>there was never a real danger of a global thermonuclear war

This seems like an odd thing to say. Is it meant as sarcasm?

Everyone has heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis, so I won't say anything about that.

But have you heard of the Sino-Soviet crisis of 1969? Allegedly (I'm neither a historian nor any other kind of authority on it) the USSR was going to launch nuclear missiles at China during a border dispute, and asked the Nixon administration to remain neutral.

Instead, Kissinger replied that the US would nuke hundreds of Russian cities in response.

This story appears to be reflective of the official Chinese Communist Party historical account.

https://www.scmp.com/article/714064/nixon-intervention-saved...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_border_conflict

What I’ve really meant is: there was never a real danger of a global thermonuclear war, unless started by US. The example above demonstrates this nicely.

The example above is a counterexample, where the USSR threatened to initiate.

Not from the description above - it says USSR wanted to use nukes in a local conflict; it's the US that threatened to make it global.

It doesn't say anything about the entire globe, just Russia.

You may be mistakenly equating nuking of hundreds of cities with planetary destruction.

There were hundreds of atmospheric nuclear weapon tests during the cold war. If that had been the end of the world, we wouldn't be talking about it.

That’s hindsight.