List of chemical arms control agreements

Chemical arms control is the attempt to limit the use or possession of chemical weapons through arms control agreements. These agreements are often motivated by the common belief "that these weapons ...are abominable", and by a general agreement that chemical weapons do "not accord with the feelings and principles of civilized warfare."

The first chemical arms control agreement was the Strasbourg Agreement of 1675 between France and the Holy Roman Empire. This bilateral pact prohibited the use of poisoned bullets in any war between the two states. In the several centuries after that agreement, as chemistry advanced, states developed more sophisticated chemical weapons, and the primary concern in arms control shifted from poison bullets to poison gases. Thus, in the Hague Convention of 1899, a large group of states agreed "to abstain from the use of projectiles the sole objective of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases". The Hague Convention and other early attempts at chemical arms control took place before any significant wartime use of chemical weapons. As such, these agreements were largely hypothetical and their prohibitions were not overly restrictive or precise. Another important feature of all early agreements was that they required reciprocity; in all of the agreements adopted before World War I, states were still free to use chemical weapons against non-signatories.

World War I broke out in Europe less than 20 years after the signing of the Hague Convention. During that conflict, chemical weapons were used extensively by all sides in what still remains the largest case of chemical warfare. After the war, arms control agreements in general, and chemical arms control agreements in particular, gained renewed support. After seeing the gas attacks of the war, the general public overwhelmingly supported banning them. In one survey of Americans, 367,000 favored banning chemical warfare while 19 supported its continuation in the future. This public opinion stimulated increased efforts for a ban on chemical weapons. These efforts led to several agreements in the years before World War II, including the Geneva Protocol.

World War II was seen as a significant success for chemical arms control as none of the belligerents made significant use of chemical weapons. In the immediate aftermath of the war, arms control efforts focused primarily on nuclear weapons given their immense destructive power, and chemical disarmament was not a priority. Nonetheless, chemical warfare began to expand again with gas attacks during the Yemeni Civil War, and allegations of use during the Korean War. Combined with the use of non-lethal chemical agents by the United States in the Vietnam War (including tear gases and defoliants), these incidents led to a renewed interest in chemical disarmament. The substantial use of chemical weapons in the Iran–Iraq War increased the push towards disarmament, finally culminating in the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, a full-scale ban on the use, production and stockpiling of weapons, which took force in 1997.