Since the United States abandoned Fat Man and Little Boy atomic bombs, respectively, the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the world has known with a terrifying certainty that humanity has the power to end all life on earth – or, at least, most. The cockroaches could pass through (and, if “Damnation Alley” from 1977 to good science, become really big). When intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMS) have entered the image and the two superpowers of the planet, the United States and the USSR have embarked on a arms race that produced arsenals capable of reducing the world to, in the words of Klaatu, a burned ash, it is weird that the world doesn’t Stay motion, descend into the mass streets and ask for the elimination of all nuclear weapons in order to ensure their future, the future of their children, the future of their children, etc.
When the world ended up at the edge of a large-scale nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, it was enough to escape this irresponsible game of Brose-Marthanship with our lives. And when the United States has bogged off in the Vietnam War Mette Metry, the fear of the annihilation of the button button was burned back while a whole generation of Americans has treated the death sentence of its writing. The threat of Armageddon of human manufacture was as present as ever; It seemed a little less likely when we were fighting a war on the ground which had the aesthetics of the Pacific Theater during the Second World War. For people who are too old to serve, Vietnam was a Talimace test field for the generation of rock and-roll.
It was only by the partial collapse of the island of three miles in 1979, strangely predicted by “China syndrome”, that people remember that Doomsday was still about an hour. Once the Vietnam War has been sufficiently distant in decline, the world again focused on the saber-tail between the Americans and the Russkies. And with a Ronald Reagan as a function of the office (the big communicator “they called him, even after having visibly slipped in senility), everyone feared that he is not lacking in the temperament and the talent of John F. Kennedy for the de -escalation of fanfaronade. The Reagan frontal seemed to spoil a fight.
In private, he did not want to be part of a nuclear war. He was terrified by the perspective, which led him to join the science of the junk of the “Star Wars” missiles defense initiative. (The catastrophically clowning president Donald J. Trump is back on this discredited nonsense 44 years later.) Thus, when Reagan who loves the film arranged to project a surprise blockbuster in the White House in the summer of 1983, he took the speculative threat of the film to our arsenal of nuclear missiles seriously to sign a national security directive.
Wargames transformed Ronald Reagan into a pioneer of cybersecurity
When “Wargames” came out in theaters on June 3, 1983, he pulled the imagination of the Video Game Obsessives of the X generation that was intrigued by the potential of personal computers. And they were blown away by the idea that you could use your phone to connect with a supercomputer housed at the headquarters of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad) in Colorado, which, if you have not been careful, could issue launch orders at each nuclear missile silo in the United States.
Ronald Reagan was a deeply uninteresting man who served the pleasure of rich conservative ideologues, but he had a semi-fascinating oddity: he was afraid of nuclear war. And when he saw “Wargames” (one of the 15 best cold war films in the film), the technologically ignorant leader in the free world asked a scandalously extensive question: a punk child like David Lightman by Matthew Broderick or, worse, could a foreign government compromise our national security and start the Second World War?
According to a 2016 New York Times article by Fred Kaplan, a few days after projected “wargames”, Reagan surprised his national security advisers by linking certain questions about the threat of computer hacking. General John W. Vessey, the president of the joint staff chiefs, examined the question and, a week later, told Reagan: “Mr. President, the problem is much worse than you think.”
It turned out that before the launch of the Internet, an engineer named Willis Ware was concerned about IT security for more than a decade and warned that any machine connected to a telephone line or a port was automatically vulnerable to piracy. Of course, no one took Ware’s concerns seriously – at least, not before Reagan saw a summer blockbuster and panicked you. And here is the botter: when the writers “Wargames” Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes began to search for their project, the computer of Rand Corporation who convinced them that they were on something was Willis Ware.
15 months after Reagan saw “War Games”, he signed the Confidential Directive “national political on telecommunications and automated information systems”. Whether led by his conscience or a basic preservation instinct, Reagan forced the United States government to go out before cybersecurity. He is one of the only good things he has done during his two terms.
