The decommissioning of weapons by the IRA and other paramilitaries would have to be carried out in front of television cameras so that ordinary people could believe it had taken place, the North's First Minister and Ulster Unionist leader, Mr David Trimble, has said.
At a peace seminar in the Swedish capital at the weekend, he said he was "very relaxed" about the method of decommissioning used, but there was one "absolute and irreducible" requirement: "Whatever is done, there's got to be a television camera there."
The important thing was that "whatever happens, happens so that ordinary people can see it and believe in it and know that it's actually happening." It would not be politically possible to include Sinn Fein in a northern administration until this had taken place and the necessary confidence had been generated.
Afterwards, Mr Trimble expanded on his remarks to reporters: "I have said this before, maybe not just in quite as blunt terms. The mechanics of it is for the verification commission, provided it's verifiable and provided it's visible to the public. Those are the things that really matter."
He believed that "visible" decommissioning necessitated the presence of television cameras. "I mean, as Ulster Unionist Assembly Member Sir John Gorman said, they can pile up all the Semtex into some gap in the forest some day and invite the Decommissioning Commission to come along and check off the stuff and then have a big bang."
But the gesture had to be credible to the public. "They've got to believe it." He did not think it would be credible otherwise.
Mr Trimble and his fellow Nobel laureate, Mr John Hume, were speaking in the Swedish parliament building at a seminar organised by the Stockholm-based Olof Palme Centre.
The two party leaders will return home from the Nobel Prize ceremony and related events in Oslo and Stockholm with major difficulties in the peace process still unresolved. They also have to face the prospect of a motion in the Assembly tomorrow from Mr Robert McCartney's UK Unionist Party.
This seeks to bar paramilitary-related parties from the new executive unless there has been decommissioning of weapons. There is speculation that the UUP will propose an amendment to the motion.
At the Stockholm seminar, Mr Hume took a different approach from Mr Trimble on the weapons issue: he said it was a "distraction" to seek decommissioning in advance of the implementation of the Belfast Agreement. "The real issue about weapons is, have they stopped being used?"
Most of the major political parties in Ireland, except the SDLP, had been "founded out of a gun," Mr Hume added.
"Fianna Fail was founded out of a gun - where are their guns, who did they give them to? The opposition party, Fine Gael, where are their guns, who did they give them to? And in more recent times, the Workers' Party and Democratic Left."