We aren't really in that position today. The size, deliverability, and maintenance levels of both the US and the Russian nuclear stockpiles are nowhere near whe

We aren't really in that position today. The size, deliverability, and maintenance levels of both the US and the Russian nuclear stockpiles are nowhere near where they were forty years ago, and recent history has raised a lot of questions over whether even then they were where the zeitgeist believed them to be. No other country has stockpiles even remotely approaching the size it'd take to produce a conflict equal to Cold War fears. Unfortunately, the major change between the Cold War and now is that the existential risks facing our civilization back then turned out to be a lot more straightforward to solve.