The start of By Dawn's Early Light has a stolen nuke fired into Russia if I recall correctly?
Almost any scenario that has a single bomb go off could easily escalate before anyone realised the truth, but it's hard to see either France or the UK firing westwards. Whilst I could see a rogue state using a nuke , especially during a period of tension, I can’t see any possible reason for the western nations to launch against America. That would be a sure way to lose everything. It would be relying 100% on no-one detecting the launch location, of no-one blabbing. Both countries are too compact and too poorly prepared for nuclear war and they would take massive damage from even a very limited strike by America. The small number of weapons the Americans would need to use wouldn’t make much difference to the number they still had pointed further east either. The only result of a blue on blue nuclear strike would be Russian armour rumbling in from the east and skirting around the American made craters to pick over the remains.
A couple of points of interest though.
NATO at one time allegedly had a view of 'equalisation of the misery'. Any attack on the fringes of the main conflict by non-aligned states, or any embargo on essential material (specifically oil from the Middle East) would have seen efforts to prevent anyone getting such materials, quite probably by destruction of those very assets at source (ie the oilfields). Whether that is a sensible course of action long term seems not to have been a consideration. Presumably this mindset would also apply if any of the minor members of the nuclear club/rogue states decided that a European conflict could be used as cover to bury a few hatchets. Massive retaliation would have been the response, probably with little to no warning.
France does (or did) have a 'Final Warning' attitude that, above a certain threshold of damage within France, would see massive retaliation, with or without NATO approval. The part in canon where France is neutral but still gets hit by Soviet nuclear weapons to deny it’s facilities to NATO would almost certainly lead to French neutrality going out the window and more nuclear warheads flying east.
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