of metahumans was kept to a minimum, but ever since he showed up he's been a "beacon" to pull them out of the shadows. The actual film is set after the events of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, where Superman dies, so it's revealed that the Suicide Squad was formed to ward off "the next Superman".
  • The Star Wars franchise has The Empire and its successors doing this. There was the original Death Star which could blow up a planet. The second Death Star was even bigger and an improved close range defense. The novels gave us the Sun Crusher which does what its name indicates. The Force Awakens has Starkiller Base, which is an entire planet that uses an entire sun to power its weapon that can destroy multiple planets at the same time from light years away.
  • Plan 9 from Outer Space has a typically bizarre speech by the alien soldier Eros about how humans started by building small, "harmless" explosives and gradually escalated to the point where they're about to build a weapon that will explode particles of sunlight, and thereby blow up the universe.
  • In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the Klingon Empire develops a cloaking device that can enable such an equipped warship the ability to fire torpedoes while still cloaked; an unprecedented ability and a massive tip in the balance of power. The Enterprise gets battered by its untouchable foe in the climactic space battle... until the heroes surmise that despite its cloak, it must still emit fuel exhaust somehow, and devise a plan to graft a sensor to catalogue gaseous anomalies into a photon torpedo guidance system. The Klingons' latest and greatest martial terror gets undone by a quick hack job on a torpedo using off-the-shelf parts when the torpedo is finally fired and inexorably homes in on its mark.

    Professional Wrestling 
  • This has happened to professional wrestling as a whole, although it has been most drastically visible outside of WWE in the past decade. Moves that were considered devastating once-a-match nearfalls in the 70s, like the piledriver and the vertical suplex, have since become mundane moves. The powerbomb, considered the scariest and most dangerous move in the business when it was popularized in the mid 90s, is occasionally used as a mid-match move by modern wrestlers like Samoa Joe. WWE eventually took measures to curb this by implementing a "safe style" in 2005 in order to minimize the health hazards of the more dangerous moves being invented (as well as ensure that classic finishers like the Stunner, choke slam, and powerbomb still looked effective), but the wrestling world outside WWE continues to invent crazier head drops and more spectacular flips. This has the double effect of making older moves look weak and threatening wrestlers' health. WWE itself is likely to not change this policy of safe work due to the circumstances surrounding Chris Benoit's death.
  • Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling, started off with a relatively normal premise of pro wrestlers fighting martial artists of different styles but quickly became the most violent pro wrestling promotion the world had ever seen, combining the use of brawling, barbed wire and fire seen in the Southern USA (particularly Jerry Lawler's promotions) and Puerto Rico(primarily CSP/WWC), at one point actually partially melting a ring. Victor Quiñones would breakaway from to start two more promotions, W*ING and IWA Japan, that would then directly compete with FMW by using the same style. Soon there were scythes, boiling water, electricity and explosives being implemented in matches Giant Baba would describe as Garbage Wrestling. After the decline of these three no major promotion would again reach these heights, though FMW itself continued to exist as the "winner".
  • All Japan Pro Wrestling has a particularly awful case, extending to its splinter-rival, Pro Wrestling NOAH. The old finishers like the Tiger Driver and Folding Powerbomb just didn't cut it, so new, more vicious and head-dropping moves were invented to be the real finishers in big matches, so that the old finishers were now recurring moves. Then worse finishers got invented, leading to huge death-drops like the Burning Hammer and Tiger Driver '91. This is believed to have led to the eventual death of legend Mitsuharu Misawa in the ring, as his neck could no longer take the punishment.
  • The Dragon Gate promotion has been the worst offender of the new millennium, in the case of finishing moves. CIMA's Schwein went from instant victory to repeated nearfall in just three years; Naruki Doi's Bakutare Sliding Kick was reduced to The Worf Barrage; and Shingo Takagi's Last Falconry was replaced by an upgraded version that failed to keep opponents down (the renamed Original Falconry became a low-level impact move) while his death finisher, MADE IN JAPAN, suffered such Badass Decay that Shingo's rival BxB Hulk was able to survive three of them.

    Tabletop Games 
  • BattleTech got into this pretty quickly. At the start of the game's first edition, the year was 3025 and humanity lived in a near-Scavenger World; the Humongous Mecha of the setting were near Lost Technology and every 'Mech design in the game (as well as most of the actual 'Mechs) was canonically centuries old because the tech base for further developments had been lost. After a few years in-game, a library of such Lost Technology was unearthed and shared with all the major powers of the Inner Sphere, rapidly kick-starting 'Mech and weapons design and improvement and causing each of the nations to build their own designs to respond to other nations' advances. In 3025, there were about 60 unique 'Mech designs available in the five Successor States, all of them relics of the Golden Age. 25 years later, that number had doubled, with most of the old designs still produced with the latest technology. The Clans only added to this as the Inner Sphere had to respond to them as well, to the point that by the Dark Age there are currently over 400 different 'Mech designs still in use in the Inner Sphere alone.

