Was the Cold War a Hot War that failed to happen?

The Cold War was an entirely new conception of international relations, and one which can only tentatively be termed a ‘war’, certainly in the conventional sense. The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, in his highly influential work Vom Kriege written in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, proposed a theory that the conduct of limited war had to be a rational instrument of foreign policy, and that the conduct of a ‘total war’ would eventually consume the state itself, as had been seen with the destruction of the six European Empires and three Fascist states from 1914-1945. The outbreak of a full-scale conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union would almost certainly have led to the destruction of both. It is thus difficult to term the Cold War as a ‘hot’ war which never came to fruition, not least because a third global war within half a century would have threatened to consume not just both nations but all those which had a stake in the survival of either Soviet Communism or American capitalist democracy, even before the nuclear element was added in August 1945. Clausewitzian theory therefore elucidates that the Cold War was ‘cold’ by virtue of the impossibility of it becoming ‘hot’; total, nuclear war could not be a rational element of statecraft.
A continuation of this theory in a more material sense can be seen in the position of atomic weapons on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Certainly following the first tests of thermonuclear hydrogen bombs in the mid-1950s, beginning with the American BRAVO test at Bikini Atoll in 1954, the psychological effects of seeing these weapons detonated had a significant impact on both those developing them and those who would authorise their use. In the USSR Malenkov realised that the modern weaponry at the disposal of both the Soviet and American leaders would lead to “the end of world civilisation” if used, while Churchill foresaw the “universality of potential destruction” afforded by such weapons. Both sides came to the conclusion, rather separately in fact, that war with such weaponry was not a possibility; a convenient modern interpretation of Clausewitzian theory. Furthermore, in the nuclear age it became all but impossible to gain a military advantage through atomic weaponry. Indeed, even in the pre-thermonuclear period, US Air Force planners realised that the weapons at their disposal, which had developed out of the strategic bombing doctrines of the Second World War, had little applicable military use beyond mass destruction of civilian populations. Soviet planners, throughout much of the period, similarly realised that there was no hope of the Soviet Union fighting and winning a nuclear conflict against the United States. Both states therefore sought to maintain a nuclear deterrent to the other as acentral part of their own national defence policy, with little to no intention of initiating any conflict that neither felt was winnable; a status quo maintained by mutual vulnerability. Thus, even during flashpoints such as the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, both sides had to maintain an outward appearance of strength (for both domestic and international political reasons) while both fully aware that nuclear conflict was not an option. The entirely new attitude to war, prompted by the entirely new methods available to fight such a war, therefore prevented the Cold War from ever becoming a ‘hot’ war, and so by its very nature was destined to always remain ‘cold’, fought instead both in 'Third World' nations such as Korea and Afghanistan, and by espionage, such as in Iran.