From China's point of view, it is better to preserve North Korea's few remaining economic lifelines than risk nudging Kim Jong Il's regime towards an implosion that could send millions pouring across the Chinese border.
Yet nothing contributed more to the division, mistrust and implosion of our society in the north than Sinn Fein and the IRA's refusal to heed the cries of the people of Ireland to cease their violence.
Today, even ruthless despotism, as the implosion of Iraq, Libya and Syria reveals, is no longer a reliable bulwark against militant disaffection.
If Mr Bayrou takes most of his voters with him, Mr Sarkozy has just signed a suicide pact and the result will be not only personal defeat, but an implosion which his 10-year old party will struggle to contain in the face of a rebranded Le Pen.
The Rugby Football Union and its leading clubs are tiptoeing towards a PR implosion.
Looking back on the turbulent history of the European system since 1990 and the subsequent and totally unforeseen implosion of the Soviet Union the following year, it is too easy to fault the Russians for failing to insure themselves against the possibility of eastern European states joining the Atlantic alliance.
But we all know the divergent paths these teams took - one to World Cup glory and umpteenth Bledisloe Cup wins, the other towards mediocrity, scandal, bitterness and ultimately implosion at the height of the Beale/McKenzie/Di Patston texting debacle.
There are no mentions of the impending teacher shortages or assessment implosion, and little on frozen budgets.
Many travellers come here to see the lake's glacier, Perito Moreno; it's world-famous, because the ice expands until the warmer waters beneath undermine it and cause a calamitous implosion, sending tsunami-like waves on to the terminal moraine.
Clearly such mass implosion has little to do with the structures below the national team.
The destruction of rural populations through enclosure and agricultural change, followed by rapid and chaotic urbanisation based around industries that later collapsed; the implosion of organised labour; extreme atomisation and hyper-consumerism.
