The DUP has gathered enough signatures to press for a debate in the Assembly next Tuesday on the exclusion of Sinn Fein. In the likely case of the motion failing, however, the party's two ministers intend to resign.
The DUP managed to sign up the dissident Ulster Unionist MLA, Ms Pauline Armitage, as the 30th signature necessary to table the motion.
The DUP's Minister for Regional Development, Mr Peter Robinson, said that this was the opportunity for unionist MLAs to "nail their colours to the mast".
He continued: "It's a day of reckoning for every unionist in the Assembly. They have to ask themselves: `Are we prepared to abandon our unionism or our election manifesto by voting against it?' If they don't vote for this motion, the electorate is going to know about it, and it's going to be in front of them every minute, every hour and every day until they face that electorate again."
Praising what he described as the "principled stand" of Ms Armitage, Mr Robinson said he was aware that the motion was unlikely to muster the required cross-community support to pass, but he hoped it could still gather 60 per cent of unionist support.
If it does not, Mr Robinson and Mr Nigel Dodds, the Minister for Social Development, intend to resign and hand over their posts to other party colleagues on a rotating basis.
The UUP Arts and Culture Minister, Mr Michael McGimpsey, criticised the motion, saying that it "smacked of hypocrisy" given the level of engagement between the DUP and Sinn Fein in the Assembly and the fact that the DUP had done nothing to achieve decommissioning.
The Northern Secretary, Mr Peter Mandelson, said yesterday that paramilitary organisations must eventually disband and weapons must be permanently decommissioned if democracy is to take hold in the North.
"Over time, we must see these two things going hand in hand, the guns going away, the gunmen fading from Northern Ireland society as politics takes root and democracy takes over."
However, Mr Mandelson insisted that there was no point in imposing a time-frame on decommissioning loyalist and republican weapons. "I don't want to pluck timetables out of the air or try to impose deadlines. We have tried that, heaven knows, over the last two years. It hasn't got us very far."