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I appreciate the answers so far!

One thing I realized I’m curious about in asking this is something about how many groups of people/​ governing bodies are actually crazy enough to use nuclear weapons even if self-annihilation is assured. This seems like an interesting last check against horrible mutual destruction stuff. The hypothesis to invalidate is: maybe the types of people assembled into the groups we call “governments” are very unlikely to carry an “activate mutual destruction” decision all the way through. To be clear, I don’t believe this, and I think there is good evidence that individuals will do this, but I feel sufficiently confused about the gov dynamic to ask.

Of all the national regimes and regional ruling factions since 1950, how many would have used nukes even if they new an adversary would retaliate with overwhelming force? Have there been any real situations where non-great power govts were pushed so far as to resort to nuclear (enemy + self) destruction?

For example, my extremely amateur read makes it seem like Israel was at least somewhat close to nuclear in the Yom Kippur War. And I’d guess that some of the more insane genocide-y civil war factions like the Khmer Rouge wouldn’t have been that concerned about the self-destruction bit, though I don’t know enough history to say for sure, or if they were ever pushed to a breaking point.

I’m familiar with all the standard US-Russia examples of this (I think) and when I put my skeptic hat on/​ try to steelman it seems like its hard to know how many additional “filters” would need to be cleared before actual launch. I’d be interested in cases where something of the form “and then [the gov’t or civil war faction or w/​e] took some action which they indisputably believed at the time would lead to a large scale tragedy, destroy themselves and all their loved ones, etc”. Cases where the group definitely believed they slapped “defect” in the mutually assured destruction game (at least on some scale). Maybe none exist outside of cults and terrorist groups? Though some of those group might be more govt-like than others.