It's about 2 am. The temperature outside is -5F. I'm lying on the bed, wearing underpants and socks. I was just standing by the window watching snow blowing across the front lawn, getting deeper and accumulating in drifts. It's a blizzard. Heat from the radiator was rising against the cold window.

Near the top of my worst-nightmare list is suddenly being pushed into a cold winter night, unprepared, as in underwear and socks. A thin sheet of brittle glass separates me from primal nature; a bored teenager could pass by and throw a rock at the lighted window just for the fun of it. I've imagined doing such things myself, maybe even done it -- or maybe I'm just remembering an urge I only thought about.

If the furnace fails, I can call someone, even at this hour. But if the power goes off, there will be neither heat nor light till . . . maybe long enough for the heating pipes and water pipes to freeze while I huddle under blankets and overcoats.

I'm a refugee, except for the window glass and electricity.

When I was a kid during the Korean War, we'd see refugees in the Movietone News at the movie theaters. They'd be trudging through snow with their belongings on their backs or in little carts, fleeing some goddam hell in search of a better place, if any existed. Had my mother not said, "Oh, those poor people," I might never have thought about refugees and of being pushed without warning into nature's uncaring blast.

Earlier today I found in my notes a reference to a review of a book by Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard myrmecologist. The review was written by the physicist Phillip Morrison and it was published in the November 1994 issue of Scientific American. Morrison writes (and judging from my notes quotes Wilson) as follows: "Ant societies have a foreign policy, too, one as highly utilitarian as their domestic policy. It is summed up here: 'Restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation . . . whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.'"

"Only human beings kill their own kind" was a truism when I was young. This too: "Only human beings have wars." I accepted this sort of thing until the day I saw an ant war.

You can see ant wars on the sidewalks in the summer. No doubt you could find them too in the grass and under hedges, masses of ants from separate colonies ripping each other apart. I was twelve or fourteen when I saw that first ant war, and I knew just enough about Darwin and about ants to see a paradox: If sterile females ants from one colony fight against sterile females from another colony, how do the winner's victorious genes get passed into the future? Where's the Darwinian benefit?

If we are right in assuming ants don't have ideologies or religions, nor even crude "reasons" for their group conflicts, then their wars must be based in instinct, i.e., they must be genetically predisposed. But how would such a genetic propensity come about among sterile combatants?

Darwin might have answered that question the way William Morton Wheeler did in his 1910 book, Ants: Their Structure, Development and Behavior. Professor Wheeler was one of the myrmecologists who preceded Edward O. Wilson at Harvard. What Wheeler said, in paraphrase, was that when it comes to ants, you can think of the colony as the organism subject to natural selection, and that individual ants are like the "cells" of a larger social creature. When ant colonies fight, the winning side -- the one less depleted of workers, that is -- has more workers to support the sex organ of the colony, the misnamed "queen" genital. In that sense, ant society as organism, Darwin's natural-selection idea applies. Ant wars appear to be instinctive, gene-based, part of what ants are -- if Darwin's idea is correct.

Years after I read the Wheeler book, I wondered if human wars might be instinctive. We are social like the ants, but unlike them we think and we are rational, or so we tell ourselves.

If war among humans does in fact have a genetic basis, then the reasons we give for our wars are rationalizations, like the ones we give for having sex, or for eating. That is, most people have sex with the intent not to procreate, but rather for the pleasure of it. Same with eating, rare is the person who eats with the intent of getting nourishment. Whether it's sex, a Big Mac or pizza, we rationalize the high costs of sex and excess food with rationalizations of love or "I'm starving."

If the human propensity for war is in fact related to genes, then an argument could be made that we are born with something like original sin. For many years I thought the idea of original sin was sex-related, as I got no guidance on the matter in Sunday school, where to ask what "adultery" meant in the Ten Commandments, or what "sodomy" is, brought hand-waving non- answers. Same with original sin, but at some point I got the idea that it is the desire of human beings to have the knowledge of God to judge, and the power of God to create and destroy.

