The Cold War was not a time of being protected from nuclear war, it was the opposite, it was a constant state of war where the fingers were all on the button 24 hours a day and full armies were facing each other across a gap, the Soviets being an army fully developed for attack with many Airborne divisions and bridge building and Armor units. It was a war where Western Europe could fall in a week or two under the mass of war power staged on their borders.
It was always tense, and we almost had it in the 1980s.
I was in Germany from 1980 to 1984. I was in Mainz-Kastel. I was on the wrong side of the Rhine.