CBW Events

The aim of CBW Events is a new long-term project to record significant events, both large and small, relating to preparation for or prevention of chemical and biological warfare. The co-ordinating editor is Richard Guthrie.

The initial CBW Events database was put together from the chronology that appears in the CBW Conventions Bulletin published by the Harvard Sussex Program. The Bulletin started publication in 1988.

The CBW Events project aims to complement this effort through three primary activities:

• Addition of new material to take the existing chronological records back to 1 January 1946.
• Publication of themed chronologies:
  • Iraq & CBW
  • Libya & CBW
  • Terrorism & CBW
  • Biological Weapons Convention negotiations in the 1960s and 1970s
• Publication of annual chronologies

These primary areas of work are supplemented by a number of contemporary activities, notably analysis and reporting on significant current events in the development of CBW policy and the elaboration of "lessons learned" from past experiences. Background briefing documents are also being considered.

CBW Events is a long-term project. The website was established in 2007. As the dataset from which all of the the above publications are derived is being compiled on a part-time basis, the programme of work outlined above will be carried out in a number of stages. It is hoped that the themed chronologies will appear first, over a period of a few years. More themes may be identified in the meantime. It will take at least a few years before the first volume of the annual chronology series exists in print form. It will take a decade or more to complete the first forty years of the set.