Somehow, watching the Battle of Helm's Deep segment of the second "Lord of the Rings" movie (a sequence which I always find inexplicably distressing; it's only a story and I know how it ends, and yet ...) got me thinking about the Taliban in Pakistan. My brain "likes" to play What If. (Sometimes I don't like my brain.) What if the Taliban, with or without the backing of al Qaeda (if that organisation still exists, or in fact if it ever did), did manage to overrun Pakistan, or sufficient of it to get control of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal? What then? The only silver lining that could come out of that would be to relegate my concerns about climate change to a distant second place. (As I have said before, global warming would be counter-balanced by a nuclear winter.) Rogue weaponry is never a good idea, and especially on this scale.
My knowledge of areas, populations, relative strengths, and other relevant factors is insufficient to tell me whether it is even a remote possibility. But assuming, for the sake of argument, that it could happen, that the Taliban are the rampaging horde of Orcs* and the rest of us are cowering in our own Helm's Deep, can we look to the coming of Gandalf on the morning of the fifth day? (Look to the east.) Could Gandalf, in the guise of Barack Obama, spirit away Pakistan's nuclear arsenal to a safe place for the duration? Presumably even the Americans couldn't consider doing so by force, but would Pakistan's generals agree? And what about India? Theirs would need to go, as well, in order to placate Pakistan.
And while we're at it, should we perhaps go one step further and get rid of everybody else's? (I don't know where you could put them. How safe is Fort Knox really?) Yes, I know, now I'm just being silly. And yet it may turn out that the battlements of Helm's Deep would have been a safer bet.
* Here, the eleven-year-old corrects me: they are not mere Orcs, they are Uruk-Hai. It's important to get these things right.
