ABSTRACT
The Geneva Conference of 1927 had signally failed to halt the construction race in auxiliary naval vessels. The immediate cause of the failure was the inability of the United States to obtain concessions on the cruiser issue from Great Britain. Negotiations at Geneva had shown that a simple extension of the Washington agreements was out of the question and that extending existing capital ship ratios to all other vessels created a great number of strategic-technical questions. The various countries involved concluded that technical specialists were not capable of coming to an agreement and in any future conference ought to be relegated to advisory positions, as at Washington.
