This was despite a long standing prohibition of using biological or chemical weapons in war the 1925 Geneva protocol banned the use of there weapons; however, it was still legal to possess the weapons, as retaliation in kind was widely recognized as a right under international law. In 1969, the united suites, by president Richard Nixon's executive order, unilaterally abandoned its offensive biological weapons program and destroyed its stockpiles. The reasons were complicated but revolted around the fact that the united states had nuclear weapons, and there were no clear situations in which it might wish to use biological weapons