Earlier quoted context omitted.
>”I don't see nuclear weapons as any worse than conventional weapons because ultimately people die.” If you believe this, I am genuinely curious as to what you would consider the “gravest of dangers” to be.
I think of threats that are unknown and/or can't be adequately defended against: * Asteroid impacts like Chicxulub. * The Sun eventually inflating into a red giant and eating Earth, though this assumes we're both still around and haven't become spaceborne en masse. * Pandemics such as The Black Death and, indeed, covid for a recent example. * Social, political, or commercial intrigue. * Cancer. "AI" is a known threat…
We would have years to deflect an asteroid, but just minutes to react to a mass ICBM launch.
We have the technology available now to deflect asteroids (ironically, with nukes!), but no country has built up sufficient ballistic missile defence to shield themselves from a first strike.
The Sun expanding (or changing in any impactful way) won't be a problem for hundreds of millions of years. Nuclear war could be triggered today. The US is literally sending about a hundred billion in weapons (total) to kill the soldiers of a nuclear-armed belligerent state... right now!
Pendemics tend to fizzle because pathogens that kill too fast are self-limiting. Merely making people sick is selected for, because that leads to increased disease spread by the infectious -- but alive -- victims.
Societies, politics, and commerce have been more stable than ever in human history, and are become more stable over time, not less.
A cure for cancer in the next two decades is looking increasingly likely. Techniques such as individual rapid gene sequencing, custom mRNA anti-cancer vaccines, CRISPR/Cas9, AlphaFold 3, etc... are building up to a toolkit that will eventually allow us to treat pretty much any human illness, possibly including old age itself.