Yet somehow all the other horrible weapons in history get a free pass? Fireboming of populated cities and watching tens of thousands of people burn? Being stabbed in the belly with bayonet and dying painfully over the next 12 hours? Bombs that take away the sight and hearing of children? Napalm, phosphorus, etc that stick to skin and burn down to the bone? .50 caliber shells that tear people apart? Mustard gas the burns through your lungs? Biological agents that can spread in a population quickly and kill off a city?
My take is that if it builds detente that stops conflicts then it must have a net good. Humanity built these things and uses them either explicitly (Japan) or as a threat (MAD). They are artifacts of human culture. They reflect our warring nature and we cant just shame them away. In a non-nuclear world we would have the same, if not, more conflicts and many more dead. Assad has killed around 500,000 civilians with his small military and just conventional arms. No nukes needed. That's more than twice the number killed by nuclear weapons use in WWII.
There's also a moral hazard here of excusing guys like Assad because "hey at least he isn't using nukes." The more we vilify nukes and excuse conventional warfare, which is just as if not more brutal, the farther we'll be from proper peace. Nothing really changes if we get rid of nukes. You're making the mistake of confusing the symptom with the problem.
Nukes should go away, but only at a time where the threat of another world war doesn't exist. What that means politically is unknown, but arguably nukes, as horrible as they are, have stopped a proper WWIII. The more I study WWII and think about how much better our conventional weapons and manufacturing ability were during the cold war compared to the 40s, I can't imagine a conventional WWIII not ending the world. Not as dramatic as nukes, but certainly the end result would be similar. I sometimes wonder if nukes are a required stage for a species like ours. Its something that stops the possibility of a catastrophic world war while we aim to developer better social and political mechanisms to end war on this level. At that point we would naturally get rid of our nukes, the same way people in very safe neighborhoods don't sleep with guns under their pillows. I think "umm kay nukes are bad" narrative is short-sighted and ignores the real possibility of a conventional WWIII ending the world.