My interest in conflict and war goes back decades. In 1961, the film Failsafe starring Henry Fonda as the U.S. president presented a dire warning about the nuclear arms race taking off. It revealed our vulnerability: human error, miscommunication, and technological failure. The tragic ending was shocking. Film director Kathryn Bigelow’s new A House of Dynamite is equally gripping, demonstrating to viewers the reality of our modern world, our closeness to global destruction. Failsafe was alarming. House of Dynamite is foreshadowing.

In 1961, I was at UCLA earning a doctoral degree in evolutionary biology and studying animal behavior, including humans. My early interests included conflict resolution and gender differences. Decades later, after a period of writing fiction and promoting one of my novels, I was drawn back to the topic of war. Voice of the Goddess, a Bronze-age epic, told of a non-violent, non-warring, goddess-worshipping culture on the island of Crete and a warrior hero from the nearby mainland Mycenaean culture. To promote the book, I gave a talk entitled, “If women ran the world there would be no war.”

During the talk, a woman in the audience challenged my book’s core message. She cited the........

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