Biological Weapons Convention is recorded in this encyclopedia from the source named below.
Overview
The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), or Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC), is a disarmament treaty that effectively bans biological and toxin weapons by prohibiting their development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use. The treaty's full name is the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction. Having entered into force on 26 March 1975, the BWC was the first multilateral disarmament treaty to ban the production of an entire category of weapons of mass destruction. The convention is of unlimited duration. As of May 2025, 189 states have become party to the treaty. Four additional states have signed but not ratified the treaty, and another four states have neither signed nor acceded to the treaty. The BWC is considered to have established a strong global norm against biological weapons. This norm is reflected in the treaty's preamble, which states that the use of biological weapons would be "repugnant to the conscience of mankind". It is also demonstrated by the fact that not a single state today declares to possess or seek biological weapons, or asserts that their use in war is legitimate. In light of the rapid advances in biotechnology, biodefense expert Daniel Gerstein has described the BWC as "the most important arms control treaty of the twenty-first century". However, the convention's effectiveness has been limited due to insufficient institutional support and the absence of any formal verification regime to monitor compliance. The treaty has seen notable violations in offensive biological weapons programs of the Soviet Union, and of Ba'athist Iraq. Its Article VI mechanism for complaint of a violation has been invoked once, by Russia in 2022, regarding the debunked Ukraine bioweapons conspiracy theory.
Source and reuse
The descriptive text above is drawn from the English-language encyclopedia article Biological Weapons Convention, reused under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence and attributed in the sources block on this page. Figures in the infobox come from Wikidata and carry that project's own provenance; they should be checked against the cited source before being relied on.
Editorial note
This record is a sourced summary, not original research. Where the underlying material is silent on a point, this article is silent too. Last reviewed 2026-09-23.