India, Dec. 2 -- External affairs minister S Jaishankar's call for the modernisation of the 1975 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) is timely. One of the first treaties to ban an entire class of weapons, it mandates signatories to "never in any circumstances. develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain microbial or other biological agents, or toxins". BWC had some initial success with the US and the erstwhile Soviet Union rolling back their biological weapons programmes, but much has changed since due to advances in biology and technology, which renders the existing pact more of a moral instrument than an effective treaty against the use of biological weapons.

A major flaw of BWC is it does not mandate a verification syst...