HMS Dreadnought and naval arms race

1906

Britain's launch of the all-big-gun HMS Dreadnought rendered every other battleship obsolete, but it also erased Britain's comfortable naval lead at a single stroke. Germany, sensing opportunity, accelerated its shipbuilding under the direction of Admiral Tirpitz. The race to build more and bigger dreadnoughts poisoned Anglo-German relations and, by 1914, helped turn a Balkan crisis into a world war.