We human beings acquired the power of the old time God during the twentieth century when we figured out how to traverse the sky propelled by fire and heralded by thunder. And we learned how to throw bolts of fire across the planet, and to raise cities and raze cities. We are creators and destroyers. We have become the gods to whom we used to pray, of whom we were sore afraid -- as we now are now afraid of ourselves.

War was a game we played as kids. The thrill of the idea of war was maintained by movies portraying ships and aircraft, guns and the thrill of victory. In the summers, my father would take me to the local Air Force base to see warplanes, bombs, and rockets. It's impossible to imagine a healthy male human being who is ignorant of war's details not being attracted to it.

It was at an Air Force base in June of 1961, after I'd finished my first year in college studying aeronautical engineering, that I saw something that could easily have been the proverbial bat outta hell in all its evil beauty. It was a summer morning that would have been blindingly bright except for a uniform white overcast. The object in question appeared at first sight as a black dot just above the western horizon.

Insight travels on strange wings, and arrives always and only at unexpected moments. In this instance it arrived at 500 miles an hour on a delta-winged B-58 Hustler flying close to the ground.

The plane passed, and the noise hit of course like an explosion. Then it pulled up toward the overcast, and all four afterburners cut in. On a fiery column of a quarter million horses, the damned thing spiralled into the clouds -- and drilled a swirling hole right through the overcast. A beam of slant sunlight shot through to a hill in the distance.

Had that happened 2500 years earlier and in the middle east -- a thunderous noise from the west then a fiery hole blown through the sky -- it would be in the Bible now, and not as a sign of God, but as a divine visitation.

The insight delivered to me that late spring morning was that power, physical power, not aircraft, was my love and fascination. And so I changed my college major from aeronautical engineering to mechanical engineering -- the engineering of engines, the science of energy and physical power. The science of original sin.

But why is it called a "sin"? I am ordinary in my attraction to dynamism, movement, force, energy and power, a typical male member of a race of beings who have endured a million years of nature's worst. We humans deal with rough situations; we are the Bad Weather Animal. And when the weather has been good, when nature is not putting it to us, it seems that our method of staying in shape is by being self-challenging: without our wars we might have died out rather than becoming the powerful and clever new gods of the earth, playing with fire and using it to transform soil into computers, cars, and planet-covering communications networks. In looking back it seems inevitable I was going to be involved in the design of engines and weapons. Physical power give me pleasure -- it gives most male human beings pleasure.

Pleasure and desire are the indicators of an instinct at work. Curiosity, for example, involves both pleasure and desire. And that's what science is, curiosity; despite its patina of rationality science is instinctive and therefore nonrational; its tacit goal is the power of gods, the ability to shape the physical world into the physical plant of societies, and to project force at a distance, to destroy. Science, with its skepticism and animal curiosity, gives the power of gods. Our attraction to that power -- our male attraction to it -- is instinctive and therefore irresistible.

In the twentieth century, at Hiroshima and at Nagasaki and at the other cities ignited by non-nuclear means, humanity surpassed the power of the Hebrew God. So too on that road from Kuwait City where three miles of fire was laid down on those humans which humans deemed sinners. Old Testament fire from above, burning equally the innocent and the guilty, the naive, the intelligent, stupid, cruel, and gifted. Our innate animal curiosity made that power accessible. Instinctual curiosity may have killed the cat, but it has made man god, the evoker of thermonuclear light to survive the dark and unknown future.

The engineering of weapons is different from the engineering of things like toasters, vacuum cleaners and cars.

An engineer who designs hair dryers and tires and the like gets to see his products in public use, he sees his life influencing both individual lives and society itself. Such a feeling is important to happiness; it is an instinctual need.

But the engineer who designs weapons, in periods when there is no other well-defined challenge to one's society, faces the frustration of rarely getting to see the products of his genius used. His work requires him to imagine his weapons actually being used. If the weapon is say an anti-submarine torpedo, the engineer must visualize it blasting through a submarine's hull. Fantasies of force and power are essential parts of weapons design. They are not often discussed among engineers, because those animal feelings can be as embarrassing as masturbation; but when the topic is broached, admissions of feelings of power flow with adrenaline enthusiasm. Hence the names of some engineered products: Zeus, Thunder Bolt, Thor, Trinity Site, Nike, Saturn, Apollo, Valkyrie, Titan . . .

