Article 1: a capital-ship building holiday

The London agreement extends the Washington system by suspending capital-ship replacement construction from 1931 through 1936. France and Italy may still lay down the replacement tonnage allotted to them for 1927 and 1929, and the treaty preserves the exception for ships accidentally lost or destroyed. A tentative recollection of the French battleship France grounding on rocks soon after Washington supplies an example of the kind of casualty this wording could cover. Deliberately wrecking a capital ship is treated as a joke because the loss of national prestige would make the apparent loophole costly.