totality and the deployment of nuclear weapons

Over on the message boards it was suggested that 'nuclear war [could] be seen as the antithesis of total war'. Clearly, whilst being slightly off-topic, such an inspired assertion requires qualification. So here I will try to do so.

Despite being 'counterintuitive because from the point of view of commitment there can be no deeper level of commitment to a cause', I feel that, notwithstanding its validity (which I acknowledge), this is a rather emotional view to take. Note that throughout our various discussions on the subject of nuclear weapons to date, I have used the term 'deployment' rather than 'use'. By deployment my meaning is 'to present in a fashion that would have a beneficial military or political effect'. By contrast, one might take ' to use a nuclear device' to mean detonate, explode, drop etc. Or whatever, semantics aside, my point is that the difference is significant and that herein lies the significance of my point. An important distinction must be made between the inherent strength of nuclear weapons and those of conventional systems. The strength of nuclear weapons lies in its clear destructive potential. That is fact/undisputable, ie, scientifically defined: you drop the bomb, assuming the thing goes off, you have the desired military effect (as if by magic a big hole appears in the general area of where your target once was). Conventional forces are different, their strength lies in their use (and states with armies tend to use them, the same cannot be said of nuclear weapons). Their relative performance is much more of an unknown, call it the fog of war if you like, but unless you use them you do not know for sure (indeed, many theoretically superior armies have lost their battles and wars (just look at Germany c.1945 for a example)).
Assuming that we are talking about heavy yield weapons rather than small, tactical (eg, fired from a howitzer) nuclear devices that would cause widespread destruction, I would contend that, regardless of their staunchly defended publicly voiced positions on the matter, privately and/or subconsciously neither East or West actually had any intention of using the things. Look at the space race as an example of the lengths that each side would go to just to obtain any perceived edge as a state. Notwithstanding the technological by-products of the space race, there was no real practical purpose to it. Indeed, the last time man put foot on the moon was in the early 1970s.
As pointed out earlier, the 'deployment' of nuclear weapons can be cheap. This is true when compared in relation to equivalent fighting power in terms of conventional weaponry and especially true when you consider their relative likelihood of actual use. Following the aftermath of the use of nuclear weapons against Japan, any political decision to use conventional troops was to be relatively easy when compared to that of nuclear weapons. This is key to their difference in terms of the assertion that each state was bluffing and that the 'deployment' of nuclear weapons could be seen as the antithesis of total war. Indeed, this limiting nuclear contradiction would turn out to be the principle feature of the Cold War. So effective was the 'deployment' of nuclear weapons that there was relatively only limited requirement to directly deploy conventional systems between the superpowers. Everything else was a sideshow and a 'policing of policy' effort. ie, Korea cannot be seen as contrary to this statement because it never had the potential to be anything but limited.