Following the widespread use of chemical weapons, the Geneva Convention was established in 1925 to establish the rules of war. One of the regulations called for the cessation of the use of chemical and biological warfare. Unfortunately, many countries would violate this document to gain an advantage over their adversaries. The biological weapons programs of Japan, the Soviet Union and the United States are just a few in the world, each committed to its own purpose. These are the countries that will tell the story of their weapons programs in this article. The Japanese began their major biological weapons experiments in 1935, after the Japanese invasion of China. It was there that Unit 731 was founded in the Pingfang Forests. The program was managed by General Shirō Ishii after it had shown promise in his preliminary experiments a few years earlier. Some of the experiments included injecting Chinese diseases such as cholera and typhoid into subjects and studying their reactions. The "trunks", as the doctors called them, would be dissected while they were still alive. Diseases were also spread by the Japanese through rice and grain full of fleas infected with the bubonic plague (Watt). This practice was the cause of the plague epidemic near Ningbo in 1940. However, the death toll was not extraordinarily high: 106 victims. There was a repeat of this attack on Jinhua. The difference with this attack was that the Chinese were prepared. The pellets dropped from the planes were swept off the streets and collected for study at local hospitals. It was in these hospitals that it was discovered what was being dropped on people. The death count on this attack was kept to single digits (Keiichi)....... middle of paper... ended, as did the War Reserve Service. The War Reserve Service would be closed in 1946; this would not be the end of the US biological weapons program. With the end of the war came the trials of Axis war criminals and it was then that the United States began the next phase in bioweapons engineering. The Americans managed to reach a deal with Ishii, leader of Unit 731, in which he and his team would be granted immunity for the forfeiture of his years of work testing biological weapons on human subjects. This move, as previously stated, was heavily criticized by all countries victimized by Ishii's cruel and unusual testing procedures. With the outbreak of the Korean War, the United States government faced a delicate topic. They feared that the communist biological program would become involved in the riots.