A characteristic shared by political philosophy and political psychology is a failure to provide a theoretical account of the emergence of nuclear war as a political phenomenon and of attempts to manage that phenomenon through threats of total destruction, i.e. through deterrence. In this paper I propose to speculate on the outlines of two avenues of analysis which will lay a foundation for a more general political theory of nuclear war. Parts I and II seek to locate deterrence in an interpretation of the history of theorizing about political rationality. This philosophical reflection concludes by raising a number of psychological issues and, as a consequence, parts III and IV suggest a depth psychological perspective on the application of a policy of deterrence. These sections of the paper can be taken as a supplement to work such as that of Robert Jervis (Jervis 1976) and other political psychologists, although by the conjunction of a psychological approach with a philosophical argument I intend to move beyond applied cognitive psychology. Part V concludes with proposals for continuation of this line of investigation.

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