Not putting any probabilities on these ideas yet, just brainstorming:
I expect that some dynamics would be similar to nuclear strategy in the real world: nuclear weapons would make wars less common, but the few wars that did happen would have a risk of being much more devastating. If you're Saddam Hussein and you're pondering whether to start the Iran-Iraq war, maybe you hold back for fear of a nuclear exchange, and start your own local cold war instead. I'd expect that maybe we have only a small fraction as many wars, but some of the remaining wars would involve nuclear weapons.
While interstate wars might decrease dramatically, I'm not sure if the frequency of civil wars would change much. I could easily imagine a dark alternate history where maybe half of civil wars involve some small group (either rebels or an embattled remnant of government) getting their hands on a stray nuke and setting it off in the middle of a city.
It could be tempting for many countries to go for a North Korea strategy -- acting crazy and threatening everyone around them in exchange for concessions. Perhaps, after a bunch of initial chaos, the world would eventually enforce a much stronger norm against these rogue nations... imagine a kind of worldwide NATO who wouldn't have any qualms preemptively nuking dictators who seemed to be going down the North Korea path.
In a world where nuclear weapons were much easier to obtain and/or construct (imagine you don't need to refine the uranium at all, and you don't need specialized high-precision shaped explosives to set it off -- just take ordinary U-238 and wrap it in TNT), it would also become much more important to pay attention to other parts of a nation's nuclear capabilities. If you are a poor African country, do you have intercontinental missiles ready to fire towards anywhere on earth at a moment's notice, or do you just have some loose warheads that you can hope to sneak into another nation's port in a disguised container ship? Do you have any second-strike capability? Etc. Just giving everyone nukes would not put countries on an even, mutually-assured-destruction playing field. The resulting instability as different countries jockeyed to gain advantages over their neighbors -- more accurate missiles, stealthier submarines, etc -- would probably breed plenty of conflict.
Overall: A peaceful world stuck in a multipolar-Cold-War mexican standoff seems very unstable and unlikely to me. Instead, I think a world with easy nukes looks like something between the following two extremes:
- Things are mostly similar to our world, except wars are a less common, but those wars often involve nuclear weapons, so everyone is just nuking each other occasionally, especially during civil wars, in poorer countries with less nuclear capability, and among dictatorships rather than democracies. (Cold-war-like dynamics mostly prevail among rich and powerful nations, just like IRL) This is obviously terrible because many more people die, and over time a larger part of the earth's territory, atmosphere, etc, is being irradiated.
- In order to prevent continual low-level nuclear war as described above, the world coordinates much more to eliminate the threat posed by unstable and rogue nations. This coordination would take a different form depending on whatever part of nuclear conflict seems easiest to control. If our scenario is "nukes are still hard to make, but everyone gets 100 free warheads in 1950", maybe this means aggressively forcing countries to give up those nuclear weapons. If it's "nukes are easy to build, you just need the uranium", maybe the leading countries jointly occupy all uranium mines. If nukes are even easier to build than that, perhaps we end up with a neocolonial system with very few independent nations to eliminate the threat of war (no civil wars or unstable dictators if there are just a handful of empires dividing up the Earth), or a system of totalitarian surveillance if we are also worried about small non-state actors (as imagined would be necessary in Nick Bostrom's "Vulnerable World Hypothesis").
I appreciate the answers so far!
One thing I realized I'm curious about in asking this is something about how many groups of people/ governing bodies are actually crazy enough to use nuclear weapons even if self-annihilation is assured. This seems like an interesting last check against horrible mutual destruction stuff. The hypothesis to invalidate is: maybe the types of people assembled into the groups we call "governments" are very unlikely to carry an "activate mutual destruction" decision all the way through. To be clear, I don't believe this, and I think there is good evidence that individuals will do this, but I feel sufficiently confused about the gov dynamic to ask.
Of all the national regimes and regional ruling factions since 1950, how many would have used nukes even if they new an adversary would retaliate with overwhelming force? Have there been any real situations where non-great power govts were pushed so far as to resort to nuclear (enemy + self) destruction?
For example, my extremely amateur read makes it seem like Israel was at least somewhat close to nuclear in the Yom Kippur War. And I'd guess that some of the more insane genocide-y civil war factions like the Khmer Rouge wouldn't have been that concerned about the self-destruction bit, though I don't know enough history to say for sure, or if they were ever pushed to a breaking point.
I'm familiar with all the standard US-Russia examples of this (I think) and when I put my skeptic hat on/ try to steelman it seems like its hard to know how many additional "filters" would need to be cleared before actual launch. I'd be interested in cases where something of the form "and then [the gov't or civil war faction or w/e] took some action which they indisputably believed at the time would lead to a large scale tragedy, destroy themselves and all their loved ones, etc". Cases where the group definitely believed they slapped "defect" in the mutually assured destruction game (at least on some scale). Maybe none exist outside of cults and terrorist groups? Though some of those group might be more govt-like than others.