Should Canada explore developing a nuclear weapons program?

Two men standing in a pool of gasoline. One man has 20 matches while the other has none.
The man with no matches wonders if it's a better idea if he should have a match too.
- Two men stand in a pool of gasoline. One man has 20 matches one has 5.
  The man with five matches gives up his matches under the promise that the man with 20 matches won't hit him. A couple other men with matches at the edge of the pool of gasoline promise to uphold this agreement.
  20 years later the man with 20 matches takes the man who now has no matches' arm. All the signatories let it slide because the man with 20 matches had a decent claim to the elbow. 10 years after that, the man with 20 matches tries to take the entirety of the man with no matches; the men with matches on the edge of the pool are afraid to do anything less matches get thrown back at them.
- Obviously he should. Having a match, which is a genuine threat to the other man’s life, is the only thing that will give him a seat at the table.
  
  Two disparate puddles of gasoline.
  Hiroshima/Nagasaki did not render the country or world inhabitable.
- It would be a good idea for the guy with no matches to get matches. If the guy with all the matches is much stronger than the guy without matches, the guy without matches would benefit from the threat of being able to take the other guy down with him.
  
  That's MAD

Before, I definitely would have said no. Working toward a nuke free world was going to get humans past the Great Filter. After understanding how susceptible humans are to propaganda, seeing how much more our technology is growing than our collective humanity, witnessing a small group of rich people use entire populations like they are nonsentient resources, and watching the USA power walk towards facisim... we are not going to make it past the Great Filter. Unfortunately it is starting to become more viable that longest lasting peace our species could hope to achieve comes from the fear of mutually assured destruction. All in all, I am no longer against the thought of it at all, especially after seeing how that worked out for Ukraine.
- Working toward a nuke free world was going to get humans past the Great Filter
  Ironically, I'm increasingly of the opinion that the Great Filter will turn out to be Ignorance; more specifically, greed, stupidity and humankind's more selfish nature delaying positive change long enough for climate change to wipe us out.
  
  And for the few that remain, history gets lost.
  The notions of it being the same cycle again and again seem not too far fetched, now.
  
  I don’t think any of these issues will wipe us out completely. Maybe they’ll reduce the population by 99% but that still leaves 80 million people, enough to raise a new society from the ashes of this one.
  Anyway ignorance, greed, stupidity, and selfishness are not specialities of the human race. They’re common to all animals.
  Our unique problem is that we’ve created an environment which is radically different to the one in which we evolved. Look at one simple dimension: food. We evolved to survive scarcity and famine. Our new extreme abundance of food is killing us with obesity. We’ve cracked the code on the molecules our brains used to detect nutritious food and used them to engineer fast food that is addictive like a drug.
- Not with that attitude.
- we are not going to make it past the Great Filter
  Yeah. Most likely not. We've only had the ability to actually extinct ourselves for a very short period of time and we've already used nuclear weapons on civilian populations and threatened to use them repeatedly ever since. It's only a matter of time.
  When one flies, they all start flying. And if we don't do it that way, we'll simply burn up all the resources this planet provides and pollute the fuck out of our ecosystem.
  I'll hold out a glimmer of hope, just cuz everyone likes rooting for the underdog, but realistically, the human species is probably just a temporary thing in the big picture.
- Our collective humanity hasn’t grown at all in 100k years. It isn’t growing.
  We have constantly evolving social norms and rules, but these things are now struggling to keep up with mass communications technology. Also people’s susceptibility to cognitive biases is really showing its ugly side these days.

Well, they share a very long border with what is now an enemy. So yeah, probably.

If Ukraine did then it wouldn’t be in the fight for its life
- Ukraine had nuclear armements.
  They divested them under the promise that their sovereign territory would be respected.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum
  
  Oh I’m aware. Clearly that was a mistake

They need to have a nuclear deterrent by...
Last year.

That's all the reason Trump would need to invade Canada.
- For sure. If we were to pursue nuclear armament -- and I'm not saying we should -- it would be in secret. Publicly withdrawing from NPT just paints a target on our backs well ahead of any possible benefit.

Personally, I feel like this is quite a level of escalation that I think is a bit too far for Canada. Nuclear proliferation is just incredibly risky, especially when it comes to normalizing the idea of more countries having nukes. If Canada gets nukes, then who are we to say that another country shouldn't also get nukes? What if that country is Iran, or Turkey, or some other country that has a notably loose concept of restraint while being next doors to a hostile country?
On the other hand, nuclear weapons is a form of protection that negates balance of conventional forces, and few imbalances are as great as that of Canada and the US.
For me, I think that we shouldn't get nukes, but a better idea is to help an existing nuclear power to reinforce their stockpile and come under their umbrella, like the UK or France. Canada is already one of the top uranium exporters and a major nuclear energy power, so there's little reason why we can't be a contributor to the building and maintenance of a friendly nation's nuclear stockpile in exchange for their protection.
Not to mention that it'll cut back the risk of proliferation.
- Nuclear proliferation is just incredibly risky
  You could argue, convincingly, that it's incredibly risky not to.
  Ukraine.
  They made a deal with Russia to give up their nukes in exchange for Russia never invading them. Fast forward a handful of years and Russia invades them and they have no nukes as deterrent.
  We're moving into a future where everyone is going to need nukes as a deterrent from being invaded.
  Sucks, but humans are stupid, violent animals.
  
  Fun fact, the US also provided security assurances. (Budapest memorandum.) Those turned out well, right?
  
  This is why I mentioned France and UK's nuclear umbrella. It's effectively the power of having nuclear weapons without actually having them.
  Ukraine had the unfortunate fact that they only got a promise of nonintervention rather than a security guarantee backed by arms when they gave up their nukes.
  Either way, while not having nukes might not entirely prevent others from pushing harder to get nukes of their own, at the very least, I believe we shouldn't be the ones starting this trend. It only takes one country with an itchy trigger finger to normalize using nukes in armed conflicts, which is one step away from preemptive nuclear war.