Of course there can be - likely with a gentleman's understanding that neither would use them, and each side careful to not back the other into a corner where they'd have nothing left to lose.
It's just going to be your typical meatgrinder and attrition warfare.
Yeah, arguably the war in Ukraine is teaching everyone who is listening that nobody is willing to be the first to use nukes and destroy the planet, which means that nuclear powers can actually fight wars--which is incredibly dangerous, of course.
Nukes don't "destroy the planet", they're just really powerful bombs. Nuclear munitions have been detonated 2058 times already.
https://www.atomicarchive.com/almanac/test-sites/testing-chr...
Living systems actively regulate water, stabilize soils, moderate heat, absorb shocks, reduce flood peaks, buffer storm surge, sustain food systems, support biodiversity, protect public health, and preserve the ecological conditions that make human communities viable
Ecosystem resilience is based in the so called natural buffers. They are a product of the interactions between life beings. Imagine the life bar in a videogame. A natural buffer is like a 4-D life bar, where each character actualize their life bars at the same time. You lose some life and your friends will change their energy automatically to fix your health bar, Is paid with energy but also needs some "time currency".
With healthy buffers, even big impacts in an ecosystem are absorbed and the system returns to the initial situation again and again. But it has a coast in the buffer. The life bar gets shorter.
When the buffer is spent, the system is not 'elastic' anymore. At this moment the danger is extreme, but the warnings are subtle or none. Just further impacts, even tiny impacts, on the ecosystem cause a total, devastating and irrevocable collapse that may extend over several years and can't be stopped.
Is unclear if we had crossed this line yet.
The life has recovered from huge collapses at a planetary level five times yet, but it needed millions of years for that.
Just because we had luck before, does not mean that we will have luck forever.
My takeaway is that Russia, China's vassal, wanted to use nukes and China told them they can't[1].
I don't believe Russia really cares about the rest of the planet. At the same time, China doesn't care if Russia gets a bloody nose on Putin's little vanity project and realizes a nuclear war is bad for their mercantile economy.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/volodymyr-zelenskyy-china-ur...
This coming from the leader of the other country in a war... I mean, I do find it credible that Xi might have told Putin to think very hard before doing something extremely stupid, but from there to stating that Russia is "China's vassal" and will do whatever they're told by a party who has long been a direct competitor (China and Russia have been solid "frenemies" for a long time, pushing very different views of what "real socialism" looks like)... It's a big jump.
The Soviet Union's relationship with China was more of a peer rivalry situation. The Russian relationship with China is nowhere near parity. Russia would fold tomorrow if China withdrew their backing and went along with the US/EU sanctions.
So Russia is only able to prosecute their war with China's permission. When your foreign policy is decided by another power, that's the textbook definition of a vassal.
I think the biggest risk of war between nuclear powers is from mistakes and accidents that might trigger nuclear escalation/MAD. Systems can malfunction. War can spiral out of control, fast.
We had some very close calls in the cold war.
>"gentleman's understanding that neither would use them, and each side careful to not back the other into a corner where they'd have nothing left to lose."
So we'll just grind each other into a halt? And what is the end state? What a BS.
That's what's happening in Ukraine right now, I don't understand why you think it's BS. The point is reaching a situation where one of the parties is ok with going "alright, enough". Not all wars are WWII-level fight-to-the-death conflicts, a lot of them just end with both sides agreeing a new status quo.
In case you did not notice, that is exactly what happened between China and India. Disputes at the border are frequent and they fight with sticks: https://youtu.be/T1-Gi_l-024