Analysis and Implications - Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945 - page 358

stained from voting on UN General Assembly Resolution 59/70 calling
upon all Protocol States Parties to lift their reservations.
BW programs that continued in States Parties to the BWC, such as the
Soviet Union, or that were started subsequent to the entry into force of
the BWC, such as in South Africa and Iraq, were consequently illegal and
in breach of the solemn undertakings given by the countries concerned.
The Soviet Union, succeeded by Russia, had ratified the BWC on 26
March 1975, and South Africa had done so on 3 November 1975. Iraq
had signed (11 May 1972) though not yet ratified the BWC when it initi-
ated its BW program. But in international law, the act of signing a treaty
incurs the obligation to refrain from acts contrary to the object and pur-
pose of the treaty, even if the signature remains unratified. Consequently
Iraq, too, was in breach of the BWC in regard to its BW program. Iraq was
also in flagrant breach of the Geneva Protocol, which it had joined in
1931, when it used CW against Iran in the 1980s.
In the case of the Soviet Union, it is now evident that its BW program
was intensified following the entry into force of the BWC. Information is
not yet available from Russian archives as to why this happened. Various
ideas have been advanced, including Soviet disbelief that the US had ter-
minated its own weapons program, and the Soviet perception that BW
would acquire much added value in a world in which no other states pos-
sessed them. The program continued until at least 1992, when President
Boris Yeltsin decreed that work on BW in Russia should stop. Although
the UK and the US engaged with the USSR and then with Russia in a tri-
lateral program intended to demonstrate that all the BW programs in
Russia had indeed ended, the work proved inconclusive because of sus-
tained refusal by Russia to allow UK and US access to its military biologi-
cal facilities. This obstruction of transparency has resulted in suspicions
that continue to this day.
The South African CBW program was restarted in the 1980s, when
apartheid-era South Africa was becoming increasingly isolated interna-
tionally. The South African government was concerned that its forces in
Angola might be attacked by such weapons, and its spokesmen have
stated that it wished to explore the option of being able to retaliate in
kind in accordance with South Africa's reservation to the Geneva Proto-
col (which was not lifted until 1996). South Africa had joined the Proto-
col in 1930, but Angola did not do so until October 1990. The biological
component of the South African program was not clearly described either