It was Ronald Reagan who first coined the motto "trust, but verify" to guide the decades-long slog by American and Soviet negotiators to cut the size of their respective nuclear arsenals. Each was determined not to allow the other an inch of cheating-room. The current Bush administration has no patience with that approach. Early on, it torpedoed an inspection protocol for the Biological Weapons Convention. Its arms-cutting treaty with post-Soviet Russia is just a page long, with no new checking mechanism-if Russia wants to waste its money on more nuclear weapons than it needs, so be it. And this week American officials were attempting to persuade 65 sceptical governments at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva that much delayed negotiations on a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty, or "fiss-ban" (ending the production of fissile material for military purposes), should proceed without considering any verification rules.
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