Given how close we were to launching them at each other during Cold War?

I guess we'll never[0] know. Human societies are a very complex system, so it's hard to pinpoint the real, exact cause of a particular geopolitical event - a cause that if it was hypothetically removed from the timestream, would change the outcome of that event or prevent it from happening.

[0] - for a practical, pre-singularity definition of "never"

I think all the examples of times in which the situation demanded the launch of nuclear weapons but they were not launched demonstrates how far away humanity was from ending it all.

This is totally off-topic, but your point can't be emphasized enough: Both sides of that potential nuclear war went to great lengths not to fire their missiles. Up to and including insubordination by missileers in the silos. Having spent most of my adult life serving in the infantry in various warzones, I have a pet theory about why this happens. The reason we don't start a nuclear war is because that would bring the war from the front lines to grandma's house. War is a thing that plays to the male psyche of being a kind of exciting grand adventure. This may seem hard to believe for those of you that haven't been shot at or shot at other human beings. But after a while, when the urgency of mortal concerns begins to wear off, you can see things for what they really are. I think that war is a very male extension of childhood play. It's exciting until faced with one's own mortality, and indeed nobody thinks they'll be the ones getting blown to pieces. There's a great quote by Winston Churchill about being shot at. But I think nuclear war is such an existential thing that transcends conventional warfare to such a degree that no one wants to "play" with destroying the everything. As proof of my theory, I predict that the person that actually employs more than one-off nuclear weapons (and escalates a conventional war to a full-scale nuclear war) will be widely seen as being a total psychopath, legitimately insane.

Maybe, and I appreciate the argument 'fapjacks brought forward downthread, but then again - psychopaths exist too and if one's to believe recent reports, the US military kind doesn't pay as much attention as it should anymore to vetting and training people who are working with nuclear weapons. By extension, I doubt situation in Russia or other nuclear powers is any better.

Even ignoring psychopaths, I have my pet theory too. It goes like this: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to be separated from it by enough layers of abstraction". So for instance, the moment some military decides to automate away people in the silos I'll start being very scared.

Something about horseshoes and hand grenades.

I'm not sure what you mean. Could you elaborate? I could only find references to a song, a musical band and a videogame.

EDIT: I guess you mean the phrase "Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades"?

Right. The presence of 400,000 U.S. troops during the Cold War might also have had something to do with it.