Trust, but verify (Russian: ???????, ?? ????????, Doveryai, no proveryai) is a Russian proverb. The phrase became well known in English when used by President Ronald Reagan on multiple occasions in the context of nuclear disarmament.
Video Trust, but verify
Soviet-American relations
Suzanne Massie, a writer in Russia, met with President Ronald Reagan many times between 1984 and 1987. She taught him the Russian proverb, "???????, ?? ????????" {Doveryai, no proveryai} (trust, but verify) advising him that "The Russians like to talk in proverbs. It would be nice of you to know a few. You are an actor - you can learn them very quickly." The proverb was adopted as a signature phrase by Reagan, who subsequently used it frequently when discussing U.S. relations with the Soviet Union. Using proverbs that the Russians could relate to may have helped relations between the two leaders.
After Reagan used the phrase to emphasize "the extensive verification procedures that would enable both sides to monitor compliance with the treaty", at the signing of the INF Treaty, on 8 December 1987, his counterpart General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev responded: "You repeat that at every meeting," to which Reagan answered "I like it." While Reagan quoted Russian proverbs, Mr. Gorbachev quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had been popular in the USSR when Gorbachev was in college, saying that "The reward of a thing well done is to have done it."
Following the 2013 Ghouta attacks, Secretary of State John Kerry told a news conference in Geneva on September 14, 2013 that the United States and Russia had agreed on a framework to dispose of Syria's chemical weapons. He said "President Reagan's old adage about 'trust but verify' ... is in need of an update. And we have committed here to a standard that says 'verify and verify'."
Maps Trust, but verify
Influence
The similar phrase "Trust and Verify" was also the motto of the On-Site Inspection Agency (now subsumed into the Defense Threat Reduction Agency).
David T. Lindgren's book about how interpretation, or imagery analysis, of aerial and satellite images of the Soviet Union played a key role in superpowers and in arms control during the Cold War was titled Trust But Verify: Imagery Analysis in the Cold War.
The National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC), a national critical infrastructure threat investigation and response entity, published a paper entitled "Trust but verify" in 2001 on how to protect yourself and your company from e-mail viruses.
The Bitcoin and blockchain community has also adopted it as a catchphrase, representing the fact that every node in a blockchain network verifies the data that it receives from others in order to ensure security. For the 2016 Scaling Bitcoin Workshop, T-shirts were made with the logo "Don't Trust, Verify", a word play on the original phrase.
Notes
References
External links
- Trust but verify excerpt from Reagan and Gorbachev press conference
Source of article : Wikipedia
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