deploying war artifact to nexus is failing; packaging as jar works.

Hello,

I'm trying to distribute my war's artifact to nexus but I'm getting the
following error below. If I change the packaging in the pom.xml to jar it
will deploy fine.

Can anyone see what I am doing wrong?

thanks,
John.

[INFO] --- maven-deploy-plugin:2.8.2:deploy (default-deploy) @ my-webapp ---
[INFO] Downloading:
http://nexus.lan:38080/nexus/content/repositories/snapshots/me/john/my-webapp/0.0.1-SNAPSHOT/maven-metadata.xml
[INFO] Downloaded:
http://nexus.lan:38080/nexus/content/repositories/snapshots/me/john/my-webapp/0.0.1-SNAPSHOT/maven-metadata.xml
(776 B at 1.9 KB/sec)
[INFO] Uploading:
http://nexus.lan:38080/nexus/content/repositories/snapshots/me/john/my-webapp/0.0.1-SNAPSHOT/my-webapp-0.0.1-20141122.103704-6.war
[INFO] Uploading:
http://nexus.lan:38080/nexus/content/repositories/snapshots/me/john/my-webapp/0.0.1-SNAPSHOT/my-webapp-0.0.1-20141122.103704-6.pom
[INFO] Uploaded:
http://nexus.lan:38080/nexus/content/repositories/snapshots/me/john/my-webapp/0.0.1-SNAPSHOT/my-webapp-0.0.1-20141122.103704-6.pom
(5 KB at 197.5 KB/sec)
[INFO]