I'm just not sure how much less safe the modern conventional airwar could have made people feel when pre-modern wars depopulated whole regions worse. Like, obviously in Germany WWII ended up killing a lot of people, but percentage wise it was still less than ten percent of everyone, so way less (and less civilians) than the religious wars over Reformation killed in many German areas, when some regions lost two thirds, and the average loss was forty percent in rural areas and about a third in cities during the thirty year war, iirc my history lessons.

Though my own city state of Hamburg did okay during that horrible time because its government managed to pay off big powers to not be ransacked and profited, whereas it was flattened in WWII (also annoyingly unexploded bombs from that time are still around and disruptive, so all the bomb evacuations you get here, which are several every year, are due to WWII bombs necessitating clearing areas to disarm them, and the stupid things get more risky over time because it turns out the delayed action detonator bombs intended to kill firemen in the aftermath of bombing deteriorate over time even when they failed, so in that way industrial warfare certainly keeps on giving).

Anyway, the whole continent pretty much seemed to work like that Death World trope for centuries, so I'm not sure missiles changed your security prospects here much for the worse, but the nuclear aspect of the cold war was terrifying (not helped by being in pretty much the worst place for that stand off).