The Washington Naval Treaty, also known as the Five-Power Treaty, was a treaty signed during 1922 among the major Allies of World War I, which agreed to prevent an arms race by limiting naval construction. It was negotiated at the Washington Naval Conference in Washington, D.C. from November 1921 to February 1922 and signed by the governments of the British Empire, United States, France, Italy, and Japan. It limited the construction of battleships, battlecruisers 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 each.
Signing of the Washington Naval Treaty (1922).
Akagi (Japanese ship originally planned as a battlecruiser but converted during construction to an aircraft carrier) in April 1925.
HMS Hawkins, lead ship for her class of heavy cruisers alongside a quay, probably during the interwar period
Japanese denunciation of the Washington Naval Treaty, 29 December 1934
An arms race occurs when two or more groups compete in military superiority. It consists of a competition between two or more states to have superior armed forces, concerning production of weapons, the growth of a military, and the aim of superior military technology. Unlike a sporting race, which constitutes a specific event with winning interpretable as the outcome of a singular project, arms races constitute spiralling systems of on-going and potentially open-ended behavior.
1909 cartoon in Puck shows (clockwise) US, Germany, Britain, France and Japan engaged in naval race in a "no limit" game.