Nuclear war isn't something that's going to happen. It's something that can be used to scare the people, but what's the upside of a country attempting to use a nuclear weapon against another? Nothing, there's no benefit as everyone in both countries will end up dying from that.
Nuclear terrorism could occur, that's something that could truly happen as terrorists just want to prove a point and don't care about their own life. But at the end of the day, if there was a big enough threat all of the governments of the world would ensure that it was silenced and stopped. Nothing is worth all of those deaths when everyone can just be rich as all hell.
Get it?
The biggest risk is that someone fucks up and it results in Nukes flying.
Came pretty close the 60s:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/03/you-and-almost-everyone-you-know-owe-your-life-to-this-man/tldr;
Russian Sub goes stealth (no communication) and heads to Cuba a few weeks before Cuban Missile Crises
US finds them, and starts dropping explosives alternating on their left and right to signal them to surface.
They think they're being attacked, and the US assumes they know about the crisis and would understand the signals.
The sub has a nuclear torpedo equivalent to the Hiroshima Bomb. Because they are completely cut off, the protocol is to fire it if 3 men all agree it's appropriate.
2 of the 3 say fire it and some guy talks the 3rd out of it.
Then it almost happened again in the 80s during the cold war:
https://time.com/4947879/stanislav-petrov-russia-nuclear-war-obituary/Russias missile detection systems malfunctioned and showed 5 ballistic missiles incoming. The protocol was to return fire before the incoming missiles were halfway there, but the guy basically chickened out.
