Biological warfare is illegal, and biological weapons are illegal, Annie Jacobsen notes (in Biological War), yet biological weapons exist:
Over 100 years ago, the international community banned the use of biological weapons with the Geneva Protocol of 1925, but by World War II, various nations were developing robust biological weapons programs, including the United States, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan.
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And then, in November 1969 and without much warning, President Richard Nixon renounced America’s biological weapons program. This led to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention—the BWC—an international treaty prohibiting the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling, and use of biological and toxin weapons.
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The Biological Weapons Convention treaty allows for “defensive” biological weapons research, meaning scientists can conduct research involving the same pathogens that could be used for biological warfare—so long as the research warrants to be “for prophylactic, protective, or other peaceful purposes.” In other words, offensive biological weapons research can masquerade as “defensive” in scope.
“The treaty has no protocols for enforcement,” former assistant secretary of state Mallory Stewart tells us.
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In the second half of the Cold War, after signing the treaty, the Soviet Union secretly and illegally developed and stockpiled massive arsenals of biological weapons, including genetically engineered germs.
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A 2025 U.S. State Department compliance report assesses that Russia and North Korea each “maintains an offensive BW [biological weapons] program” in violation of the treaty, while China and Iran are engaged in biological research and activities that raise unresolved compliance issues.
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“The United States maintains that the Soviet program was absorbed, not dismantled, by the Russian Federation,” says the State Department’s special representative to the Biological Weapons Convention, Kenneth D. Ward, “and that program has continued and evolved in violation of Article I and Article II of the BWC.”
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A deadly germ—genetically modified to be human-to-human transmissible, hypervirulent, able to defeat countermeasures, and with no known cure—could be twenty-first-century humans’ last invention.