“The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) was signed on April 10, 1972. The United States, the USSR, and the United Kingdom deposited their instruments of Ratification of the Convention on March 26, 1975, and the Treaty came into force. It was the first—and for a long time only—post World War II disarmament treaty in which an entire class of weapons of mass destruction was done away with—or so it was widly assumed at the time—and the arms control community by and large thought biological warfare had been removed from the scene. Contrary to the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968 (NPT), there was to be no preferred group of countries that would continue to retain the weapons. Biological weapons were to be prohibited to all, into the future. This was the first major and unique distinction of the subject.”
By Milton Leitenberg
About Virtual Biosecurity Center
