Israel isn't even close to the most recent country that got nukes (and they never signed the non-proliferation treaty) so I'm not sure why you have beef with them in particular.
If a mafia boss defines anything he gets away with as legal, that's not aligned with what we commonly think of as legal justice and thus a pointless distinction.
So I've made peace with mafia boss power politics keeping the number of countries with nuclear weapons on the low end of the spectrum, and for that matter I'd support a much more aggressive approach to that end than we have seen these last 30 years.
It’s not that people were just too dumb or too scared to do something about it.
As challenging as it sounds, we need to develop a strong impartial international institution whose the only mission would be maintaining peace and preventing wars on the planet. This should be the only entity that's approved to have nuclear weapons.
The scenario you concocted here is Disneyland. It’s not just challenging, it’s just an oppressive version of the UN, but it won’t be impartial because it will be the most powerful organization on the planet and a target for every extremist and ideologue that seeks to acquire power. You haven’t changed the game, you’ve temporarily changed the battlefield.
This speaks like someone who has never been outside of a heavily bureaucratized regime. People don't get "approval" for things, they just do them.
Agreed. Let's start with US and Russia first.
The contradiction is that by relying on militarism instead of diplomacy we keep demonstrating that countries are safer from aggression once they have the bomb. You think the situation you’ve described provides a negative incentive for nuclear development, but it does not.
Or maybe that is the wrong approach, but the policy we've had that let North Korea develop nukes and Iran at least get very close also isn't working.
Iran is more straightforward. I don't know why we've been so reluctant to make real diplomatic effort, especially after so many of Iran's proxies were significantly weakened in the last year or two, and Iran's sway was at a minimum. There seems to be an unwritten rule that once we've categorized a country as an enemy we're obligated to deal with them in the dumbest ways imaginable.