The 10,000-ton, eight-inch cruiser framework traced its benchmark to the Hawkins class. Hawkins was an awkward successor to earlier large light cruisers, with 7.5-inch guns in an arrangement shaped by wartime compromises rather than an ideal postwar requirement. Treating that ship as the reference point embedded its distortions in the treaty category. Arms-control definitions could therefore freeze an accidental or transitional design into an international standard.
Notable Point · 17:48-20:09
Why the Hawkins class made a poor treaty template
The cruiser limits inherited their benchmark from Hawkins, a compromised wartime design that made a poor basis for a permanent category.