    Visual Novels 

    Web Comics 
  • Drowtales:
    • Moonless Age: The clans of Chel'el'Sussoloth have a magical version of this going on, as expained in detail here. Originally, there were three primary schools of spellcasting: Sorceries, Summons, and Sentinels. Then came the foci, crystals which let even the most untalented channel mana. This also made it possible to master different kinds of magic, which hit the Dokkalfar hard as they only specialized in one school. The use of foci was countered by sheer force of numbers, which was then in its turn countered by more modern golem engineering. The answer to 'manatech' was the nether arte, unleashing a plague of demons that even the summoners' deaths couldn't stop, which forced every faction to train special demon sealers. Snadhya'rune invests heavily in airships and anti-aircraft artillery, while the Sarghess improve their crossbows to modern-Earth spec-ops levels and broaden their recruitment to humans and sylphs to add earthen battlemages to their ranks. Her schemes with dispersing a deadly plague backfire, as the retaliatory assassination of the sole scientist who resurrected the plague - and the only person who could comprehend the secret to the antidote - means the disease becomes a pandemic. However, this only adds further demand to Snadhya'rune's perfected Soul Jars. The allure of true immortality is too great, convincing many high-ranking enemies to betray their clans; as they no longer need to fear death, the new assassins gleefully throw themselves into suicidal battles, intending to learn as much as they can to become grandmaster killing machines in mere months. Kiel'nida counters this by allowing her army of demons to eat the souls of the immortals, permanently killing them. By the finale, the coalition formed to stop Snadhya'rune resorts to resurrecting their goddess from the dead, while Snadhya'rune unleashes a suicidal doomsday weapon and rampages across Chel in a giant stone dragon, which then devolves into an Eldritch Abomination that sacrifices many of Snad's 'immortal' pawns to power itself. After the war finally ends, one small benefit was that the rapid magical progress allowed personalized flying ships to be commercialized - something which, unknown to the inventors, even the advanced precursor civilizations never got around to.
    • Hel: The central conflict is between the forces of Asgard, who seek to destroy the Abyss, the gigantic, eldritch spewing portal at the bottom of Hel, and the many victims who ran afoul of Asgard's oppressive regime and seek survival or revenge. Asgard continuously researches, unearths, and unanimously approves of dangerous precursor weaponry to purge the upper levels of 'demons', while many of said demons take pilgrimages to the Abyss to make pacts with cosmic gods from other worlds. As the fighting escalates, more technologies are unearthed by the Asgardians, and more demons take the pilgrimage to become champions, taking on more monstrous pacts from stronger gods.
  • Summarized and taken to its logical conclusion on this strip from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
  • Schlock Mercenary:
    • The webcomic started with Nanomachines, Super Soldiers, Powered Armor, sentient AI, all-purpose fabricators, genetically engineered lifeforms, and an interstellar Portal Network. Then the Toughs' Mad Scientist invented the teraport, and technology's been spiralling upwards ever since.
    • There was also that bit where the author went on about how there are not only missiles and anti-missile-missiles, but also anti-anti-missile-missile-missiles, anti-anti-anti-missile-missile-missile-missiles, and so forth.
    • The space cannon built into Credomar and hijacked by LOTA is initially believed to be a one of a kind weapon capable of weaponizing teraports by firing concentrated energy blasts through wormnholes, completely bypassing shield defenses. The Toughs eventually find ancient warships equipped with similar weapons that are vastly smaller in scale but only slightly less dangerous, only these versions were called "Long Guns". The All-Star engineers call them by a different name: "End-Guns".
    • Then we find out that in the distant past, "grand warfare" consisted of "throwing big stars at little stars." And they had foundries that ate planets to build fleets. Petey has begun mimicking some of this in his war in Andromeda against a species of Eldritch Abominations; for his troops, the first step in combat is to secure the local star so that it can't be used against them.
    • All these terrible technologies end in the "soulgig," a teraport-derived device that uploads a mind straight into virtual reality, and is capable of doing so to entire planets at once. The mere existence of such a device leads to massive existential questions about the soul, and it's worse when they enter a situation where such devices are necessary. This is why all the precursor civilizations are gone; if they survived, they built massive worldships, cut all communications, and fled the galaxy.

