By George Friedman This was a week of nuclear weapons. The North Koreans seemed to promise that they would abandon their nuclear weapons program, while the Iranians made it clear that they had no intention of abandoning theirs. The confluence of these events causes us to raise a fundamental question rarely addressed: Why would small nations want to spend their national treasure on developing a handful of nuclear weapons that would be difficult to deliver to a target and that could be destroyed by another country — like the United States — almost at will, if the United States chose to use their own enormously more plentiful weapons? The answer is not as obvious as it might seem. One of the concerns normally expressed about the North Korean nuclear program is that Pyongyang might one day choose to destroy Tokyo.