OH, GOODY: Pakistan Carts Its Nukes Around In Delivery Vans.

Tom Clancy should be suing Pakistani generals for ripping off the basic idea behind The Sum Of All Fears. You’ll recall that Pakistan is home to al-Qaida, a particularly fearsome version of the Taliban, the leadership of the old-school Taliban, its friends in the Haqqani Network and a host of anti-Indian terrorist groups that the Pakistani intelligence service employ as proxies. Sometimes the Pakistani military helps these terrorist and insurgent groups attack US troops in Afghanistan. And any one of these groups would love a chance to wield a nuclear weapon.

Except that Pakistan isn’t trying to safeguard its nukes from them. It’s trying to safeguard its nukes from us. The Navy SEAL raid in Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden has made important Pakistani generals think that the US military’s next target is Pakistani nukes. So off the vans go, along what Ambinder and Goldberg term “congested and dangerous roads,” trying to throw off the scent of the US, with little more than hope to protect them from an adventurous highwayman.

The irony is that the US isn’t planning to steal Pakistan’s nukes — but Pakistan’s cavalier attitude toward nuclear security is making the US think twice about whether it should revise some worst-case-scenario contingency planning.

So why haven’t we addressed this problem with some of that “smart diplomacy” we were promised?