The original incentive for this book was the interest aroused by an article published by the authors in the Bulletin of the European Safeguards Research and Development Association, entitled Inspection Randomization for Pedestrians. In it we demonstrated, with a tongue-in-cheek example, how a simple game-theoretical treatment could justify, and even quantify, a proposal which had often been made for purely pragmatic reasons. The proposal was to concentrate IAEA inspection resources in the most sensitive areas of the nuclear fuel cycle whilst reducing safeguards effort at power reactors. Our article not only supported this idea, but showed that the concentration would not incur any real loss in detection capability.

That short paper now forms the basis for the introductory example in the present book, a work which might well have been given the title Verification Theory for Pedestrians. Wishing to avoid condescension, and notwithstanding such erudite precedents as H. J. Lipkin's classic Lie Groups for Pedestrians, we chose a slightly more pedestrian tit title. We have however tried to maintain the relaxed and informal style of our original article without, we fervently hope, overdoing it.