"Better Angels goes out on a limb and speculates that the chances of all-out nuclear Armageddon were higher during the height of the Cold War than they have been since the Cold War ended. Perhaps that is statistically naïve; I don’t think so."

"Taleb is surely right to urge us to think about the magnitude of events with non-negligible probabilities, and to caution us about our inability to assess such probabilities with confidence. Yet he does not acknowledge the problems with his own suggestion that “the emphasis should be on the weapon” ..."

And then Pinker compares the warning of the possibility of the "worst case" (which would be a nuclear war or even a new conventional large-scale war, now that the world population is much bigger) with the "bloated American military budget" and the Iraq war and the Patriot Act.

So on one side we have the nukes "on the short fuse" always ready to launch, in spite of the known errors (and who knows how many unknown ones):

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/take-nukes-off-a-...

and the response is, to paraphrase, if we'd worry about the worst case, we're doing the same error as the US going to war in Iraq.

It has no sense, as us taking steps to do something against the fatal threats would be exactly to remove the most dangerous paths for the fatal use of weapons by the very military structures that Pinker also recognizes as being ready to make much more damage than possibly necessary.

I don't think anybody can claim that our amount of care shouldn't be proportional to the scale of consequences that an error can produce.

http://thebulletin.org/press-release/board-moves-clock-ahead...