Nukes as Sovereignty Insurance

States may treat nuclear weapons not as prestige or power tools but as insurance against foreign regime change: giving them up or never acquiring them materially changes a government's vulnerability calculus. This argument links the fates of Libya, Iraq, Ukraine, Iran and North Korea into a pattern where security assurances and integration proved unreliable compared with the deterrent effect of an independent arsenal. — If true, this shifts the nonproliferation debate from moral/legal norms to hard alliance credibility and could accelerate proliferation incentives or force a rethink of how security guarantees are structured.