I think that's the key point regarding Germany, or most other nations. They might conceivably blunder into a border skirmish, but they had no arsenal or capacity to create a nuclear war. And they had the actual superpowers almost guaranteed to leap down their throats and punish them for any such transgression.
The US and USSR, on the other hand, had limitless capacity for that... and almost all of those cases you mentioned, Raellus, prove out how it easily could have happened. In every situation there were people with almost all of the power needed to do so willing to go to war and even to go nuclear -- but either a key system failed, or a single officer refused their orders. The fact that it's happened that way repeatedly is a relief but also not entirely comforting!
The more complete version depicted in Arc Light is that a coup happens in Russia coincidentally at the same time that the Russians have decided to go nuclear in their war with China. They misinterpret the Chinese counter-attack as an attack by the US, and in the chaotic situation order their own retaliation against the US. It goes from there. So again it's a lot of factors piled on each other that add up to overwhelming the systems designed to prevent it.
It really is a very good technothriller. The politics and characters are a lot better developed than in many other similar books.
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