While both scenarios are terrifying, I don't agree that the failing state is scarier. Nuclear weapons take a lot organizational skill and competence to maintain

While both scenarios are terrifying, I don't agree that the failing state is scarier. Nuclear weapons take a lot organizational skill and competence to maintain and deploy, which gets much harder for a failing state to muster. Plus we've been through this before with the Soviet Union where a disturbing number of nukes went unaccounted for, but none managed to get deployed by terrorists. By contrast, a functioning dictatorship means a single madman can pretty much decide to destroy humanity at any point.