You’re right, but avoiding nuclear war is the higher priority. If India and Pakistan want to kick the ahit out of each other they should disarm their nuclear weapons. Imagine for a moment that Russia had been sending terrorist to the US border with Canada. Now imagine that the US started bombing Russian border towns. You would quite rightly, be crappping your pants and focusing on the threat of global annihilation.
Nuclear powers are burdened with a far greater need for restraint out of necessity than non-nuclear powers, even in the face of provocation.
Small, oil-strapped countries should also not start unwinnable wars against superpowers that have 2 times their population, 5 times their GDP, and 10 times their military industrial capacity.
And yet, despite knowing that their cause was hopeless, and that the war would be unwinnable, the government of Imperial Japan knowingly committed suicide, by attacking the United States in 1941.
This is one of the reasons I find the principles underpinning MAD to be fairy tales. In matters of war, belligerents do not behave rationally.
