The Obama administration has decided to maintain former President George W. Bush’s policy on biological weapons, which rejected the idea of international verification to ensure countries are not developing such agents. The Biological Weapons Convention, approved by 163 nations since the early 1970s, does not include any means for inspecting laboratories to see if governments are cheating. Seven years of international negotiations to craft a verification system collapsed in 2001 when the Bush administration rejected the idea, in part because it did not want to submit U.S. military and civilian labs to inspections.