Perhaps so - but imagine they could somehow have had those nukes ready to go. History would've gone differently; likely in a much, much better direction.
My point - which I thought was very obvious - is that other countries should now pursue their own nuclear programmes because that is seemingly the only deterrent that works.
The point that you keep missing though is that I'm not describing my ideal state of the world. I'm describing the current state of the world.
Nukes are the only existential guarantee a state can have nowadays. The leaders of Iran would like their state to continue existing, and have set their strategy accordingly. After Russia invaded Ukraine, and Trump threatened Canada, other nations will be revisiting the calculus around nukes in the years to come.
This is much worse than the world order we had, but there you have it.
What does imagining have to do with reality? Imagine you could fly, shoot lasers from your eyes and shit money out your ass. There's no point in talking about unrealistic hypotheticals. There was 0% chance UN or any world powers would approve Ukraine keeping any of those nukes they inherited from the USSR.
And even if we were to imagine they did get to keep them, given Ukraine's situation back then, it was a big chance that some of those nukes or fissile material would end up in the hands of warlords creating more way problems than what we have right now.
> History would've gone differently; likely in a much, much better direction.
And now Saddam or Ghaddafi or Binladen or 9/11 planes could have been carrying fissile material stolen from poorly kept nukes in Ukraine at the USSR breakup. How is that a better direction?
This is the issue when people make short sighted emotional arguments without considering the second order effects of what their decisions would cause. It's like the trolley problem.