Seriously, though. This is nearly exactly something I've worried about before as well. Basically, I came to peace with it. It's unlikely we'd have massive nuclear war, because what would be the point? Anyone launching a nuke is likely to get one in return, and what would be the victory there? It's hard to feel good about destroying your enemy when your own country is a smoking crater itself.
The gloating is the worst part. If you started a war over ego or democracy or just plain proving you're right, you definitely don't want to have your enemies say "Hah, we were wrong". If someone nukes you because you refuse to give them your oil, nuking them back will force you to give less oil, than a complete surrender.
Return nukes are the difference between white peace and unconditional surrender. Or trillions of dollars in reparations.
The Japanese got nuked and now they're stronger than ever. They recovered from near total destruction and became one of the world's strongest powers after a few decades. If a nuclear war happens, it's still more merciful than WW2 was, and our grandparents survived through that.
And how much help did they get from America again?
They also were nuked twice, as opposed to the saturation bombardment that a modern nuclear war would result in.
Yeah, no matter how bad it turned out, people still helped them in recovering. Though not always the case, if they were being dicks during the war.
Many of the Japanese major cities were leveled in the firebombing in order to force Japan to surrender.
Bombing Tokyo alone killed more people than both atomic bombs did. So there, nukes did less damage than bombs... and being disintegrated by a nuke will probably hurt less than being charred to death by an incendiary bomb.
Plus, large scale or small scale or even terrorist's-soviet-nuke scale, it doesn't quite matter that much if it happens to you. But unless you live near a major city like NY or Paris or near some important military facility, it's not likely that your city will get nuked.. though you'd still have to deal with the nuclear fallout and giant scorpions.