invariants and compiler flags, best practice?

[Bruce Carneal]

I'm nervous enough about future compilations/builds of the code 
that I'm responsible for that I employ the following idiom quite 
a bit, mostly in @trusted code:

   (some boolean expression denoting invariants) || assert(0, 
"what went wrong");

How might the above cause problems and how do you deal with the 
possibility of someone disabling checking of one sort or another? 
  Do you embrace it as late-binding desirable?  Ignore it?  Other?