India and Pakistan aren't really powerful nations in the nuclear sense that the US and Russia are. I assume the person you are replying means powerful nation as "nation with a lot of nukes", which is pretty much only the US and Russia.

US Nukes: 7300

Russia Nukes: 8000

India Nukes: 90-100

Pakistan nukes: 100-120

Everyone except the US and Russia nukes: ~1100

(source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/nine-nations-have-n...)

Even if you restrict it to the US and USSR (and later Russia) there have been direct armed conflict, including both being on opposing sides in war (notably, but not exclusively, both Korea and Vietnam during the Soviet period, but also extending into the current war in Syria), though there have been political cover done to limit risk of escalation (e.g., Soviet Air Force flying NK-badged fighters and, initially, prohibiting use of Russian over the radio in Korea; Russian forces on the ground fighting, sometimes directly against US forces, being the “Wagner PMC”—a GRU-backed notionally-private group.) op

The US and USSR/Russia did fight a good number of proxy wars throughout the cold war and beyond but those are distinctly different than the kind of all out war I think the original poster was referring to.

There's a reason they were all proxy wars and they never escalated into direct conflict on the scale of WWII (or beyond), and that reason is nuclear deterrence.

> The US and USSR/Russia did fight a good number of proxy wars throughout the cold war and beyond but those are distinctly different than the kind of all out war I think the original poster was referring to. But they did fight them, including direct conflict with eachother. Which answers the upthread comment “If you have nuclear, why do you need anything else?” which was supported with the claim “Nukes prevent any war from happening between any powerful nation.”

Nukes don't prevent “any war” from happening between powerful nations, though they do seem to have some utility in restricting the escalation of such conflicts.

(Now, you could argue that unilateral conventional disarmament would leave no choice but to escalate to nuclear war, which would improve deterrence and prevent even small scale conventional, politically-covered attacks, but that argument would be highly speculative.)

> India and Pakistan aren't really powerful nations in the nuclear sense that the US and Russia are.

100 nukes is powerful enough.