Eighteen-Nation Disarmament

However, during the Second World War, apart from Japanese operations in China, chemical weapons were not used and, after the defeat of the Axis powers, the advent of the atomic bomb overshadowed chemical warfare-related issues. Chemical weapons essentially disappeared from the disarmament scene until the late 1960s when events in the Vietnam War prompted the United Nations to prioritise chemical disarmament. However, it should be noted that the United Nations is, of course, the servant of its member states, not master of them, and as such is really in no position to prioritise anything. Indeed, the reality was that in 1968 was that the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Conference decided to... 

See for example the Soviet proposal submitted to the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee in March 1962, as quoted in SIPRI, The Problem of Chemical and Biological Warfare, Volume IV CB Disarmament Negotiations, 1920-1970 (Stockholm Almquist Wiksel, 1971), pp.23Iff. 

Secondly progress towards the control of chemical weapons has been extremely slow. Under United Nations auspices various committees, based in Geneva, originally the Eighteen Nation Committee on Disarmament now the Conference on Disarmament, have been engaged in seeking a chemical weapons convention... 

Draft Convention for the Prohibition of Biological Methods of Warfare with Associated Draft Security Council Resolution tabled by the United Kingdom in the Conference of the Eighteen-Nation Committee on Disarmament in Geneva on 10 July, 1969 , Cmnd. 4113 (1968-9) liv. 

In 1972, following two years of additional negotiation, the BTWC was complete. The Conference of the Committee on Disarmament, which grew out of the Eighteen-Nation Committee, was ready to submit the text of the document to the United Nations General Assembly. The key provisions of the Convention were as follows ... 

The Conference on Disarmament is the current name of the multilateral negotiating body which has been variously known as the Ten Nation Committee on Disarmament (TNCD), the Eighteen Nation Committee on Disarmament (ENDC), the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament (CCD), and the Committee on Disarmament (CD). In the following text, the CD is referred to by the name which was current during the period under discussion. 

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