Cold War in a Hot Climate By Anne Applebaum

She thinks the Cold War paradigm will hold between India and Pakistan, and there won't be a nuclear exchange. I'm sorry, but I think her first section fails.

1) India and Pakistan share a common border, along which minor conflagrations might easily turn into a major war—indeed, there has been shelling across the border for some days now. The United States and the USSR did not.

In fact, even though the United States and the USSR did not have a common border, NATO and the Warsaw pact shared many common borders, along which there were many minor conflagrations, some of which seemed, at the time, just as likely to develop into nuclear war—the construction of the Berlin Wall and the Berlin airlift, for example.

Except those "conflagrations" never led to attacks over the borders. The US and USSR were very careful to not fight each other directly. India and Pakistan are not only on the verge of a shooting war: in many ways, one is already ongoing. I said something like this before... If NATO had invaded East Germany, or the Warsaw Pact West Germany, and the defenders looked ready to lose, do you really think they wouldn't have gone nuclear?