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The objective of this paper is twofold: (1) to briefly reflect on the evolution of Richardson-type arms models, and (2) to reformulate the model in order to examine possible impacts of changes in bilateral defense policies. Although historically the United States and Soviet Union provided the archetypal illustration of an arms race, Richardson's model applies equally to any two nations facing potential conflict. But as Rapoport [11] first pointed out, while Richardson's model can be interpreted as describing one nation's armament response to another, it does not explain how a nation arrives at such a strategy. As Intriligator [6, 339] observes: ". . . one of the principal limitations of the Richardson model . . . is that it looks at the arms race from the outside as a mechanistic model rather than from the inside in terms of decisions made by defense planners." The present study attempts to focus on armaments policies "from the inside." The bi-lateral defense problem is reformulated as an explicit optimization on the part of two "player-nations," where decision makers in each nation are assumed to be familiar with the other's objectives. The resulting noncooperative Nash differential game is similar to that found in Simaan and Cruz [13] who themselves follow the work of Brito [3]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]