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The most salient lesson of the post-Cold War era: Get nukes or die trying.
A nation's relationship to other states, up to and especially including superpowers, is completely different once it's in the nuclear club. Pakistan can host bin Laden for years and still enjoy US military funding. North Korea can literally fire missiles over South Korea and Japan and get a strongly-worded letter of condemnation, along with a generous increase in foreign aid. We can know, for a fact, that the 2003 Iraq War coalition didn't actually believe their own WMD propaganda. If they thought that Saddam could vaporize the invasion force in a final act of defiance, he'd still be in power today. Putin knows perfectly well that NATO isn't going to invade Russia, so he can strip every last soldier from the Baltic borders and throw them into the Ukrainian meat grinder.
Aside from deterring attack, it also discourages powerful outside actors from fomenting revolutions. The worry becomes who gets the nukes if the central government falls.
Iran's assumption seems to have been that by permanently remaining n steps away from having nukes (n varying according to the current political and diplomatic climate), you get all the benefits of being a nuclear-armed state without the blowback of going straight for them. But no, you need to have the actual weapons in your arsenal, ready to use at a moment's notice.
My advice for rulers, especially ones on the outs with major geopolitical powers: Pour one out for Gaddafi, then hire a few hundred Chinese scientists and engineers and get nuked up ASAP.
How easy is it to smuggle a nuke, and how long would it remain viable once smuggled?
My impression of nuclear prevention and watchfulness is that it takes a lot of science and infrastructure to refine uranium into a usable state for weapons, and you can't really build all of that stuff without a lot of commotion that foreign powers will notice.
But lots of nations already have all of that infrastructure, and the country wanting nukes only needs the end product. If country A without nukes allied with country B with nukes, would country B be able to use their own infrastructure to do most of the work and then secretly pass them enough weapons grade uranium and/or assembled nuclear warheads to stick into missiles that everyone else thinks are non-nuclear? And then several years later when it became relevant they announce "Tada! We have nukes!"
Or would this be immediately caught while happening and result in massive international penalties for countries A and or B?
There is a rumor that Saudi Arabia put up a lot of the funds for the Pakistani bomb project, and as a result has an agreement that they could get a shipment of nukes if they ever decided to ask for them.
@MathWizard
There’s nothing preventing such a transfer. The problem is, if whoever you gave them to uses them, the victim is probably going to hold you liable for that and respond accordingly. And second, who would you trust with that, long term? Alliances sour, governments change and maybe in forty years they are pointed at you.
According to wiki, it's not just a rumour- it's the opinion of the CIA and the Mossad, has been confirmed by at least one Pakistani ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and is treated as fact by NATO.
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