1 This study attempts to construct some rationale for certain of Dr. S. P. Huntington's historically based findings (3) by means of multiplier diagrams whose use the writer learned early in 1958 from Professor T. W. Swan, in an as-yetunpublished paper, Circular Causation (1957), and from D. W. E. G. Salter, both of the Australian National University. It is further maintained that such diagrams (which are of a kind applied to the problem of arms races by A. Rapoport [5, pp. 275-78]) require the addition of representations of temporal effects if they are to help account for the behavior of sophisticated contestants in an arms race. Dr. Huntington's is a rich and suggestive essay, which brings together much interesting information and develops a theory of the subject along non-quantitative lines. I should like to thank him and Professor W. T. R. Fox, both of the Institute for War and Peace Studies, Columbia, and members and visiting associates of the Center of International Studies, Princeton, for their critical help in the development of the following ideas. ace may make its increases naively; that is, it may increase its armaments simply because it has come to believe that another's