25 december 2010, as failure to act has consequences

As bombs are man-made and we're terribly used to them, and with dozens not thousands dead, I doubt the pakistan blast will define this year's christmas day as the tsunami did boxing day a few years ago. Nuclear-armed pakistan though is a critical place in the world today. I well recall a friend who served some un-time there likening it to cold war berlin: a fault line of the geopolitical world where any spy worth their salt could do business. Whilst the most unstable nuclear state award undoubtedly goes to north korea, its range and arsenal are limited. Pakistan by contrast is a crossroads for many of the world's conflicts, and a player in its own right. It's also hugely unstable politically, and today's bomb is notable for being a first female suicide bomber. If you see the extreme islamists as hamas, and the american-aided government as plo, one begins to understand that such extremists having a national bomb programme almost as big as britain's is unlikely but possible. More worrying still, as politics is shades of grey over time, the more bombastic end of the current establishment already refers proudly to its "Islamic Bomb". As in many things though, what drives this as much as anything is western double standards, india and israel both having accepted nuclear arsenals despite their refusal to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and providing justification for pakistan and others like iran to go nuclear. And some fine obama words notwithstanding, we have gone back on the deal we signed up to, literally, a generation ago that if you don't go nuclear, we will disarm. Over time, and that time may be coming, saudi arabia, turkey, egypt, japan, taiwan, south africa and australia may all reassess whether the status quo can hold indefinitely, making mass nuclear breakout within a decade a dramatically realistic scenario. Happy 2011.