I think everyone having nukes is more like all my neighbors having truck bombs parked in their driveways. Even if they're just for deterrence against other people who might use truck bombs, I'm screwed if one of them goes off for any reason. Guns don't really compare.

The series of novels I talked about is the Fall Revolution series. I think the story of nuclear deterrence for sale is in the first book, The Star Fraction, and again in the last, The Sky Road. The first two books tell a certain future history and the next two books tell what happened after, with very different outcomes, based on the people who run the nuclear deterrence program making different choices at a crucial point in history. The third book is the most exciting, about a future where a hard technological singularity took off and humans left behind in the solar system almost went extinct. The fourth, the alternative scenario, is almost boring, about a "soft" technological singularity (and the history that led up to it) that left Earth like a libertarian paradise, with only voluntary cooperatives and long lives of abundance for almost everyone.