Pakistan's nuclear facilities have already been attacked at least thrice by its home-grown extremists and terrorists in little reported incidents over the last two years, even as the world remains divided over the safety and security of the nuclear weapons in the troubled country, according to western analysts.

The incidents, tracked by Shaun Gregory, a professor at Bradford University in UK, include an attack on the nuclear missile storage facility at Sargodha on November 1, 2007, an attack on Pakistan's nuclear airbase at Kamra by a suicide bomber on December 10, 2007, and perhaps most significantly the August 20, 2008 attack when Pakistani Taliban suicide bombers blew up several entry points to one of the armament complexes at the Wah cantonment, considered one of Pakistan's main nuclear weapons assembly.

This is certainly an under reported story in the USA and a very, very scary scenario. It is one of the nightmares facing the USA, the West, Israel, India and others. 

Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is a defense strategy that suggests that two rational nations, each of which possess the nuclear capability to totally destroy the other, would not start a nuclear war because each is certain it would end with the total destruction of both (and the rest of the world). MAD may have been well named, the United States and the Soviet Union never did engage in a nuclear war.

In the 21st century nuclear weapons age, two of the underlying assumptions of MAD are clearly called into question.

First, are those who possess nuclear weapons rational? Is North Korea’s Kim Jong Il rational? Is Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rational? If Pakistan should fall to the Taliban, will Pakistan’s Taliban leader be rational?

Second, if North Korea, Iran, or some other country sells or gives a nuclear bomb to a terrorist group and that group uses it to attack the United States (or Great Britain, or Israel, etc.) what targets are destroyed in the mutual retaliation? We may suspect North Korea or Iran as providing the bomb, but they would claim innocence and the world would condemn the United States if it launched a nuclear attack on either country without overwhelming public proof. Unlike the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, terrorists do not live in nice near targets (cities).

To paraphrase Klaatu: