Atomic bomb would give Iran an extra layer of protection from those few countries that can do whatever they want, start wars based on lies, steal oil, commit genocide and worse, and the "international community" turns a blind eye most of the time.
Luckily we have UN, which can vote against sanctions,... oh wait, they did that:
https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/11/1143112
> General Assembly votes overwhelmingly against US Cuba embargo
> Those in favour: 187
> Those against: 2 (the US and Israel)
> Abstentions: 1 (Ukraine)
Guess what, sanctions are still in place :)
Chemical weapons are a bit like Age of Sail line of battle, with an awful lot depending on the weather. Biologicals are even worse, since neighboring populations - surprise! - turn out to be pretty closely related, making it difficult to target foreign ethnicities. Humans in general are pretty tightly clustered, although I would imagine one of the great weapon uses for AI systems in this century (or decade) will be biologicals very tightly targeted at micropopulations, very small cell factors (so, with your new AI-designed bioagent, instead of 80% enemy 40% friendly [which was the estimate for an Anti-Black People agent in South Africa] it goes to something like 70% enemy 10% friendly). Both biologicals and chemical can have unpredictable weapon effect, which is the primary reason we don't see them more often. A really great rifle that shoots backwards even .1% of the time would still be the world's worst rifle.
Nuclear states have a form of "super-sovereignty" that effectively makes them a different kind of state. No one's chucking rockets or missiles at you anymore, no one's going to risk an airstrike or putting you on the Regime Change list. The long term effect of holding a nuclear arsenal has some nasty follow-on effects internally, for a nation, beyond just the sanctions and such, but it's such a cost-effective method of deterrence that such factors fade into the background.
Except, you know, that’s not actually true. Recently, a greater share of nuclear states have had direct strikes on their territory by foreign enemy states than is the case for non-nuclear states.
[0] In your FACE, "chuck"! There's plenty of verbs in the sea.
[1] This is a fun one. "No One" would be "another state", someone that has land to lose. Stateless entities - religions, ethnicities, corporations - have sort of a secret superpower when dealing with nuclear states. We kind of see that in the post-ww2 era, and the "Cold" War, for the nuclear powers, was a war of stateless factions (a little bit like the European Wars of Religion). A follow on from this is that an unstable land border of a nuclear power is more or less the exact definition of trouble: Taiwan, Ukraine, Gaza/West Bank[a], and going back, the Soviet breakup of course. The real horror story would be a nuclear state run by a stateless minority - like a religious government that hates the bulk of its own people - because they're at least partially incentivized to take nuclear casualties.
[1.a] Yeah yeah I know "Israel Doesn't Have Nukes", but c'mon.