The administration changes tack

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.

Why? An 18-month review, say officials close to the exercise, showed that it would cost more money to verify such a treaty than anyone is likely to want to pay, and checks would have to be so intrusive they could compromise national security. But arms-control enthusiasts smell a rat.

Daryl Kimball, of the Arms Control Association, argues that a properly focused treaty could be monitored with confidence. He puts the reversal of past American policy by the Bush team down to three less high-minded motives: their aversion to multilateral agreements; the worries of Israel and Pakistan, two allies that want to keep the option of adding to their stockpiles; and opposition from the navy, which doesn't want inspectors snooping around to make sure that nuclear fuel for powering submarines is not diverted to power warheads.

The navy has long hated the idea of a fiss-ban, says Rose Gottemoeller of the Carnegie Endowment, a think-tank, but under past administrations it was held in check. As in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), it has long been assumed that a fiss-ban would make an exception for naval propulsion, something more navies than America's have been counting on. Yet some governments may well have opposed that. And some verification professionals have long worried that such an exception would make the rest of the treaty hard to monitor.

Naval concerns played a part in the review, but otherwise administration officials deny that their judgment on verifiability was made on anything other than technical grounds. No other country, they argue, has undertaken a similar systematic review. And they point out that the only difference between production of highly-enriched uranium for civilian purposes and for making bombs is one of intent. That is something inspectors cannot be expected to verify--as the current wrangle over Iran's true nuclear ambitions shows. In any case, governments could still agree on transparency and confidence-building measures to show they are keeping their commitment.

Why support the treaty at all? America stopped producing fissile material for weapons 14 years ago. Yet it sees value in turning that into a legally binding commitment for all, including Israel, India and Pakistan, which never signed the NPT and which could now be brought into at least a part of the non-proliferation regime. The five acknowledged nuclear powers promised a fiss-ban at the NPT review in 2000, but it was meant to be an effectively verifiable one. The next review, in May 2005, could prove a bad-tempered affair.