What is the Bilateral Destruction Agreement?
The most important provisions of the June 1990 Bilateral Destruction Agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union require both states to stop producing chemical weapons and reduce their respective chemical weapons stockpiles to no more than 5,000 agent tons by the end of 2002. The agreement stipulated the continuous presence of inspectors and monitoring instruments on-site at destruction facilities and on-site inspections at storage facilities. The Bilateral Destruction Agreement also required the United States and Russia, which assumed the USSR’s obligations, to cooperate on establishing safe methods and technologies for destruction of their chemical weapons stockpiles. Initially, the parties were to have begun destruction no later than 31 December 1992 and completed the task by 31 December 2002. Economic difficulties in Russia prompted revised deadlines, calling for the commencement of destruction by 30 June 1997 and the end by 30 June 2004. However, Russia officially bac
