'WarGames' and Cybersecurity's Debt to a Hollywood Hack
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> President Ronald Reagan watched the film several days before its screening, on November 5, 1983. He wrote in his diary that the film was "very effective and left me greatly depressed," and that it changed his mind on the prevailing policy on a "nuclear war". The film was also screened for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A government advisor who attended the screening, a friend of Meyer's, told him "If you wanted to draw blood, you did it. Those guys sat there like they were turned to stone." Four years later, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed and in Reagan's memoirs he drew a direct line from the film to the signing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After#Effects_on_polic...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game
Certainly one man can't be well-versed on every little thing. But global thermonuclear war is not a little thing. It is, arguably, the biggest thing, especially for a man who effectively had the ability to end human civilization by his decisions.
> In this case, it's not possible for people without military or scientific backgrounds to really have a grasp on the magnitude of stuff.
This isn't about the physics and tactics of nuclear weapons, though. This is about the basic idea that nuclear war would be the greatest disaster in human history and should be avoided at any cost, which by Reagan's own admission is something he hadn't entirely grasped until he watched a movie about it.
> Heck, even those with military backgrounds couldn't fathom a lot of things, judging from the parent's quote on the reaction from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
If the nation's top military personnel also hadn't previously grasped that nuclear war would be really bad, that makes the whole thing more terrifying, not less.
On the specific question of how to keep policymakers aware of the gravity of the nuclear decisions they could make, it notes there was a proposal floated at one point (half-jokingly, but only half) that the launch codes for American nuclear missiles, instead of being carried around in a briefcase, should instead be surgically implanted under the skin of one of the President's aides. That aide would then be responsible for carrying a butcher knife on their person at all times.
Why? That way, for the President to be able to launch the missiles and kill millions of people, he'd have to be willing to kill one person with his own hands first.
The guy was an actor after all. He knew and lived movies, probably more than almost every other politician.
The whole point of hunting for the Falken backdoor was to gain the highest access he could, so he could get his hands on what he thought were games in development to be released soon.
Also, 'nother WarGames fun fact: Stephen Falken is, of course, a play on Stephen Hawking. At the time of the movie's creation, Professor Hawking had only recently been diagnosed with ALS and was thought to not be long for the world. The original script/treatment was about a relationship between Falken and a teenager, to whom the terminally ill Falken would pass as much knowledge as he could before he died, so his work could live on. When the PC debuted, the script was reworked to incorporate the role computing had in young people's lives, and the nascent "hacker" phenomenon.
Curiously it also engendered a life-long curiosity with Seattle which I finally satisfied last year by actually going to visit the place. Odd how one's mind can fixate on such fictions and make them points of interest.
It pays off to make that call!
Me and my friends used to quote that to each other back in the 80s.
I loved that movie.