In my younger days I was wholly in favour of a nuclear deterrent because the geo-political situation was very different back then. The USA and the Soviet Union were sworn enemies and China was a completely unknown quantity. France & the UK wanted a seat at the top table and that's the only reason they developed nuclear weapons. However our efforts to develop an effective delivery capability were predictably dire so Macmillan had to go cap in hand to Kennedy to beg for Polaris after the USA cancelled Skybolt. In those dangerous Cold War days, the superpowers couldn't engage each other directly but they fought proxy wars in Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia.
The world today however is a very different place and the threat has changed. There is no Iron Curtain and China plays a full part in the global political economy. As we've seen only too recently, the threat to global security arises from religious ideologies not millions of pounds worth of hardware. Cyber warfare can cause as much infrastructure damage as a nuclear weapon without a single unit of radiation being generated. Also, there is now a danger that nuclear weapons could even fall into the hands of organisation like ISIS or Al Qaeda, who are non-state actors. What use would our warheads have been if Salman Abedi had detonated a tactical nuclear device a week last Monday? The answer is none.
And looking back at past conflicts, would Ukraine have used nuclear weapons to respond to the Russian annexation of Crimea and the disguised encroachment into parts of Eastern Ukraine? No it wouldn't. Did the USA use nuclear weapons on Iraq when it invaded Kuwait? No it didn't. The one conflict I can think of since the Cuban missile crisis that could easily have led to the use of nuclear weapons was the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. There was a genuine existential threat to Israel in the early part of that conflict, particularly on the Northern front when an overwhelmingly numerically superior Syrian force broke through the forward Israeli line on the Golan Heights. Israel had nuclear weapons and the capability to deliver them but it didn't use them. Had their hastily improvised second line of defence not held back the Syrians then it's possible they might have used them but would the Russians have responded in kind? I highly doubt it.
So there is, in my opinion anyway, no reason for us to have nuclear weapons and the fewer there are in the world, the better and safer it will be.
