[mandevil]

Taiwan is almost certainly only a few months from completely indigenous nuclear weapons: they have their own nuclear power reactor at Maanshan, and all the way back in the 1980's the US estimated that they were less than two years from a nuclear weapon. Given (waves hand generally at the world around him) all of this, they have almost certainly undertaken quite a bit of effort to shorten that timeline over the past forty years.

South Korea and Japan are in basically identical places, FWIW. The only reason we haven't seen a north-east Asia nuclear arms race, so far, is that several countries relied on their presence inside the US Nuclear arms umbrella. With that looking more questionable, I think the next four years are likely to see widespread nuclear weapons proliferation. Certainly the example of Iran, where the US negotiated an excellent treaty and then unilaterally pulled out of it and started violating the treaty whole-sale under Trump's last time as president, and the fate of Ukraine, who were invaded by a much larger, nuclear armed neighbor, should encourage all three of those countries to make nuclear weapons faster.

The only reason any of them might not is domestic political response, which loom biggest for Japan, but I doubt that would stop any of those countries.

[maxglute]

TW nuclearizing is PRC redline, and they're thoroughly infiltrated by PRC intelligence (half the reason US had to coerce them into ending initial effort was because PRC intelligence knew what was up). Today, any TW nuclear program is 7 minutes from being cratered, they're simply not nuclear turn key capable anymore unless US just positions nukes on TW and give authority in which case we're in WW3 anyway.

[DeepCope]

US stopped Taiwan's nuclear effort for fear of restarting the civil war, thus dragging US into a potential nuclear WW3 scenario.

If US lets Taiwan (or even Korea/Japan) into the nuclear club, then what is stopping nuclear proliferation to Iran? Venezuela? Cuba? There are negative externalities to US allowing it's allies to have nukes.

Taiwan doesn't want nukes according to the past Presidents.

[mandevil]

Yes, I don't disagree that RoC having nukes (or Korea or Japan) would be bad for the world, and is likely to have bad consequences for nuclear proliferation generally. I think that decent leadership from the USA (and the countries involved) has been what has kept this from happening so far, and I am extremely doubtful that the current leadership of the USA is either interested or capable of maintaining that.

ROC not having nukes is obviously also a policy choice by their leaders, not just a decision made in Washington DC, but if what is happening in Washington DC is different, I suspect that it will change the calculations in Taipei, Seoul, and Tokyo by a lot as well.

I think that a lot of baseline assumptions about how the world works are going to be proved invalid over the next four years, and I think the world will be worse off for it, but we're where we are now.

As for past President's statements, no one openly wants nuclear weapons until they have them. If you don't have any, then your public statements are that they are horrible, brutal devices of no value or use and you don't need them. Once you have them, they are vital to your national security. Citation: Every nation after the first one to get nuclear weapons(1).

1: Except South Africa, which never acknowledged them, and destroyed their weapons and the entire program rather than hand them over to Nelson Mandela. But that's a special case.

[jiggawatts]

The roadblock most countries have to nuclear weapons is a lack of a domestic high-tech industrial base… which Taiwan has in spades. I’m surprised they haven’t built a bomb already!

If I were them, I would try the Israel approach of very carefully refusing to admit whether they do or do not actually have 127 bombs that can reach Beijing.

Oh.. why 127? No specific reason… don’t worry about it…

[DeepCope]

It's because US stopped Taiwan from getting nukes. US literally went into the nuclear labs and ripped up everything.