Claim: Washington Naval Conference was held.

The Washington Naval Conference , also called the Washington Arms Conference or the Washington Disarmament Conference , was a military conference called by U.S. President Warren G. Harding and held in Washington , D.C. , from 12 November 1921 to 6 February 1922 . Conducted outside the auspice of the League of Nations , it was attended by nine nations -- the United States , Japan , China , France , Britain , Italy , Belgium , Netherlands , and Portugal -- regarding interests in the Pacific Ocean and East Asia . Soviet Russia was not invited to the conference . It was the first international conference held in the United States and the first arms control conference in history , and as Kaufman , 1990 shows , it is studied by political scientists as a model for a successful disarmament movement .   Held at Memorial Continental Hall in downtown Washington DC , it resulted in three major treaties : Four-Power Treaty , Five-Power Treaty -LRB- more commonly known as the Washington Naval Treaty -RRB- , the Nine-Power Treaty , and a number of smaller agreements . These treaties preserved peace during the 1920s but were not renewed in the increasingly hostile world of the Great Depression .