People talk about Iran getting nuclear weapons as if the ayatollahs would immediately start flinging them about like fireworks on Bonfire Night. The picture tends to involve apocalyptic theology, a red button and Tel Aviv glowing in the dark before breakfast. It makes for good television, but it is not actually how nuclear weapons behave in the real world.
The awkward truth is that nuclear weapons are mostly political insurance policies. Their purpose is not to be used but to make sure nobody tries to overthrow you from the outside. Once a regime has them, any invasion carries the small but rather terminal risk that the defender might decide to take the attacker with them. That tends to concentrate minds wonderfully.
You can see the logic by looking at the countries that do have nuclear weapons. The United States has them. Russia has them. China has them. India, Pakistan and North Korea have them. None of those governments are in serious danger of being invaded and removed by foreign armies. Meanwhile Iraq and Libya, which abandoned or never finished nuclear programmes, were both dismantled by external intervention. One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to notice the lesson other governments might draw.
But nuclear weapons only solve one problem. They protect regimes from external destruction. They do nothing to protect them from their own people.
The Soviet Union collapsed while sitting on the largest nuclear arsenal on Earth. Thousands of warheads, fleets of missile submarines, entire cities dedicated to building the things. None of it stopped the state dissolving in 1991 because nuclear weapons are rather poor at managing economic stagnation, corruption or political legitimacy. Even the Kremlin could hardly threaten to vaporise Moscow in order to win a domestic argument.
The same logic applies to Iran. If Tehran acquired a small nuclear arsenal it would not suddenly become suicidal. It would become harder to invade. Israel and the United States would have to think much more carefully about military action, which is rather the point of the weapons. But they would not prevent regime change from inside. A government cannot nuke its own territory to deal with protests, factional struggles or a collapsing economy. Those things are settled the old fashioned way, with politics, power and occasionally a great deal of shouting in the streets.
Which leaves the uncomfortable conclusion. Nuclear weapons can make a regime safer from foreigners, but they do very little to save it from itself. History suggests that when governments finally fall, they usually manage it perfectly well without the help of an invading army.
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