How was nuclear war avoided

During the cold war there were some very close calls but one of the closest was the Cuban Missile Crisis. The leaders on both sides didn't want to go to war but they were being pushed into it by the war mongering generals. Now the way I believe they avoided this was with empathy for each other. President Kenedy was constantly looking at it from the other sides perspective and trying to keep from blowing each other up. They also used back road politics so that both sides get what they want and both sides look like heroes for it. For example the Russians would remove their missiles and in return the americans would remove theirs. But there was on condition the Russians couldn't say it was a trade off and the americans would only remove their missiles six months later. The empathy and back road politics kept the world from going to nuclear war.

atom bombs

I think that the atom bombs dropped on hiroshima and and nagasaki were unnecessary. They could have easily have dropped a bomb on less populated area or on a more military populated area. Most of deaths were civilian and pointless. Truman could have dropped the bomb on the tokyo harbor. I feel that this would have been a sufficient show of the bombs power. Also at the time the bomb was dropped the japanese were about to give up anyway, and yes the americans did give the japanese the option to surrender but the japanese also didn't get enough time to respond. The bomb cause untold damage there are still areas which are too radio active for people to live and in total about 250,000 people. It was a tragedy that could have been avoided with some better judgement and planing.