It's not about being involved in regional, relatively minor conflict, but about avoiding annihilation. I did not say we have had no war, I said we have had no global wars of the scale seen fairly frequently until WWII.

For Israel, the idea was to convey the message of a desperate strike before succumbing (since the neighbouring countries were pretty clear about their intentions); if the message was not convincing, it wouldn't have had the effect it had. Meir took a risk that paid off handsomely. MAD is the only message as no nation today would get away with the aggressive use of a nuke, it is the option for desperate people and discourages total war which makes governments desperate. The Yom Kippur war is generally fascinating to read about and I really recommend digging, if you are interested in modern history and the Middle East.

Europe was under threat of the Red Army to such an extent that entire regions were mined with nukes on 3 day fuses (in some famous cases, with live chicken inside to keep the electronics warm) to take out the invading force once it had settled. Russia's foreign policy was of systematic undermining of Western civilisation in any way possible (through both fostering enemies in proxy wars, and Active Measures, which is a fascinating topic in itself on which much has been written by Gen. Kalugin and others - just look up famous KGB defectors).

Israel, Pakistan and North Korea obtained weapons to defend themselves against overwhelming regional threats by increasing the cost of invasion substantially; Pakistan also wanted to follow India's lead (famously "If India builds the bomb, we will eat grass and leaves for a thousand years, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own." - Bhutto in... 1965 - luckily, India's foreign policy did not end up in an invasion of Pakistan, as the mountain of bodies from Partition may have led observers to think would happen).

The UK and France both were involved only in decolonization wars (Algeria, Indochina, Kenya, Malaya, Ireland... and modern French interventions are related to Francafrique) except for the Falklands, a territory too small to warrant exercising the nuclear option or even scale to the mainland, especially when the attacker was not nuclear; and Rhodesia, where British forces were deployed just long enough to allow Mugabe's forces to take the countryside safe from the RLI and Selous Scouts and therefore the election (the blame might also lie with the Scouts' miscalculation about British unwillingness to let Mugabe win, weakening Nkomo strategically).

Talking of Rhodesia, you have to understand the mindset of pre-1991 South Africa - every European colony in Africa was falling, one after the other, and South Africa felt the vice tighten as hostile borders closed in. The great thing about exporting commodities is that no matter the blocade the stuff still gets through, so you can get away with a lot. There were tankers in Iraq and Syria during their respective wars... (from what I hear, it's actually harder to move the money than the oil). The other reason for closeness with the US was the Cuban artillery and fighters in South West Africa and other places where the South Africans were fighting.

French and British nukes were aimed at Russia, with which they never fought. China's wars are and were defensive or internal, with the exception of Korea (and even the intervention in Indochina - the Maquis Chocolat reported beheading some officers from a Chinese division that moved early on - was the result of an internal conflict, pushing a Southern general out of the way to make way for a Northerner to take up the space, although I don't have the details at hand, see e.g. [1] if you can read French or follow Jean Sassi's trail); especially after the split from the Soviet, Mao needed his own capability to really scare off any new friends of the KMT.

The point stands: nuclear weapons appear to have staved off any further truly global conflict with dozens of millions of deaths. Local conflict will always happen when the odds are in favour. Si vis pacem, para bellum - only an overwhelming imbalance of force is dissuasive enough to avoid conflict and enjoy a relatively free and safe global environment.

Look at [2] - between 2004 and 2007 around 50,000 to 200,000 people a year died from armed conflict. Compare this to WWII which killed 48 million, with an estimated further 2 million saved by the two nuclear attacks on Japan causing it to surrender early. Or take the "purge" of the PKI in Indonesia (1965?) where estimates of the civilian death toll number between half and a full million.

TL;DR: We live in a period of unprecedented peace, even if it doesn't look like it looking at TV. Most Western countries even abolished national service... Nuclear weapons and MAD are a very likely contributing factor.

[1] http://www.amazon.fr/Commandos-choc-Indochine-h%C3%A9ros-oub...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_conflict_deaths