It is true neither side is obliged to retire a single weapon until 2012, but in reality taking nuclear weapons apart is a long, painstaking procedure that will have to follow a timetable.

Opening the cube would be a painstaking procedure, and nothing must happen to the strange occupant of the crystal coffin.

The world had been sterilized as if by some painstaking medical procedure.

Already it had been left too long, and the preparation of a hide for a full body mount was a skilled and painstaking procedure.

They have some technical advantages over Walcott; most important is a painstaking procedure for reconstructing a three-dimensional animal from the invisibly thin layers crushed together in a two-dimensional fossil.

In a painstaking procedure that requires the detection of lead in picograms, which are little more than one-quadrillionth of an ounce, scientists measured how much uranium had turned to lead.

None of the 49 people believed to have been killed have been formally identified under painstaking British procedures, and so there is, so far, no official list of the dead.

This effect could only be achieved through painstaking technical procedures that are, if anything, distinctly modernist.

This would be a slow, painstaking procedure, but it would prevent a massive domino crash like the one that had just occurred.

There is a certain futility in the painstaking procedure that is particularly the futility of art.