ABSTRACT
At the invitation of Tsar Nicholas II, an international peace conference was convened at the Hague in 1899 with the avowed purpose of limiting the ever more destructive nature of warfare. In the long effort to ban the use of chemical and biological weapons, progress in prohibiting the manufacture and possession of such weapons has come slower. During the 1932–1937 Disarmament Conference, unsuccessful attempts were made to negotiate an agreement prohibiting the production and stockpiling of chemical and biological weapons. A companion convention prohibiting chemical weapons has been under active negotiation at the Conference on Disarmament, the successor to the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament, in Geneva since 1983. The most difficult problems are verification and the proclivity of some states in the Third World, e.g., Iraq, to retain chemical weapons. On June 1, 1990, the United States and the Soviet Union concluded a bilateral Interim Agreement limiting chemical weapons stockpiles and banning the production of chemical weapon.
