No - this is false.
It was the existential and immense nature of the consequences of war that enabled the parties to 'back down'.
Without nukes - the US and USSR would have likely started a bunch of scuffles here and there.
There's a great chance that US/USSR navies duked it out over Cuba - because the consequences would have been likely very limited - unless they escalated of course.
Yes, we were lucky that it didn't go down as well, but nukes have been a huge factor in keeping the war basically cold..
"some less risky peace-building efforts" - there is really no such thing. 'Balancing Power' is what creates peace for the most part.
Why these guys aren't better known, I have no idea.
[0] http://time.com/4947492/stanislav-petrov-soviet-officer-nucl...
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong
My assumption is that those scientists working on the bomb, where perfectly aware of what humanity was capable of (even with democracy and hightech) and decided to raise us this rockets as a monumental finger of "Never again or never ever after!". Way to go to tame a beast, who thinks you are a useful plaything. Well played Mr.Oppenheimer.
Rage all you want upon this monument of reason, erected against the intellectual treason you commit against the humanity that is- not the humanity you wish for.
The inferno of the first WorldWar, the Inferno of the second WorldWar, the various Colonial Wars and all the useless carnage before - these all started with a humanity capable of deducing deterrence, but true deterrence appeared first in presidential discussions after the existence of ICBMs.
Run the experiment several times, and this luck inevitably runs out. Continue with nuclear weapons, and there just will be a nuclear war.
I don't have a good explanation for that number of coincidences, though.
They did.
False. 'Proxy wars' is a misleading title.
The Korean war was not a 'proxy war' it was a real war, that happened to also be a proxy for other powers.
Country A does not fight random country B for no reason.
They are generally real conflicts where their actions may happen to have geostragetic alignment with other powers.
No, they usually don't. But countries, nations, and people often have very long lasting disagreements. Instrumentalizing those, for another "bigger" cause isn't really that hard of a task for the far more influential and powerful countries C and D.
C and D end up supplying A and B with money, weapons, training and sometimes even direct manpower.
The result is usually a conflict that escalates much more quickly in scope and severity than it would have without the involvement of C and D.
The outcome is a tire fire that will burn for my lifetime at least.
However, nuclear war between the US & USSR was not prevented by the existence of nuclear weapons. Even ignoring the logical absurdity this would require, the simple fact is that nuclear war nearly happened on many occasions as a result of various misadventures, and it was a matter of pure dumb luck that it didn't. It literally is just an accident of fortune that we didn't have a world-encircling cataclysm. Your and my existence hinges merely on happenstance. Huge amounts of documentation attest to this. The best single-volume account is probably Eric Schlosser's Command and Control.
Nuclear weapons don't prevent war. They reduce the frequency of some types of conventional war, at the cost of making cataclysm absolutely inevitable. They will be used at some point, whether by malign choice or accident. It is only a matter of time.
There are a whole bunch of other questions discussed by military historians which complicate the matter further, arguing (for example) that nuclear weapons increase the number and length of proxy wars. But even that's all a detail in the face of the manifest fact that if nuclear weapons continue to be deployed, we will have a nuclear war one day.
So perhaps we should be working on some less risky peace-building efforts, while there's still time?