If you allow a nonnull field to hold null at any point then it's trivial to leak that out and have nonnull variables holding null all over the program, which is obviously something to be avoided.
Maybe you can say that if you read a nonnull field when it's null, that throws an exception. That might have its own knock-on effects since nobody expects reading a field from a valid reference to throw an exception, but it might be the best way.