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").
Those are some valid points; more generally I'll admit that I might have been jumping the gun/overselling it a bit (in retrospect I think that many small-level regional exchanges may not spark a chain reaction if the world restructured the international system to avoid chain gang alliances). However, I still think it's more likely that nuclear catastrophe would occur than not by 2020.
In part, I think it depends on how you set up this counterfactual: if we are talking about a world in which everyone goes to sleep one night in 1960, then they wake up and surprise every state now magically has a nuclear arsenal--i.e., the counterfactual status/event wasn't brought about by the intentions of states in the counterfactual world--then I think the chances for peace are reasonable, because most states probably didn't want that event/status in the first place. However, if the counterfactual is one where almost all the states now have nuclear weapons because they sought out the nuclear weapons and were easily able to acquire them, etc. (which is the assumption I was operating on), I would expect that coordination would be much more difficult. As it is, I think that the fact that states around the world were willing to get nuclear weapons is indicative that they don't trust/won't abide by "global governance" (or, more directly, that "global governance" is ineffective).
More generally, I think that people might be overestimating the ability for some 100+ states to coordinate when there are no global superpowers: who sets the rules? Who enforces the rules? Who enforces the enforcement? Collective action problems in international affairs have been hard enough even when we were in a bipolar and unipolar system; enforcing anti-terror laws and related provisions may get a lot easier with collective buy-in (even would-be state sponsors of terrorism would be extremely worried that their proxies may disobey orders or even turn on their masters), but if we are talking about verifying arms control treaties, investigating accidental (?) detonations, retaliating against first-uses, and other actions where states may have a vested interest in opposing the proceedings, rule-setting and enforcement can become very difficult tasks.