My problem with a full disarmament scenario (whether talking about UK, as Stoss does, or the US) is that the logic is all based on assumptions that (a) we know how things are now, and there are few if any likely scenarios where being able to rain down nuclear armageddon on a given country makes any sense, and (b) the foreseeable future will be exactly the same. Current analyses of the motivations and capabilities current regime in Beijing, or Moscow, or Tehran, or Pyong-yang, or New Delhi, etc., are probably not as great as people would like them to be, and certainly no guarantee that a major change next Friday night might not radically alter the calculus.
This sort of capability, once mothballed, is not at all easy to dig back up if circumstances change (see the issues with NASA and efforts to revisit non-shuttle manned space flight). Getting the technology rebuilt and the practices reworked and the support staff trained and everything else can be a huge mess, something a short-term or even mid-term crisis would not allow.
The UK and US situations are more than a bit different in this question, though there are potentially more similarities than it seems. But while there is clearly a case for downsizing nuclear fleets, I don't think the case has been made that there is one, yet, for full disarmament.
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Changing my mind on nuclear disarmament – Charlie’s Diary
I’m a child of the 1970s and 1980s; I grew up under the shadow of the mushroom cloud. Prior to the end of the cold war in 1989-91, I don’t believe I ever lived more than 10 kilometres from a strategic…
Point a) seems pretty good point to me. What scenarios would we want to rain down nuclear rain? The backlash, terror, and pain from such an event seems a little too much on the devastating side. War still seems necessary at this point unfortunately, but nuclear missiles seems over the top.
In the likely scenarios I can think of, it's purely a deterrent. "You don't nuke us, we don't nuke you." It's awful as a deterrent, but it would be potentially more awful to be without it, under dire circumstances.
Wouldn't two countries nuking each other destroy the world? I thought the fall out and blocking of the sun would damn near do us all in. In which case I still see little benefit.
You assume rational protagonists who recognize the danger and consider it to trump any regime threat.
A nuclear arsenal's greatest value is in acting to deter a rational actor. In other words: if you nuke us, we will nuke you, we will both be dead, thus you have gained nothing and lost everything.
Irrational actors are problems, any way you slice it. Having nuclear weapons does tend to drive states towards being more rational, however, because the risks of irrationality are too great.
North Korea is the largest danger because, from a rational standpoint, maintaining the status quo destroys them anyway. So there is less relative loss for them in a nuclear war.
North Korea is a danger for a variety of reasons — both what you note, a cultural paranoia that They Really Are Out To Get Us (and therefore we have little to lose), an institutional megalomania that seems to drink its own Kool-Aid and thus demands respect from others, etc. None of them are particularly rational, and the "so would a Nuclear Winter be a bad thing?" would seem to be the least element of their thinking.