MAD was a policy of the cold war. And while there was a lot of rhetoric I am not sure that there was any real trend toward increased hostilities from the USSR toward the US. (I was pretty young, I could be wrong)
Meanwhile the terrorist we started fighting were growing in number and the number of attacks was growing greatly. 911 was just the latest in a series of attacks that were more numerous and more dangerous.
Because there was a trend, with no action at all we can be safe to say that there would have been more of them and they would have been worse. in contrast there is no trend for asteroids to be increasing in number so we would expect that the number of asteroid hits would be about the same.
Here is a link to some links to a list of terrorist attacks. Any of you are welcome to sift through them and pull out the ones committed by AQ and count how many happened before the war and how many happened after the war.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents
Look for the box that looks like this (each year is a link to a list):
1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979
1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989
1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
After you look at those huge lists of attacks (181 attacks in 2000) note that AQ has only committed one attack in 2005 (not in the US), no attacks in 2006, one attack in 2007 (not in the US), and one attack in 2009 (not in the US).
