The Washington Naval Treaty and Naval power

One hundred years ago this month, the chief Allies from World War I signed the first major arms control treaty the world had ever seen. It lasted, at least partially intact, for 14 years. Although in some ways it provided a model for modern arms reduction treaties, in other ways it was unique to its time.

The treaty was the Washington Naval Treaty, signed by the governments of Great Britain, the United States, France, Italy, and Japan. It placed limits on the construction of battleships, battlecruisers, and aircraft carriers by those five nations, and limited the size of smaller individual ships like cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. 

The naval treaty was completed on Feb. 6, 1922, and the five signatory nations exchanged ratifications in Washington on Aug. 17, 1923. Amendments to the treaty were negotiated in 1930 and 1936. 

In the mid-1930s the military government of Japan and the fascist government of Italy renounced the treaty, and in a related action about the same time the fascist government of Germany renounced the 1918 Treaty of Versailles which had limited Germany’s navy. 

Prior to and during World War I and into the decade following it, naval power was thought to constitute the deciding factor of military greatness. Whoever controlled the seas possessed a significant advantage in power confrontations, especially when land armies prevented unfettered trade across borders. 

In those days, Great Britain’s economy and military ability relied on free shipping lanes from its empire colonies and friendly nations around the world. By the late 1800s, Britain had developed a policy of maintaining a navy larger than the combined size of the next largest two nations’ navies. Immediately after World War I Britain’s naval fleet was the world’s largest and most powerful, with the United States in second place, followed by the significantly smaller navies of Japan, France and Italy.

The Treaty of Versailles, which settled World War I, severely restricted the size and number of warships that the new German government could build and maintain. The Germans had scuttled their own fleet after the war rather than turn it over to the Allied powers.

With the Germans apparently out of the competition, the victorious Allied nations immediately began to jockey for power on the high seas, and a naval arms race appeared imminent. The U.S. was not immune to that temptation: President Woodrow Wilson’s administration announced plans to expand the American navy to a total of 50 modern battleships.

The Japanese and British followed suit, with both nations planning to expand their battleships and battlecruisers by consequential numbers. (Battlecruisers were similar to armored battleships, but were somewhat lighter and faster.)

But the American people disliked the idea of heavy spending for more battleships. When Republican Warren G. Harding won the presidency in 1920, his administration called a halt to Wilson’s naval expansion plans and responded to the domestic push for global arms reductions by proposing the Washington Naval Conference in November 1921. Britain agreed, in light of the postwar recession that threatened that nation’s economy.

U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes laid out the framework for the conference’s goal: a target capital ship ratio of 5:5:3 for Britain, the United States and Japan respectively, with targets for France and Italy even smaller.

The postwar threat to Britain’s economy, coupled with the likelihood that the U.S. and Great Britain would never declare war on each other, won Britain’s assent to the plan. 

Japanese opinion was divided, with militarists opposed to the plan and the more diplomatic faction in favor. The diplomats won out, pointing out that if Japan entered into a naval arms race with the U.S., Japan would surely lose. In 1922, Japan had only 55 percent of the capital ships and 18 percent of the gross domestic product of the United States.

The treaty also prohibited all parties from building new fortifications or bases in the Pacific, thereby guaranteeing that Japan could dominate the Western Pacific. That factor also induced Japan to agree to the 5:5:3 capital ship formula.

(The Japanese government’s conviction that it couldn’t outproduce America may have been a crucial factor in its decision in 1941 to carry out the surprise attack on the Pearl Harbor naval base, hoping thereby to destroy most of the American Pacific fleet and buy enough time to shore up an unassailable defense structure throughout the Western Pacific.)

The French and Italians were unhappy with their trailing slots under the American proposal, but assurances that the numbers of cruisers and submarines would not be included in the limits mollified them into signing the document.

An unofficial result of the treaty was the end of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. The Americans would not agree to the treaty unless Great Britain ended its alliance with Japan, which Britain did.

Violations of the capital ship restrictions popped up by the mid-1930s, and Germany proceeded to rebuild its navy despite the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. When the treaty’s termination date of 1936 approached, most of the signatories gave notice they would not sign a renewal, and the treaty ended.

As with a number of subsequent arms reduction treaties, technical innovations had rendered the Washington Naval Treaty obsolete by its termination date anyway. Probably the most significant of those was the burgeoning potency of air power. 

In 1921, just months before the treaty’s signing, American military leader Billy Mitchell had demonstrated the weakness of reliance on naval surface ships by conducting the impressive bombing destruction of some obsolete and/or captured battleships. That disadvantage grew more evident over the next 15 years, and by the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the aircraft carrier had supplanted the battleship as the crucial naval vessel in wartime.

But in the years immediately following World War I, battleship and battlecruiser fleets performed the same function as nuclear armaments in modern days: they were deemed so powerful that no major nation was willing to risk all-out confrontation between its battleship fleet and that of another nation. 

The decision by the world’s major powers to seek a sort of parity in capital ship numbers in 1922 sprang from the same belief that drives the nations of today: the creation of a “balance of terror,” whether in battleship fleets or in nuclear capability, that theoretically discourages any nation from using those weapons. 

Since 1945, that theory has proved to be sound. Time will tell whether it remains a correct one.

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