[twelve40]

Well now this is also a practical problem. At this point, you'd have to unseat this "theocratic dictatorship" and possibly kill N thousand people in the process, otherwise they will inevitably get the nukes.

That's the thing with non-proliferation that doesn't really sit right with me, it kind of goes against human knowledge and progress. You have to have a smaller group of people ban certain kinds of knowledge from the rest of humans, and be demonstrably willing to use violence to enforce that, otherwise anyone with enough determination will eventually figure it out. Even when there was somewhat of a consensus on how to deal with that during the Cold War, a bunch of countries slipped through the non-proliferation but everyone pretended like it's ok. Now that there is less consensus on anything in this world, how will this system work going forward?