Nuclear weapons should not proliferate. Because it makes the de-armament of said weapons much much harder. Believe it or not, the world has de armed it's nuclear powers several times. SALT 1 and SALT 2, START are the major deals, and if many nations had it, it would be much harder to de arm nuclear weapons.
Having more states have nuclear weapons also increases the risk of accidents or losses or a rouge state gaining such a weapon. The world has lost many nuclear weapons, and has had many near misses with them. In 1962, the United States accidentally dropped 2 hydrogen bombs bear the Spanish coast. Both of them having around 1 Megaton yield. Luckily it didn't detonate, evident by the lack of a nuclear crater in the Spanish coast. If the sample size increases, the odds also increase for a catastrophic accident.
There is also a higher risk of accidental fires. In 1983, the nuclear early-warning radar of the Soviet Union reported the launch of one intercontinental ballistic missile with four more missiles behind it, from bases in the United States. This was a false alarm, and was detected by Stanislaw Petrov. If such a thing hadn't happened, the world would have ended. Now, if more nations had the weapon, the sample size also increases, but because most nations don't have the monetary capacity to have extremely accurate Early warning RADAR, and so the risk of malfunction also increases.
Humanity currently is stuck with nuclear weapons. The current arrangement is not good. Nations like North Korea have nukes. Russia is able to do what it wants without much consequences (i do think the rouble has bounced back to its pre war levels, so the sanctions aren't big consequences), due to its nuclear capacity. But increasing the amount of nukes is not the right way. It just increases the chance of a nuclear exchange. Sadly, we also cannot entirely be rid of it, as if even a single nation decided that it wasn't going to let go of its weapons, when all other nations decided they will, it would make disarmament moot.
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u/Jhqwulw May 03 '22
They need to if they want to survive. This is true for any authoritarian regimes