After World War I, many attempts at disarmament, or the reduction or abolition of the military forces and weapons of a nation, emerged worldwide. Historians writing in the 1930s began to emphasize the fast-paced arms race preceding the outbreak of World War I. Additionally, all the major powers, except the U.S., committed to disarmament in both the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant of the League of Nations. Simultaneously, an international non-governmental campaign to promote disarmament developed throughout the 1920s and early 1930s.
WASHINGTON NAVAL CONFERENCE
The Washington Naval Conference, also called the Washington Arms Conference or the Washington Disarmament Conference, was a military conference called by President Warren G. Harding and held in Washington from 12 November 1921 to 6 February 1922. Conducted outside the auspices of the League of Nations, it was attended by nine nations—the United States, Japan, China, France, Britain, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, and Portugal—regarding interests in the Pacific Ocean and East Asia. Soviet Russia was not invited to the conference. It was the first international conference held in the United States and the first disarmament conference in history.
The conference resulted in three major treaties: Four-Power Treaty, Five-Power Treaty (more commonly known as the Washington Naval Treaty), and the Nine-Power Treaty. It also produced a number of smaller agreements. The Four-Power Treaty was signed by the United States, Great Britain, France and Japan. All parties agreed to maintain the status quo in the Pacific by respecting the Pacific holdings of the other countries, not seeking further territorial expansion, and mutual consultation with each other in the event of a dispute over territorial possessions. The Five-Power Treaty was signed by the governments of the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, France, and Italy. It limited the construction of battleships, battle cruisers and aircraft carriers by the signatories. The numbers of other categories of warships, including cruisers, destroyers and submarines, were not limited by the treaty, but those ships were limited to 10,000 tons displacement. The Nine-Power Treaty affirmed the sovereignty and territorial integrity of China as per the Open Door Policy (keeping China open to trade with all countries on an equal basis, keeping any one power from total control of the country). It was signed by all of the attendees to the Washington Naval Conference.
These treaties preserved peace during the 1920s but are also credited with enabling the rise of the Japanese Empire as a naval power leading up to World War II.
Battleships being dismantled for scrap in Philadelphia Navy Yard, after the Washington Naval Treaty imposed limits on capital ships, U.S. Naval Historical Center. Courtesy of the San Francisco Maritime Museum, San Francisco, California
Scene at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, December 1923, with guns from scrapped battleships in the foreground. One of these guns is marked "Kansas", presumably an indication that it came from USS Kansas (BB-21). Ship being dismantled in the backround is USS South Carolina (BB-26).
SPIRIT OF LOCARNO
The Locarno Treaties were seven agreements negotiated in Locarno, Switzerland (October 5 - October 16, 1925), in which the Western European Allied powers and the new states of East-Central Europe sought to secure the post-World War I territorial settlement and normalize relations with defeated Germany (at the time referred to as Weimar Republic). The were formally signed in London on December 1, 1925. Ratifications for the Locarno treaties were exchanged in Geneva on 14 September 1926 and on the same day they became effective. The treaties were also registered in the League of Nations Treaty Series on the same day.
The principal treaty concluded at Locarno was the Rhineland Pact between Germany, France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Italy. Germany formally recognized its new western borders acted by the Treaty of Versailles. Furthermore, the first three signatories undertook not to attack each other, with the latter two acting as guarantors. In the event of aggression by any of the first three states against another, all other parties were to assist the country under attack. Germany also agreed to sign arbitration conventions with France and Belgium and arbitration treaties with Poland and Czechoslovakia, undertaking to refer disputes to an arbitration tribunal or to the Permanent Court of International Justice. France signed further treaties with Poland and Czechoslovakia, pledging mutual assistance in the event of conflict with Germany. These essentially reaffirmed existing treaties of alliance concluded by France with Poland on 19 February 1921 and with Czechoslovakia on 25 January 1924.
KELLOGG-BRIAND PACT OF 1928
In August 1928, Germany, France and the United States signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, brainchild of American Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand (following the original signatories, other nations joined, eventually reaching the number of 62). The Pact was an international agreement in which signatory states promised not to use war to resolve "disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them." Parties failing to abide by this promise "should be denied the benefits furnished by this treaty." In general, the agreement aimed to outlaw war and show the United States commitment to international peace (the U.S. did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles or became a member of the League of Nations). However, it did not hold the United States to the conditions of any existing treaties, it still allowed European nations the right to self-defense, and it stated that if one nation broke the Pact, it would be up to the other signatories to enforce it. The Kellogg-Briand Pact was more of a sign of good intentions on the part of the US, rather than a legitimate step towards the sustenance of world peace.
THE WORLD DISARMAMENT CONFERENCE
Article 8 of the Covenant of the League of Nations gave the League the task of reducing "armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations." A significant amount of the League's time and energy was devoted to this goal, even though many member governments were uncertain that such extensive disarmament could be achieved or was even desirable. The Allied powers were also under obligation by the Treaty of Versailles to attempt to disarm, and the armament restrictions imposed on the defeated countries had been described as the first step toward worldwide disarmament. The League Covenant assigned the League the task of creating a disarmament plan for each state, but the Council devolved this responsibility to a special commission set up in 1926 to prepare for the 1932–34 World Disarmament Conference.
Members of the League held different views towards the issue. The French were reluctant to reduce their armaments without a guarantee of military help if they were attacked; Poland and Czechoslovakia felt vulnerable to attack from the West and wanted the League's response to aggression against its members to be strengthened before they disarmed. Without this guarantee, they would not reduce armaments because they felt the risk of attack from Germany was too great.
The World Disarmament Conference was an effort by member states of the League of Nations, together with the U.S. and the Soviet Union, to actualize the ideology of disarmament. It took place in Geneva, with representatives from 60 states, between 1932 and 1934. A one-year moratorium on the expansion of armaments, later extended by a few months, was proposed at the start of the conference. The Disarmament Commission obtained initial agreement from France, Italy, Japan, and Britain to limit the size of their navies. The talks were beset by a number of difficulties from the outset. Among these were disagreements over what constituted "offensive" and "defensive" weapons, and the polarization of France and Germany. The increasingly military-minded German governments could see no reason why their country could not enjoy the same level of armaments as other powers, especially France. The French, for their part, were equally insistent that German military inferiority was their only insurance from future conflict as serious as they had endured in the First World War. As for the British and US governments, they were unprepared to offer the additional security commitments that France requested in exchange for limitation of French armaments. The talks broke down and Hitler withdrew Germany from both the Conference and the League of Nations in October 1933.
UTLIMATE FAILURE
Ultimately, these disarmament attempts failed to halt the military build-up by Germany, Italy, and Japan during the 1930s . The League of Nations turned out to be ineffective in its efforts to act as an international peace-keeping organization. It was mostly silent in the face of major events leading to the second World War, such as Hitler's re-militarization of the Rhineland and occupation of the Sudetenland and Anschluss of Austria, which had been forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles. In fact, League members themselves re-armed. In 1933, Japan simply withdrew from the League rather than submit to its judgment, as did Germany (using the failure of the World Disarmament Conference to agree to arms parity between France and Germany as a pretext) and Italy in 1937. The final significant act of the League was to expel the Soviet Union in December 1939 after it invaded Finland. Thus, all agreements and disarmament attempts failed.