Going Nuclear! But The World Survives -

Can any of the following conflicts end up going nuclear without the world virtually ending -
Arab-Israeli War 1967
Arab-Israeli War 1973
The Vietnam War
The Korean War
 

Goldwater64

Banned
I'd go so far as to say all of them. Even a Cuban Missile War wouldn't end western civilization as we know it, though things would be pretty shitty for a few generations.

The "end of the world" stuff wasn't in full swing until the 1980s, although the late 1960s is when nuclear war went from "pretty horrible" to "holy shit!"
 
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I'd go so far as to say all of them. Even a Cuban Missile War wouldn't end western civilization as we know it, though things would be pretty shitty for a few generations.

The "end of the world" stuff wasn't in full swing until the 1980s, although the late 1960s is when nuclear war went from "pretty horrible" to "holy shit!"

Agreed.

Imo.
 
Guaranteed Survival
Berlin
Korea
Cuba

Probable Survival
Vietnam (depends when)
6 day war (1967)
Yom Kippur War (Depends on escalation)
 
Yeah, most of those cases are at worst, bad for the next few generations (facing realtively minor ecological damage, rationing and a bad global market) but humanity will recover to some semblance of what it was before. Anything after the late 70's early 80's you start looking at mankind changing almost forever, because that's when you start seeing nuclear weapons going to the aforementioned ahem "Holy Shit" calibre. After that (assuming it's a full blown exchange) you are seeing power shift from the North to the South for a very long time, with nations in South America and the South Pacific becoming major powers due to thier relative isloation (not saying they wouldn't be hit, Australia would probably cop two or three hits but that is pitance compared to what Europe, the US and Asia are going to take). I quite enjoyed reading the timeline Doomsday 1983 which was a TL set after a full blown exchange between the US and the Soviet Union. The two competing powers in the aftermath are the Australian/New Zealand Commonwealth and the South American Federation simply becasue these respective powers escaped relatively unscathed in the exchange.
 
As said by others, most if not all of these conflicts could "go nuclear" without ending civilization as we know it. Prior to the 1970's the US advantage in weapons, positioning, and delivery systems was so massive that the USSR could have been eliminated with only Strangelovian "acceptable casualties" in the US and elsewhere. It gets a bit more iffy in the 1970's, so if either the Yom Kippur war or Vietnam trurns into a general "nuclear war toe-to-toe with the Ruskis" global damage could be so severe to endanger the survival of civilization.
 
Korea was the one 'winnable' nuclear war if it became a full on exchange as the Communists only had a few weapons and no 'virtually guaranteed' delivery system while the US had hundreds of bombs.

Though I would put the 'Point of Cockroaches ruling the Earth' in the early / mid 60's with the Soviets developing deliverable H-bombs.

The 70's-90's was more "This is Julia Child: On today's show we'll be making baked Earth... unfortunately to get at the juicy mantle you gotta remove the crust first..."
 
Exchange at time of Cuba would cause moderate initial damage to North America (and very little damage across Southern Hemisphere) but you have one problem:

Europe from Ireland to Urals burned to a cinder. (and sprayed with thousands of tons of chemical weapons in the process). Releasing a lot of dust and ash. Aka nuclear winter; or at very least many years without summer.
 
One of Turtledove's alt history Crosstime novels, "the Valley-Westside War", took place in a world where a Russo-American War in 1967 (one hundred and fifty years earlier) had left the world devastated, although humanity had survived and was beginning to rebuild civilization. I guess the tech level was pre-Steam Age, and the new polities were very small. Some critics have said that after so long, the survivors would have advanced beyond that, and formed larger nations.
 
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