WAS it a human bomb? As they sift through the debris at the bomb sites, Metropolitan Police scientists will be looking for the telltale signs of the new terror in our midst — the long feared arrival of an Islamist suicide bomber in Britain.

Suicide bombing is a weapon of pure terror. Part of the message is intrinsic to the method of delivery of the explosives; our hatred of you is greater than our love for our own life.

Suicide bombing reverses the logic of power that has dominated governments and societies for thousands of years.

All of our notions of security checkpoints, cordons, armed police and military force are rendered useless by an enemy who has no fear of death. As the United States Army is painfully learning in Iraq, defending yourself against a suicidal enemy is an almost impossible task.

Suicide bombing is designed to strike fear into the heart of the infidel whether he is a heavily armed US Marine or entirely innocent London commuters going about their daily business. And if every Arabic-looking young man wearing baggy clothes is a potential suicide bomber then it will certainly strike terror and fear.

Amid the rubble of the buses and Tube trains those Metropolitan Police experts will be bearing in mind the patterns of previous suicide bomb attacks in countries such as Israel.

After hundreds of suicide attacks on Israeli soil the “forensic footprint” in the aftermath of a suicide attack is well known. In an explosion, gas expands at 20,000 metres a second. All flesh within the immediate explosion zone, including the suicide bomber’s body, is pulverised.

But sometimes the outer limbs remain intact. Horrifically, the most obvious sign of a suicide attack is the bomber’s head which is shot into the air at the moment of death.

However grim, a head but no body will be the key indicator that suicide bombers have at last arrived in Britain.

Israel is the only state on earth that has ever got near successfully countering the onslaught of suicide bombers but only at a terrible cost.

By most normal standards Israel has turned itself into a modern day Sparta where 50 per cent of the population is armed at all times and where every bus stop, every restaurant, every public building has its own security guard who ruthlessly checks handbags and warily eyes every suspicious character.

Beyond the human guards is an army of soldiers who ring every major Israeli city and who can cordon off every area within seconds.

If the same equivalent security force were deployed in Britain there would be checkpoints every half mile on the M25.

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