It's no secret nuclear weapons provide great benefit and are clearly desirable; and that they are an ongoing threat to the world to escalate and get used and destroy much of the world if not all of it and we need to eliminate them.
We don't need all of our trillion dollar military, with our corrupted system, but we need a strong one, matching our limited population yet outsized threat from enemies of democracy, most of all the coming threat from China. We need to be able to respond to conventional war with non-nuclear power, or we're just inviting that nuclear escalation to any problem. Putin attacks Estonia? Nuclear war if we lack a strong conventional military.
It's a sad fact that there are tyrannical forces at war with democracy who want to see democracy ended. Just look at the UN vote to expel Russia from the human rights commission, even with our strong power: 93 nations voted yes, but 82 did not - and of the world's ten most populated countries only the US voted yes, the other nine alone have just over half the world's population.
So we have a large majority of the people of the world in countries who refused to expel Russia after its war on Ukraine - and China is pursuing power like crazy. A lesson of Ukraine is that countries opposed to democracy and democracies are a huge threat - as flawed as the US history is. We'd love to see a less militarized more peaceful world but that's just not how it works with countries who want to defeat democracy powerful.
One scary lesson of Ukraine is that it seems the only way a country is protected is to be part of NATO or to have nuclear weapons, and that nuclear powers cannot be trusted not to abuse that power to attack others; but if the whole world has to join NATO to be safe, how much risk does that create for nuclear escalation? What if Ukraine had been in NATO and Putin attacked it, what if Putin sent a nuclear missile to Kyev?
We need to get rid of nuclear weapons, and it seems very likely we won't, and so as the new cold war develops with China's rise, the risk of nuclear war goes up. Today they have to pretend not to fully support Russia, tomorrow they can openly develop a coalition to oppose the west with countries like Russia and India and THEY can sanction US and demand concessions.