Arms Control: The Interwar Years

There are in general three main reasons to limit or control the creation or prevalence of weapons. These are moral, economic, and strategic. The thinking behind arms control for moral reasons is that some weapons are simply too cruel to be used on people. These include weapons such as mustard gas or nuclear weapons. Arms control for moral reasons can often work, because of the threat of reciprocity. If one side breaks the agreement to use mustard gas on the enemy, then they will most likely have to face the fact that their own soldiers will have to face that weapon themselves soon after.

The thinking behind arms control for economic reasons is that some arsenals cost an incredible amount of money to maintain. If two adversaries are not at war, but both feel that they are expending too many resources in order to keep up with the weapons production of the other side then in order to keep military parity and save money, they might make an agreement to limit the amount of a certain expensive weapon to reduce costs. This could be considered to be the opposite of a security dilemma, where one side produces more weapons forcing the other side to do the same, reducing total security for both parties.

The final reason for arms control is a strategic one. If one country fears that another country is ahead of them technologically, they might attempt to ban the weapon that the other side has until they are able to catch up. This was the case during the cold war when the United States was spending lots of money to develop “Star Wars” which would limit the effectiveness of the nuclear bomb and end the parity that came from mutually assured destruction. Because of this threat the Soviet Union tried to ban “Star Wars” for long enough to catch up. “Star Wars” never ended up becoming a real defensive weapon, but the fear of its development was able to affect the soviet union’s behavior during the later years of the cold war.

While attempts have been made to limit many different types of weapons, the one that I will discuss for this paper is the Washington Treaty, also known as the 5-5-3 Naval Treaty, between the United States, England, and Japan. This treaty limited the number of battleships these countries could produce. The goal of the Washington treaty was to prevent a naval arms race between the powers for both economic and strategic reasons. The problem with this treaty was three-fold. The first was that the treaty did not limit the weapon that was actually most useful during World War 2. During the interwar period the conventional thinking was that these huge battleships would be the deciding factor in any naval war, however the truth was that it was aircraft carriers, destroyers, and submarines that would be the most effective during the war. The second problem with the treaty was that it was not a ban, but a limit on the number of ships that each side could produce. Because of the naval capabilities of the United States compared to Japan, even though in the treaty they had a higher allocation of ships that they could build, it affected the United States more than Japan because of how few battleships Japan actually had at the time of the treaty. Because the limit was set so high for Japan it didn’t prevent them from building as many battleships as they possibly could, compared to the United States that was already near their limit. The final reason that this treaty failed was that there was no real way of verifying that the other side was keeping up with their side of the deal. Even though Japan didn’t need to worry about their limit for a long time because their cap was so high compared to their production capabilities, when they actually did manage to reach their cap, they simply kept producing more ships. There was no established way that the United States could check to see if they had reached their limit and so the treaty was ignored, and the ships were built anyway.