[dsfyu404ed]

It's easy to give up your weapons when you don't perceive any threat, have strong friends and/or everyone around you has a very big interest in regional stability.

European nations have nuclear neighbors (France, UK) they can rely on if need be. Japan has the US to shield it from China (even still China pushes them around a little) and both China and the US to shield it from NK. South Africa is the dominant power in the region (Zimbabwe won't be annexing them anytime soon) and they have friends that like intervening in matters on the other side of the world (US, UK).

Ain't nobody with half a brain giving up their nukes after what happened to Libya. I'm surprised that Iran is disarming as much as it supposedly is. Quite frankly I'd like to see more proliferation among smaller nations because it keeps regional powers from acting like jerks. Look at how well nuclear weapons have kept the peace between India and Pakistan. Would Russia would have pushed around a nuclear Afghanistan, Georgia or Ukraine? Would Iraq picked a fight with a nuclear Iran or Kuwait? Would the US have invaded a nuclear Iraq?

Nuclear disarmament is a lot like gun control. The people who have reason to feel the most secure tend to be the first to tell everyone else to give up their arms and the guy in a neighborhood the police respond to "when they get around to it" who's upstairs neighbors are probably cooking meth wonders what kind of lunatic wouldn't want the ability to defend themselves if the need arose.

[mikeash]

Nuclear weapons work great to keep the peace... until they don’t. The notion that they greatly reduce the occurrence of war seems to be spot on... but you’re trading an ongoing problem for an ongoing small chance of a complete catastrophe.

Your proposal to promote peace through nuclear proliferation would probably work great for a while. Then twenty or fifty or a hundred years down the line, something will go wrong and civilization will die. That doesn’t seem like a good tradeoff to me.