All the countries the US has fucked up in the past few years have not had nuclear weapons. It's obvious only nuclear weapons can guarantee your national security against a major superpower. Why would anyone get rid of them when this is the case? Big or small nuclear weapons protect people from assholes out to get them for whatever shitty agenda they have concocted. On the other hand they protect dictatorships and democracies similarly, but better to live under the foot of a dictator than as a failed US liberation campaign which potentially kills thousands, maybe hundred of thousands of your citizens, destroy your economy and way of life, in the name of their liberation and then hands them over to organizations like ISIS to fuck them up some more.

Having nuclear weapons doesn't prevent destabilization tactics, the likes of which the US and Europe (NATO allies) used to destroy Syria and Libya most recently. In fact it increases the argument eg the US would then have to invade urgently to secure the nuclear weapons once destabilization has occurred. Plans for securing-the-nukes missions exist for countries like Pakistan and North Korea for example.

Further, the premise of deterrence is shaken when you consider the post 9/11 Pakistan example. The US threatened to 'bomb Pakistan back into the Stone Age' [1] if they did not comply with US demands in relation to post 9/11 military action. The US was not deterred by Pakistan having nuclear weapons.

It can also do the opposite of increase dictatorship stability. It increases the value of taking control of the country if you're an internal revolutionary group. If you're one of those groups and you topple a Gaddafi or Bashar al-Assad, or the House of Saud, once they have nukes, you become drastically more powerful on the world stage. It's a very large incentive to try to overthrow them. It's potentially a giant lever of power and blackmail.

[1] "President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan said yesterday that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks the United States threatened to bomb his country if it did not cooperate with the American campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan."

"General Musharraf said the intelligence director had told him that Mr. Armitage had said: “‘Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.’"

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/22/world/asia/22pakistan.htm...

With regard to Pakistan, the US is in an alliance with the generals who lead it, and conduct drone strikes against groups in Pakistan. That’s the current situation.

> The US was not deterred by Pakistan having nuclear weapons.

Because they were not there for resource. Iraq would have been another story: getting oil from a radiation scorched area is not fun.

I’m not sure how we can ever get rid of them. We can dismantle the current stockpile, promise not to build any more, but they can’t be uninvented. If the world disarms, then the first country to build new new ones has the world hostage.

It's not what is suggested: now the nuclear countries already have orders of magnitude more than the minimum needed to be credible: there's on a shortest notice enough for the whole civilization to be destroyed. There will be no winners, even if the army leaders behave as there would.

And if you know enough about technology, there's no system where the accidents never happen. We were just lucky up to now, but it doesn't prove anything. See Nassim Taleb's turkey example:

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/nassim-talebs-black-swan-...

"“A turkey is fed for a thousand days by a butcher, every day is a confirmation to his team of analysts that butchers love turkeys” with statistical confidence increasing daily. “The butcher will continue to feed the turkey until a few days before Thanksgiving Day. And then comes the time when it’s not really a good idea to be a turkey. Being surprised by the butcher, the turkey reviews his beliefs when his confidence in the assertion that the butcher loves Turkeys is at its peak and the Turkey’s life is “very serene” and mildly predictable. This example is based on the adaptation of a metaphor created by Bertrand Russell. From the Turkey’s story, we can also identify the source of all prejudicial errors: confusing the absence of evidence (damages) with the evidence of its absence“"

The treaties about the control between the countries already existed, allowing one country to control another claims and that did reduce the amount of the weapons. One can see that they didn't dismantle enough however to reduce the threat enough. However:

August 2019: "Donald Trump officially terminated a longstanding U.S. nuclear treaty with Russia, potentially signaling the beginning of the end of the arms control architecture that has regulated nuclear weapons since the Cold War."

The sane policy would move in another direction.

https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/the-inf-treaty-is-done-but-l...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/24/doomsday-clock...

"We are like passengers on the Titanic, ignoring the iceberg ahead" ... "the political response is alarming. It’s akin to sleepwalking"

On the flipside, you could make the argument that the threat of mutually assured destruction has a calming effect on the world. How many times would the US and Russia or China have gone to war if it was possible for one side to win?

That may be true. It doesn't matter though. My point is that a nuclear catastrophe is waiting to happen, it could happen by accident, it could happen due to some random flashpoint. It's far too risky! We've been lucky so far, it won't carry on forever.

>I firmly believe we need to get rid of them.

"You go first!"

It will never ever happen.