If not for nuclear weapons, WW3 almost certainly would have already occurred during the 20th century, plausibly starting during the Berlin Blockade in the immed

If not for nuclear weapons, WW3 almost certainly would have already occurred during the 20th century, plausibly starting during the Berlin Blockade in the immediate aftermath of WW2. And if not then when wounds were still healing, then a few years later. Advances in weapon delivery have made WW3 less likely to start now than ever before. With very precise guidance, the feasibility of ensuring the utter destruction of leadership has improved dramatically. The idea is to make WW3 the least rational option for anybody who might start it. Even if somebody goes insane and wants to die in a fireball, it is unlikely that they would be able to convince everybody else in the kill-chain to go along with that decision. A "General Ripper" scenario in which only a few nukes fly at first is unlikely to escalate into a full blown war, because even in that scenario a full committed nuclear exchange would still be irrational for both sides. Furthermore, ballistic missile submarines make it infeasible to "win" a short nuclear war with a decapitating strike. The effect of all of these systems taken together is a strong incentive to deescalate even if a limited nuclear exchange were to occur. > We've avoided an atomic holocaust in spite of nuclear stockpiles, not because of them. If not for nuclear weapons, an "atomic holocaust" would never have been on the table, so that's basically a tautological statement. What we actually avoided with nuclear weapons was a WW3 fought with chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. The supposed ineffectiveness of chemical weapons is a modern myth; during the cold war both sides fully expected and prepared for the extensive use of chemical weapons. Such disasters were only narrowly averted during WW2; Hitler refused to use nerve gasses perhaps for personal reasons, and because he feared the allied bombers operating with near impunity over Germany would be able to respond in kind (the allies did not then have nerve gas, but Hitler didn't know that.) And if Churchill had his way, Germany would have been rendered uninhabitable for generations using anthrax bombs; thankfully his staff managed to talk him out of it. You might think that these are examples of chemical and biological weapons providing sufficient deterrence on their own, but they weren't sufficient deterrence to stop the war generally, and neither chemical nor biological weapons could be as effective at killing leadership in bunkers as nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons have proven to be much more effective at deterrence.