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Trump’s Iran war will reinforce North Korea’s view that nuclear weapons are the only path to security
(www.theguardian.com)
The Security Dilemma: Any steps a state takes to protect itself also threatens their neighbours who can't tell if those actions are purely defensive or if they might be used for an offensive war.
In the Realism interpretation, this necessarily produces an arms race: The neighbours also need to increase their own safety, in turn threatening the first state, who then needs to...
WMDs and nuclear deterrence are the escalation of that dilemma. By raising the potential cost of an attack war to the level of annihilation, this leverages the most fundamental state objective (securing its own survival) to deter from ever attacking (at least one paper; war and diplomacy never turn out quite as the theory might imagine).
Idealism would instead trust in mutual understanding between states, that this arms race will produce pointless cost for all parties, which might be better invested in infrastructure and trade to make all parties more prosperous. Which also sounds nice on paper, but greed, ego and military industrial ~~corruption~~ "lobby" are working hard to separate us.
Remember, you've got more in common with a working-class American, Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, North Korean, Israeli, Palestinian, Iranian or any other other country than you do with billionaires or the leaders working so hard to spread hate and division and turn us on each other. We do what we must to protect ourselves, but we must not forget that the guy on the other side is just as much a victim.
Until we can make that unity a reality, it unfortunately does seem that nukes are a critical component in any state's security strategy.