This might be true for a theoretical perfect strongly typed language (SML comes close), but whatever C and C++ might gain by static typing, they lose by things

This might be true for a theoretical perfect strongly typed language (SML comes close), but whatever C and C++ might gain by static typing, they lose by things like casts to (void *) and of course their unsafe pointers. Even Java isn't very type-safe, especially when it started - collections held Objects, which you had to downcast (bye static type-safety, hello runtime errors).