Jordan, J. Warships after Washington. The Development of the Five Major Fleets 1922-1930

The Washington Treaty of 1922, designed to head off a potentially dangerous arms race
between the major naval powers, agreed to legally binding limits on the numbers and
sizes of the principal warship types. In doing so, it introduced a new constraint into naval
architecture and sponsored many ingenious attempts to maximise the power of ships
built within those restrictions. It effectively banned the construction of new battleships for
a decade, but threw greater emphasis on large cruisers.
This much is broadly understood by anyone with an interest in warships, but both the
wider context of the treaty and the detail ramifications of its provisions are little
understood. The approach of this book is novel in combining coverage of the political and
strategic background of the treaty and the subsequent London Treaty of 1930 - with
analysis of exactly how the navies of Britain, the USA, Japan, France and Italy
responded, in terms of the types of warships they built and the precise characteristics of
those designs. This was not just a matter of capital ships and cruisers, but also
influenced the development of super-destroyers and large submarines.
Now for the first time warship enthusiasts and historians can understand fully the
rationale behind much of inter-war naval procurement. The Washington Treaty was a
watershed, and this book provides an important insight into its full significance.