    Web Original 
  • The fan-made video Star Trek: Prelude to Axanar has the Four Years war between The Federation and the Klingon Empire portrayed this way. Each side keeps trying to head the other off with better ships and tactics. At first, the Klingons win battle after battle with their superior D6 battlecruisers. Then Starfleet commissions the new Ares class, the first dedicated Federation warships. The new ships turn the tide, especially after Captain Kelvar Garth (later nicknamed "Garth of Izar" by the Klingons) pushes his own USS Ares to the limits and pulls off a daring maneuver that cripples the Klingon forces in the system. The Klingons, not content to let the Federation get away with this, starts building a brand-new, much more advanced ship class, the now-iconic D7. In response, Starfleet designs the even larger, more powerful Constitution class, as the Ares class would prove no match for the D7s. It's a race who can get their ships finished and deployed faster. Played with in that both sides agree that if the Klingon high council had listened to their main commander Kharn, they could have had the D7s deployed in time to immediately counter the Ares before they had much effect. Only their arrogance after early successes prevented a complete Klingon victory.
  • Red Alert 3: Paradox takes place in an alternate 1969 where there have been three World Wars and the Cold War is now blazing hot. At the beginning of World War II (in 1949), jet fighters were still largely experimental and most soldiers ran around shooting each other with bolt action rifles. Horse and cart were as common a sight in logistics trains as trucks. By the end of the war in 1955, all infantry were armed with assault rifles, the Americans were experimenting with freeze rays and weaponizing space-time rips, the Soviets were using nigh-invincible tanks the size of houses, VTOL aircraft were a common sight, and jet pack infantry and lightning guns were starting to be deployed. In 1969, the Chinese are using vehicles protected by energy shields and armies of utterly disposable clone soldiers, while the Japanese use Attack Drones and Humongous Mecha alongside cyborg infantry that look like futuristic ashigaru while also experimenting with psychic onna-bushi.
  • Skibidi Toilet Series: The two sides of the story end up falling into this after fighting for long enough. The toilets create a Puppeteer Parasite that shifts the numbers to their side? The Alliance create an Energy Weapon that can neutralize these parasites. TVmen are using their screens to stun toilets or make them flush themselves? The toilets just wear shades to block the rays. As the series continues, various characters and weapons pop up on each side to counter each other in increasingly destructive ways.

    Western Animation 
  • Arcane: The first major event in the series is the invention of Hextech, the first way for non-mages to reliably use magic. This creates unprecedented economic prosperity for Piltover... but further exacerbates their problems with Zaun, their mining district and ghetto. Jayce, the inventor of Hextech, is pushed towards weaponizing it multiple times throughout the series, something that he resists for as long as possible. Meanwhile, the Undercity has Shimmer, a highly addictive mutagenic drug, which also has applications in steampunk-like technology. "Chemtech" is nowhere near as impressive as Hextech, but it's far cheaper, and the chem-barons are more willing to push it to the bleeding edge for military use. Jayce eventually builds Hextech weapons, but makes sure to keep them only for his own use and those of people he personally trusts. In the second season, when Cait takes a team down into the Undercity to hunt for Jinx, Jayce builds them all Hextech equipment. Later, Piltover defends itself from attack by turning Hextech cargo loaders into improvised railguns. It also turns out that Ambessa is in the city to get her hands on Hextech weapons (preferably legally, but she's willing to do anything) to defend against the mages she is fighting. This is why she pushes Piltover so hard to punish Zaun, because she knows if a war starts they'll have to invent new weapons, which she will be able to obtain one way or another.
  • Justice League eventually evolves to a plot line of the League being so powerful and outside government control that multiple factions start preparing for the League turning against them. The secret research team Cadmus, headed by Amanda Waller, begins recruiting their own metahumans and elite groups like the Suicide Squad. The instigation and origin can be placed at multiple points. Season three and the start of the "Unlimited" subtitle is when the League expands to includes dozens more heroes (and builds the Watchtower with a Wave-Motion Gun). "A Better World" from season two shows an Alternate Universe where the League took over the world and became the Justice Lords. There are also ties all the way back to the Grand Finale of Superman: The Animated Series, "Legacy", in which Superman is Brainwashed and Crazy and invades the Earth in the name of Darkseid, which is credited as the first beginnings of Cadmus. Once the Cadmus arc comes to an end, the Legion of Doom forms because now the villains need their own sanctuary against a better unified League.
  • The Simpsons:
    • Parodied when Itchy and Scratchy draw progressively bigger weapons on each other and finally end up with enormous pistols that wrap around the globe.
    • Discussed in a "Treehouse of Horror" episode:
      Kang or maybe Kodos: That board with a nail in it may have defeated us, but the humans won't stop there. They'll make bigger boards and bigger nails, and soon, they will make a board with a nail so big, it will destroy them all!
  • The SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Sand Castles in the Sand" revolves around Spongebob and Patrick turning a playfight around sand castles into a sort of evolution race that climaxes with state-of-the-art fighter jets against a Humongous Mecha.
  • This tropes shows up in Star Wars Rebels. The Empire typically uses fast but non-shielded, fragile, hyperdriveless TIE Fighters and Interceptors. However they use a lot of them to make up for their weaknesses. The Rebels on the other hand use hardier and more versatile fighters, but they have fewer of them. In response to this, partway through season three, the Empire, under the guidance of Thrawn, begins manufacturing the fast, shielded, hyperdrive capable, TIE Defender. The rebel B-wing design was a similar step up, but other than a single deployment of the prototype was not ready for use during the time of the series. X-wing fighters enter use in the last season and prove much more effective against basic TIE Fighters than the A-wing fighters the Rebels started with, but not enough to swing the balance of power.
  • Parodied in The Tick. The US military made a sentient mustache because "The Russians were working on a beard!"
  • Rabbit of Seville: Elmer chases Bugs with a hatchet; Bugs chases Elmer back with an axe; Elmer escalates to a revolver, and so forth.

Alternative Title(s): Arms Race, Exponentially Escalating Arms Race, Sky Shattering Arms Race

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