The weapons designer's rational social self knows the weapons should not be used, any more than rocks should be thrown through windows late at night. But that instinct-driven animal aspect desires to see the design fantasy realized, producing an effect -- any effect: the engineer and his government patrons want to know if the 2000-pound laser-guided bomb can be delivered right through the front door, or if the torpedo will in fact hit the sub and blow it in half, or if a one-megaton bomb can actually obliterate a large city. That instinctive part of weapons engineer is thwarted and frustrated in not being able to see his ideas in use and his design fantasies realized.

If a bored, unchallenged kid comes down the street and sees my lighted window as a target for a rock, and if he throws one through it, I will probably chase him down the street in my underwear and socks, wanting to twist the bastard's head off. I will not rationally understand his motive -- that is, I won't be able to put it into words any better than I am trying to do here -- but will be able to sympathize with it, sufficiently that, were I to catch him, I wouldn't kill him.

The modern secular god, Reason, looks like a conceit of instinct. By rationalizing our irrational instincts we avoid dispassionate examination of instinct's irrational wisdom.

The desire to see things happen, to have excitement and thrills is basic and universal to male human beings. If not in actuality, then in our cinematic dreams which, at least partly, meet our needs in our under-challenged society where we live in comfort, where gas is accessible and cheap, and so are cars and food, clothing and housing. Life is easy, so the Bad Weather Animal is bored and looking for action, fantasizing something to do, something more exciting than a rock going through someone's suburban window, something like invading Iraq and risking the start of a world war.

For half a century we have been recoiling from shock of having discovered energies a million times more powerful than gunpowder and TNT. But now we are beginning to rationalize the use of that divine potential. The pressure builds -- at least partly because we have prohibited to ourselves even the release of setting them off underground -- or in deep space where everyone could benefit from seeing the power of the things as they light up the whole night side of the earth.

Human beings need tasty food, good sex, satisfying bodily functions, a minimal level of physical excitement, and the occasional sense of success in seeing our lives contributing to or somehow affecting the world. But we don't need world threatening war.

Imagine instead of war how exciting it would be if one of these days some nation -- say Japan or China or India -- were to undertake something spectacular in space, such as construction of a permanent lunar base. It might provoke a second space race. The rationalization for engaging in the irrational competition would necessarily come down to this chauvinistic and mostly tacit idea: "The first nation with a self-sustaining presence on the moon will be able to dictate to the earth."

But the idea of world control from space is as loony as war itself, because a self-sustaining lunar base would have energy, materials and real estate; the only need from earth would be water, until we figured out how to use sunlight to extract hydrogen from lunar rocks. And yet nationalistic competition predicated on rationalizations and slogans is what drives people to lay out their money, their lives, their sacred honor, and the lives of their children. An international race into space, based upon any rationalization, even nationalism, would be an ultimately constructive challenge -- and a real defense, too, since humanity is fast outgrowing the small confines of the earth's surface.

There's a scene in the movie Patton where George C. Scott as General Patton stands alone after a battle looking out upon the battlefield at the bodies and the smoldering ruins of tanks and the bodies and says, "I do love it. God help me I do love it so. I love it more than life itself."

That line makes the Patton character look like a lunatic, which General Patton might have been; but it is also honest, both within the context of the movie and generally: it is the perpetual the 14-year-old, instinct-driven male mind speaking. General Patton and Curtis LeMay and other soldiers through history can be thought of as artists whose medium is steel and high explosives, fire and human bodies, and whose art, in the style of God, is chaos and devastation of cities and populations.

Despite humanity's role as de facto gods of the earth, we cannot contrive a new and ultimately worthwhile challenge to replace war. Something like a new space race would have to happen on its own. Until then, it is exciting and desirable to imagine throwing a rock through the window of Saddam Hussein, just to see what happens, to assert our new divine power and feel the thrill of it as we validate our animal existence by seeing how out of control things can get, seeing if nuclear weapons come into use, seeing how overwhelmingly challenging we really can make things for the Bad Weather Animal. Because we do love it so -- that innate attraction to the power we attribute to our gods.