Initiated by US President Nixon, following his move to shut down the US “offensive” biological weapons program, the United Nations General Assembly on December 16, 1971 agreed to prohibit the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use of bacteriological (biological) and toxin weapons.  [1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9]

The United Nations Organisation for the Prohibition of Biological Weapons (OPBW) Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction, commonly known as the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC), was simultaneously opened for signatures in Moscow, Washington and London on April 10, 1972 and entered into force on March 26, 1975. [6]  [not virus research?]

The actual use of biological weapons was prohibited by the 1925 Geneva Protocol, the first security convention.

It was initiated by US President Nixon, and followed the United Nations General Assembly on December 16, 1971.  The purpose to prohibit the the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use of (bacteriological) biological and toxin weapons. [1, 2, 3, 4, 8]

As of December 2003, there were 151 UN Member States who had signed the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. An additional 16 countries had signed but at the time not ratified the agreement. In an August 2005 US State Department report which examined the compliance with the “obligations assumed under the BWC”  for  China, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Russia (and the former Soviet Union) and Syria.

They determined that “communist China maintained an offensive biological weapons program in violation of its treaty commitments and that it was run in part by an arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS). That report specifically cited the AMMS’ Fifth Institute as the epicenter of the country’s bioweapons program.”  [5]