A thousand conventional wars? Maybe on the scale of WW1 where an entire generation of men were wiped out in Europe? Or the Franco Prussian wars which convulsed Europe before that? Or maybe something simple like the ethnic cleansing in Uganda that only resulted in a hair under 1 million casualties?<p>How about the Indian sub-continent? Nuclear weapons have largely been responsible for keeping Pakistan and India from going at each other. Both know that their enemy has the ability to wipe each other out with nukes.<p>Nuclear weapons should also be credited with keeping Sino-Soviet tempers from flaring too hot before the end of the Cold War. Some of the border incidents would have easily escalated to full war if Beijing hadn&#x27;t been intimidated by Soviet nukes.