Statement
Nixon issued his "Statement on Chemical and Biological Defense Policies and Programs" on November 25, 1969 in a speech from Fort Detrick. The same day he gave a speech from the Roosevelt Room at the White House further outlining his earlier statement. The statement ended, unconditionally, all U.S. offensive biological weapons programs. Nixon noted that biological weapons were unreliable and stated:
The United States shall renounce the use of lethal biological agents and weapons, and all other methods of biological warfare. The United States will confine its biological research to defensive measures such as immunization and safety measures.
In his speech Nixon called his move "unprecedented"; and it was in fact the first review of the U.S. BW program since 1954. Despite the lack of review, the BW program had increased in cost and size since 1961; when Nixon ended the program the budget was $300 million annually. Nixon's statement confined all biological weapons research to defensive-only and ordered the destruction of the existing U.S. biological arsenal.
The Nixon statement also addressed the topics of chemical warfare and U.S. ratification of the Geneva Protocol, which, at the time, the nation had yet to ratify. On chemical warfare Nixon reaffirmed no-first-use of chemical weapons by the United States. He also announced that the United States would reconsider ratification of the Geneva Protocol, which Nixon recommended to the Senate that year.
Read more about this topic: Statement On Chemical And Biological Defense Policies And Programs
Famous quotes containing the word statement:
“Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual’s sovereignty.”
—Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936)
“The new statement will comprise the skepticisms, as well as the faiths of society, and out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For, skepticisms are not gratuitous or lawless, but are limitations of the affirmative statement, and the new philosophy must take them in, and make affirmations outside of them, just as much as must include the oldest beliefs.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The force of truth that a statement imparts, then, its prominence among the hordes of recorded observations that I may optionally apply to my own life, depends, in addition to the sense that it is argumentatively defensible, on the sense that someone like me, and someone I like, whose voice is audible and who is at least notionally in the same room with me, does or can possibly hold it to be compellingly true.”
—Nicholson Baker (b. 1957)