"In reality, there is not a snowball's chance in hell of any weapons being decommissioned this side of a negotiated settlement." So said Mr Martin McGuinness in June 1995. Five months after a negotiated settlement, not so much as a single bullet has been decommissioned.
In September 1997, Mr David Trimble returned to the table, putting to one side Mr John Hume's previous precondition that there be no guns "on the table, under the table or outside the door".
The electoral price for that decision was paid in the Assembly elections in June. While prisoner releases were the immediate issue, a substantial swathe of Ulster unionist opinion had decided the previous September to teach the UUP a lesson.
In retrospect, observers should not have been surprised by the growth of Mr Bob McCartney's UKUP in retrospect and only his "rent-a-mob" remarks in Holywood main street prevented a more substantial slippage of support.
With 28 avowed anti-agreement unionists in the Assembly and only 30 nominally supportive of the First Minister designate - 28 Ulster Unionists and two Progressive Unionists - there is clearly no fat left on moderate unionist flanks.
Technically, now that the election of the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister is complete, Mr Trimble needs only the support of 40 per cent of designated unionists or 24 members of the Assembly to continue in business. Few believe this is a sustainable position, open as he would be to the charge of being held in power by SDLP and Sinn Fein votes.
Given this state of affairs and taking into account the fact that a bare majority of unionists backed the agreement in the referendum, and that a tiny majority of votes within the unionist bloc were cast for anti-agreement candidates in June, it is all the more remarkable that Mr John Bruton is castigated as impertinent for suggesting that it behoves the republican movement to make the next move.
Instead, the welter of Irish opinion is upon Mr Trimble to sidestep decommissioning once again. Most nationalists cannot accept that for most unionists a vital moral principle is at stake, namely that participants in a government should not have a private army.
For them, the very idea of grand moral absolutes in politics is faintly risible. Some unionists of the more pragmatic variety would privately agree but their pragmatism also tells them that not to pay the danegeld to their more ethical colleagues this time would be to visit disaster upon the whole new unionist project.
While everyone on both sides of the Atlantic pays lip-service to the notion of some decommissioning at some point, many privately find the idea absurd. What matters is that the guns remain silent, they argue - in as much as 25 republican so-called "punishment beatings", 13 "punishment shootings", 34 "expulsions" and the death of Andy Kearney represents silence.
Guns can be decommissioned one day and replaced the next is another commonly held fallacy, ignoring the difficulty of obtaining weapons internationally, compared with the situation in the mid- and late-1980s.
The real question is: If the IRA ceasefire is intended to be permanent why the paranoid refusal to dispose of the weapons of war? Could it be that the they represent an each-way bet on the success of the agreement? Or is it that they serve as a useful reminder of the consequences of republican demands not being met?
Within the tortured republican credo, decommissioning sticks in the craw even if the mindsets have been decommissioned. It smacks of surrender. If the demand was that the quarter-masters meekly turn up at RUC stations to deliver the armaments, this might be understandable but only the most vengeful could seriously expect that.
On the contrary, Mr Trimble has expressed a willingness to allow the IRA to perform the procedures themselves, subject to the independent verification necessary for public opinion.
The other republican fear is that any sign of apparent weakness on decommissioning will only feed atavistic unionist demands. The express intention in the agreement is indeed that all illegal arms be decommissioned before June 2000. There is no place in Ireland for illegal armies assuming the mantle of lawful authority.
So long as the island is awash with illegal weapons they will leak into the hands of dissidents and drug barons. At the same time, the republican movement seriously underestimates the transformatory power upon the political process and sceptical minds that even a small consignment being shown to have been taken out of circulation would have.
An academic and former republican activist, Mr Anthony McIntyre, has argued that the Provisional movement in the North at least has always held to a bastardised republicanism, more concerned with the notion of the defence of the Catholic community than with the creation of an all-Ireland state free from British control.
This thesis ignores the deeply sectarian aspects to the military campaign but on the assumption that it reflects the Provisionals' own view of their raison d'etre, decommissioning so long as the RUC is armed, military controls continue and there is no loyalist decommissioning poses tremendous problems.
What it does not explain is the need to hold on to the purely offensive arsenal of Semtex and surface-to-air missiles.
The peace process is not in crisis yet. The Adams statement, the appointment to the decommissioning body of a credible figure and the positive signals about the "disappeared" have seen to that. While republican sincerity or otherwise is being tested, unionists would be foolish to walk away from the agreement.
But if, come Christmas, most of the prisoners have been released, the military presence has been scaled down, the cross-Border bodies have been set up and the various independent commissions are well progressed and still not one bullet has been forthcoming from the IRA, most unionists would not rate the chances of Mr Trimble being able to proceed with the formation of an Executive much above those of a snowball in hell.
Steven King is an adviser to the Ulster Unionist Party's deputy leader, John Taylor