Yeah, or put into a shipping container and detonated in New York harbour.
Yeah, but then you’d have to get your container ship past the Somali pirates. 
Touché.
I’d say the OP is crossing two different issues together. Domestic stability is one and safety from invasion is another. Say what you will about the evils of Saddam’s regime, I don’t think anyone’s arguing that it was on the verge of collapse due to internal opposition - it was clearly stable (at least for as long as Saddam lived). The same thing can be said about North Korea, Libya, China, Cuba, and Iran - none of the regimes that run these countries seem to be on the verge of a popular revolution or factional civil war. And some of them have nukes and some do not - so possessing nuclear weapons seems to be a moot issue as far as domestic stability is concerned.
So the issue seems to be whether possessing nuclear weapons makes a country safer from being invaded by another country. The empirical evidence seems to say yes - no country with nuclear weapons has ever been occupied by another country. The only nuclear owning regimes that were overthrown were the Soviet Union and South Africa and both were overthrown by internal opposition. (Which serves as additonal evidence to my observation above that nuclear weapons are a non-factor on domestic stability issues.)
Well, we who live in New York hope that you are wrong and that the US Gov won’t simply abandon us to Al Qaeda suitcase nukes. I don’t think we would anyway. We still have industrial capacity that can be turned toward wartime use. I am not saying we will invade Pakistan, but under the right conditions we would, as Barack Obama has promised as well.
We have to invade, we need eyes-on confirmation of the nuclear material. I certainly hope for the third most populous city in the world’s sake that you are wrong.
That’s assuming that the Taliban doesn’t have sympathy amongst Islamist generals who run Tank battalions. Your western notion of ‘secularism’ might not be as powerful a draw over there as you think.
We shouldn’t have invaded Iraq because of this stability.
Well the problem with that assessment is that past events do not indicate future performance. No nuclear armed nation has ever been as unstable as Pakistan either. The Soviet Union collapsed for economic reasons, and people were quite freaked out about the loose nuclear material. Some of it is now stored in New Mexico. I don’t know the story with South Africa’s nuclear weapons. Pakistan is highly unstable one of the most unstable countries in the world.
They don’t have sympathy amongst the tank battalions. Pakistan is a major military power. The Pakistani army is a meat grinder (similar to US army). They just roll over opposition. They are massive. They could probably do Iran (a whole country) in about two weeks. The Taliban are a minority group in one valley. They are like a gnat fighting an elephant. In a few days they will all be dead.
And I’m not talking about my “western notion of secularism”. I’m saying they are secular relative to general society - most armies are. They don’t worry so much about God just about following orders. They’d be more likely to stage a coup and impose their own law than take orders from the Taliban.
Seriously, there is zero danger of the Taliban overpowering the Pakistani army. It’s a laughable suggestion. The main problem is from the other direction - how many innocent civilians in Swat will get killed by the Pakistani army rollercoaster.
I would dispute that Pakistan is the worst-case scenario. The Soviet Union is simply gone. The government completely collapsed and the country broke up into pieces. That’s about as unstable as you can get. And the Soviet nuclear arsenal was a lot more dangerous than Pakistan’s. So I’d say that we’ve already survived a much more serious collapse of a nuclear power than any collapse that is possible in Pakistan. A possible Pakistani collapse would be a very serious issue but not an unprecedented one.
What do you base this opinion on?
Then why are the Taliban winning?
So you say, but this is simply an assertion on your part. Back it up with some support. Why do you believe that the military is as secular as you say?
And yet the Taliban IS making inroads.
What inroads? The Taliban have only just come up against the army. They only took Swat and started to expand because the army weren’t trying to stop them. That’s all changed now.
The army briefly lifted the curfew yesterday to allow people to escape but they’ve put the curfew back in place now. That means that in the next few days they are going to intensify the military action.
Let’s see where we are in a few days.
This may be relevent to this thead:
That’s reassuring at least.