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A clause in the fourth article permitted main armament to revert to 16-inch if Japan refused to ratify the agreement by 1 April 1937.

The outcome was that the Second London Naval Treaty of 1936 restricted main gun calibre to 14-inch, but retained the 35,000 ton displacement limit. Drawing by Bombhead, via Shipbucket, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Meanwhile, Japan pulled out of discussions. Britain – at the urging of Treasury officials – pushed for smaller (cheaper) battleships, but this did not suit United States officials concerned about Japanese ambitions. That too came up for renewal mid-decade, by which time new battleships were required. The scale restrictions on battleships were retained in 1930 when a follow-up limitation treaty was signed in London. It also enforced a battleship building ‘holiday’, with the exception of two new British ships. This reflected their origins in the inter-war ‘Treaty’ system, beginning with the ‘Washington Treaty’ of 1922 which limited new battleships to 16-inch guns on a defined ‘standard’ displacement of 35,000 tons. Yet in other respects these ships were remarkably similar. The ships that emerged – the five-strong British King George V‘s and the United States’ two-ship North Carolina class – were superficially different, not least because the US ships carried nine 16-inch guns to the British ten 14-inch. In the mid-1930s, both Britain and the United States committed their navies to building their first new classes of battleship since the ‘Washington Treaty’ of 1922. In this article, we will examine some of the features behind both ships and see how they compare to one another. North Carolina, a question that reveals a lot about the design and intentions behind the first modern post-treaty battleships of the United Kingdom and United States.