Discusses the increasing incidence of world violence over the last 100 yrs. The extermination of over 60 million people in various wars and the tortures and mass murders of millions in Uganda, Iran, Syria, Chile, and Argentina continue unabated. Ethologic data on the conditions in which intraspecies aggression occurs are discussed to provide a comparative background from which the roots of more complex individual and social human violence may be considered. It is argued that social psychiatrists must recognize that apprehensions of an atomic holocaust present serious threats to the physical, interpersonal, and metapsychologic needs and aspirations of sentient human beings everywhere. Social psychiatrists should be prepared to treat the resulting anxieties and the corresponding familial, interpersonal, and social disruptions by locally appropriate clinical and group techniques to counter the alarming manifestations of religious and internecine violence on a world scale. (22 ref)