I don't disagree in principle, I'm just saying that putting up aggregated statistics for something that lends itself to once-in-a-lifetime catastrophic events doesn't tell us a whole lot. I think even the biggest MAD proponents would agree that the risk of nuclear war is greater than zero.

Risk of something being greater than 0 is an equally uselss measurement. Otherwise we would have multi-trillion dollar asteroid defense networks, alien invasion detectors in the oort cloud, personal lightning shields, lottery backed retirement funds and so on.

I can play linky too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object#Near-Earth_as...

There have been many more asteroids passing really close to earth in recent history than "almost nuclear wars". My point still stands -- nonzero chance is a terrible reason to do anything.

I was hit by lighting, and I was vary happy that my personal lighting shield worked.

PS: Car

I agree with your main point, but I would probably consider being shot with an AK-47 to be a pretty "once-in-a-lifetime catastrophic event".