In principle I am against nuclear weapons. In practice I believe a deterrent state (at least two adversarial countries maintaining an active nuclear stockpile) is probably better than just one country maintaining an active stockpile.
I always wonder what would have happened if it had taken the Soviets longer to develop atomic weapons (or never did). Would a hawkish US president be more likely to use nuclear weapons to assert foreign policy than they are now?
If the Incheon landings [0] had been a failure during the Korean War in 1950, it's hard to see how nuclear weapons wouldn't have been employed, especially as China was neither involved nor had their own.
And if they'd been normalized in a second war, even at tactical scale, it makes you wonder how the rest of nuclear history would have unfolded.
Eventually some idiot in some small country with nukes gets pissed and fires, and we have this generations Franz Ferdinand - except none of us live long enough to pick up a rifle.
The US has had quite a few proxy wars with nuclear armed countries. I think it prevents an all our war like WWI and WWII, but not war in general. Less war? Perhaps. We seem to be doing our damndest to have at least one going on at all times though.
If Assad had had a nuclear weapon most probably it would have fallen in the hands os Islamists (ISIS, more likely) during the recent civil war in Syria, not a very bright perspective.
