Acquiring nukes seems like the best way for any country to protect themselves against outside interference.
We know that as soon as Gaddafi decommissioned his nukes, Libya was targeted and invaded. If Iraq actually did have nukes, the USA wouldn't have been so brazen to invade.
China, Russia, and North Korea's acquisitions of nukes are also some of the main reasons why they are not easy targets for direct US invasion.
If Iran had nukes, it would drastically limit Israel's ability to indiscriminately attack Iranian assets.
Western policies against nuclear proliferation always seem to target the countries that need them the most to ensure national sovereignty, and never refer to their own nukes.
For example, they always fearmonger about "rogue states" like North Korea getting nukes, while being perfectly okay with Israel's own nukes. It might be best if these policies are ignored entirely.
The sanctions can always get worse.
The question is how do nukes help?
By getting nukes, a socialist country can guarantee that any invasion by a capitalist power will result in massive consequences for them, providing massive deterrence power. This allows them to reduce the resources they have to spend on the rest of the military, and instead put that into bettering the lives of the people, thus countering the sanctions.
This is North Korea's current strat.
Neither Cuba nor Venezuela have large military expenditures nor nukes, whereas the DPRK has a very large military expenditure despite the nukes.
North Korea will always need a sizable military budget until occupied Korea and the USA stopped practicing how to invade their country twice every year. South Korea's military is also enormous and is the same size as North Korea's.
My argument is that it lets them spend less human resources on the the military and instead direct it to improve the country.
Also, I don't trust any Western reports on North Korea supposed military expenditures. They will always try to depict North Korea in the most nonsensical, worst possible light.
Do they actually spend fewer human resources on the military? They have the fourth largest military in the world, so when combined with their very large military budget the nuclear weapons program doesn't seem to have helped at all. The DPRK needs to show its military strength to the world to discourage Western aggression because nuclear weapons aren't enough.
To clarify, I don't think it's nonsensical for them to put so many resources into their military. I just wonder how much the nukes actually help.
This is the correct answer.