May 19, 1990

Bilateral Destruction Agreement

Baker and Shevardnadze complete a U.S.–Soviet chemical-weapons accord

The agreement announced on 19 May was not signed for another thirteen days — and it never entered into force at all.

Moscow, 19 May 1990

After four days of negotiations in Moscow, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker announced on 19 May 1990 that the United States and the Soviet Union had reached full agreement on a bilateral chemical-weapons accord. His counterpart was Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze.

The plan would cut each country’s chemical-agent stockpile to a level described that day as 20 percent of the existing U.S. holding. Baker also announced that the United States would stop producing chemical weapons immediately.

The numbers in the text

The formal ceiling was 5,000 metric agent tons per party by 31 December 2002, with at least 50 percent of each declared stockpile destroyed by 31 December 1999 and destruction beginning no later than 31 December 1992.

That is not elimination. Each superpower could still retain thousands of tonnes of agent, with deeper cuts left to a future multilateral convention.

Announced, then signed, then never in force

19 May completed the political negotiation; it was not the signing. Presidents Bush and Gorbachev signed the agreement in Washington on 1 June 1990.

Its production and destruction obligations were conditional on entry into force, and the agreement was never ratified by both parties. Later stockpile destruction ran under the Chemical Weapons Convention instead, which entered into force in 1997.

One filing error worth naming: the corpus routes this entry to a page on U.S. nuclear weapons. It is a chemical-weapons event.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 6 sources not yet audited

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

May 19 is securely supported as the date the negotiators reached and announced full agreement. June 1—not May 19—was the date the presidents signed the treaty.
The treaty's production and destruction obligations were formally conditional on entry into force. The agreement was never ratified by both parties and never entered into force.