The United States of America and the Soviet Union were instrumental in creating the biological weapons prohibition regime more than 50 years ago. This has left the regime with a big gap in its normative structure related to the verification of treaty compliance. The working paper by Alexander Kelle and Eva Siegmann analyses great power involvement in several areas of regime implementation and concludes that none of the great powers, including China, has supported the addition of declaration and inspection norms. While recent US and Chinese initiatives could still lead to a strengthening of the regime in different areas, Russian policies, most notably false accusations against the US and others, threaten to undermine the regime.

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