war, based on rational self-interest or survival instincts, are not adequate to explain the potential for nuclear annihilation. The desire for world destruction is presented as being derived from the desires for individual selfdestruction, for aggressive destruction, for mutual death, and for war itself. Images for world-destructive deities are examined as projections of this desire. It is argued that the attraction to destruction is not most fundamentally an attraction to biological death but, rather, to a symbolic or archetypal process of death and rebirth. This process can be seen in the primitive rituals of world destruction and regeneration which may have been, in the Neolithic period, the precursors of the first wars. Attitudes toward war and nuclear arms are examined as fundamentally archetypal processes expressed in the literal dimension.