I don't want you to think I'm just batting your concerns away for no good reason. But - as I think I said upthread - we've tended to focus on worse-case assumptions about nuclear war, and that can significantly skew the way we conceive of it. While that might not matter for a bunch of people on a web forum, it does tend to result in us being a lot more anxious about things than perhaps we need to be, or is good for us to be. I did that anxiety thing through the late 70s and 80s, before - slowly - coming to the realisation that nuclear war does not have to be some existential abyss from which we would never escape.
It suits the likes of Putin - arguably, rather more than the West - for that idea to prevail, hence the fact that it has been him making those not-so-veiled threats about it, and to some extent, if the West takes those threats completely at face value, we end up completely powerless. It always reminds me of that bit in The Wizard of Oz, where the wizard is using shadowplay and loud voices to make himself sound like a terrible threat, when the reality turns out to be otherwise.
There's also the issue of practicality. Nuclear weapons aren't quite the same as iron bombs, which you can make, and then pretty much stash in a warehouse for 20 years, get them out, and use them. Quite aside from the missiles themselves - which require considerable effort and expense to keep at a state of readiness - the warheads need fairly constant maintenance on a regular cycle, as do the control systems and electronics. Given what we have begun to see in regard to mundane and comparatively cheap things like vehicle tyres, how confident can we be that the corrupt establishment in Russia has not infested that part of the military responsible for the costly (and thus lucrative, corruption-wise) business of maintaining their nuclear arsenal? It could be that the command and control systems are not up to snuff (Russia's encrypted battlefield communication systems turn out to be dependent on the very 3/4G networks they have been destroying in Ukraine, for example), or that adequate maintenance on the very fragile rockets that launch the missiles has not been done - perhaps only half of them would even get out of the silos. And, if some of the bombs themselves turn out to be "fizzles" due to lack of maintenance, that's another factor to consider. And it's likely that the top end of the hierarchy is not fully in the picture - if some regional commander is trousering the cash supposed to be supporting the refurbishment cycle on missiles, bombs, etc., it's likely that no-one will know about it until the missile blows up on the pad, or the bombs fail to detonate, etc., etc.
There are a lot of other options other than the worst-case one.
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