Oof. Have you read the accounts of the Cuban Missile Crisis? The cases where people were ordered to fire their missiles by faulty warning systems but refused and got canned, or where 2/3 keyholders on a boomer wanted to fire their payloads and it was down to the last man who refused? I don't think you should be so blasé about our history with nukes as though it was always a paper tiger. Human civilization came extremely close to destruction at least a few times, and it came down to a few individuals that talked others down. It could have very easily gone the other way.
I highly recommend you read Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Robert F. Kennedy for a largely first hand account, parts of it are chilling.
After you read Thirteen Days, you should probably read The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality by Sheldon Stern[1], former historian at the JFK Library.
He argues convincingly that Thirteen Days perpetuated a number of (largely RFK-serving) myths about the crisis that are readily disprovable by listening to the tapes JFK made of ExComm meetings. These were only available to the public within the last decade or so.
TL;DR: RFK was far more hawkish and pro-air strikes/invasion than he later portrayed himself. There was no brilliant gambit to "accept" Khrushchev's earlier offer in place of his later one: The trade of the Jupiter missiles in Turkey was viewed as an acceptable way out by JFK essentially as soon as it was proposed. President Kennedy actually comes off rather well, without over-committing to military engagement early in the crisis and by managing the post-blockade diplomatic dance while avoiding avenues of potential escalation.
Thanks for the recc, I'll take a look. Based on the reviews, though, it seems like they don't disagree that it looked pretty bleak at certain points, regardless of how much whitewashing RFK did of his own part in the crisis. Maybe it was just gamesmanship and negotiation in the case of the missile crisis, but it seems as though it could have escalated beyond their control very quickly.
I highly recommend you read Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Robert F. Kennedy for a largely first hand account, parts of it are chilling.