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by JumpCrisscross 244 days ago
> the oversight of more estabilished international agreements and safeguards?

“Unlike the chemical or nuclear weapons regimes, the [Biological Weapons Convention] lacks both a system to verify states' compliance with the treaty and a separate international organization to support the convention's effective implementation” [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention

1 comments

The UN has a page on Biological Weapons.

https://disarmament.unoda.org/en/our-work/weapons-mass-destr...

You can read more about the efforts for disarmament there.

Where is there oversight?

Biological weapons compliance is entirely voluntary. We don’t have international monitors watching America and Russia’s smallpox stockpiles. That’s left to each nation.

Your angle is "there is no oversight, why are you asking for it?". It's the same overall angle as the guy who was spreading covid rumours here in this thread.

There are efforts at estabilishing it though. And it's hard and expensive for wet labs, but it could be much simpler for things like simulating biological pathways.

One could also see your response as "other nations are developing threats, we should race", which I personally think is misguided.

Instead of these petty armchair discussions, we should instead focus on being more serious about it.