[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.