Edit: Why is this being downvoted. I'm right. One will kill 100k people instantly. The other will send them back to the Middle Ages. The former group might actually be the luckier one.
It's actually surprisingly structured, with pretty clear rules. Among them are "bright lines" and "fuzzy lines". A bright line is something which forces an automatic response nobody likes, and it's backed by a lot of commitment. Not responding to an adversary crossing a bright line trashes your whole reputation and strongly signals you're weak.
The problem with bright lines is that once you state them, the other guy is free to do anything up to your line. It's like posting your final price in a classified post - nobody will ever offer you more. A fuzzy line is the solution: you say something like "if you move forward, I will do things you don't like", without saying how much forward or what things. Which forces the other guy to tip-toe around. You see A LOT of this between NATO and Russia in Ukraine.
Back to your point - nuclear attacks are a very clear bright line. One might say the final bright line, written in neon. They should be treated as such, and not watered down - if you say "bombing a power station is identical to nuclear attacks", you may make bombing power stations very slightly less likely, but you also normalize nuclear attacks by the same amount - and this is VERY BAD.
As an American citizen, I'm very glad this wasn't treated as indistinguishable from a nuclear attack. I regret that no one was held accountable for initiating the war, but MAD would have been bad news.
I was and am against those wars, but I am not a pacifist. If a war is a 'just way' and should be fought (there's a whole scholarship on when wars are just, I have a high bar, but it can be met), there will always be targets that are 'dual use' and in that regrettable circumstance in my mind, those would be legitimate targets after a very careful calculus was made to weigh lives lost and saved by destroying them.
Most American military experts assumed the Russians would have started the war with a much more aggressive arial bombardment. It's just kind of how these things are done. I assume them doing this now is Russia paving the way for a more traditional operation to begin when the ground freezes. It's going to be a bloody winter. It's a tragedy.
With what army? Most estimates state they have lost well over half of their combat power. Russia is not doing anything but slowly (or sometimes quickly) retreating.
Exploding nuclear bombs destroys civilian infrastructure and harms ecosystems.
Destroying civilian infrastructure harms civilians.
Both are despicable acts of destruction.
One is not deserving of the other.
One is incredibly difficult to fix with permanent effects, other is minor nuisance and not that big of a deal to fix or even switch to life without power grid, you can just have own wind turbine/solar/hydro if you really need the power.
Also TIL Middle ages were like 100-150years ago, in some countries just decades ago, I'd say you could get by without power very easily even in 1950s. I am pretty sure my grandma didn't much need electricity for anything and she didn't live in Middle Ages. You can have mechanical pump in well, you can store stuff in cold basement and you can use oil lamp or candles for light in dark to cover the basics (water/food/light). Sure you would need to change the way of life, but equalling this to nuclear attack is just plain stupid.
As someone who admires Amish I find it actually appealing.
If I have to choose whether time travel to 1920s-1950s or live in nuclear war wasteland it's pretty easy choice for me.
I've travelled to places with no electricity (they jsut use generator in evening) and people were doing just fine over there and I was also not missing much.
Not very significant permanent effects most of the time. E.g. a million people are happily living in Hiroshima right now.
But I agree with sentiment the fear of nuclear bomb is way overestimated compared to real dangers [1].
[1] see chapter 1
https://ia800501.us.archive.org/35/items/NuclearWarSurvivalS...
Basically a hurricane is already expending a megaton of tnt equivalent every couple of minutes so the nuke does diddly.
No, it really does not. Mutually assured destruction - especially with current amount of nuclear weapons, which is an order of magnitude less than at the peak of cold war - means unacceptable level of casualties on both sides, however, even an all out launch-all-nukes NATO vs Russia war wouldn't even touch the regions where majority of human population lives. Sure, it would be an extremely horrific genocidal event, I personally would die, but even reducing population by half (to 1974 level) is nowhere close to "ends human life on the planet".