A European commentator very astutely asked today, “Well, what’s wrong with the Cold War? It kept us from a nuclear war!”
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.