Cluster,
do you have a CLUE?
We set off hundreds of nuclear weapons above ground before the test ban.
Everyone is still here.
Only having small nukes is one thing that contributes to the eagerness of both sides to use nukes in this case...
The other is that neither country gives a rat fuck about the lives of most of their population. One is a military dictatorship and the other, while technically a democracy, has a culture that is still riven by a ancient cast structure. In India, even the people sitting in Congress have little or nothing in common with the people you see on TV living in hovels. Those in the Army, and in the government administration, many of them educated in the West and with European tasts, have even LESS. The mob is just something to be humored and used for votes, and I am not sure how much they would weep if a few million of their countrymen were wiped off the face of the earth...