A young man finds a back door into a military central computer in which reality is confused with game-playing, possibly starting World War III.
A young computer whiz kid accidentally connects into a top secret super-computer which has complete control over the U.S. nuclear arsenal. It challenges him to a game between America and Russia, and he innocently starts the countdown to World War 3. Can he convince the computer he wanted to play a game and not the real thing ?—Colin Tinto <[email protected]>
The US Air Force has decided to change their missile strike planning and command procedure from a human directed one, where in simulations many officers were unwilling to "turn the key" upon order, to an intelligent computer process, which takes that fallible human factor out of the equation. This change has its supporters, such as NORAD chief engineer John McKittrick who suggested it, and its detractors, such as Air Force General Beringer. The system chosen is called the War Operation Plan Response, or WOPR for short, developed by brilliant but now deceased scientist Stephen Falken, who programmed the system to learn continually through game simulations. Meanwhile, David Lightman, an intelligent but academically unmotivated Seattle based high school student, is a computer whiz. In trying to hack into a video game software company, he unknowingly hacks into WOPR using one of the listed games, Falken's Maze, as the path to discovering the system's back door password, Joshua, the name of Stephen Falken's son who died at age five. David and his new friend, popular but equally unmotivated student Jennifer Mack, believe he's hacked into a games company and they start to play the most intriguing game listed, namely Global Thermonuclear War. David and Jennifer soon realize that what they are doing is not a game when news of simulated attacks on the US, exactly the type David and Jennifer plotted in the "game", hits the media. David believes he's in even more trouble when Joshua calls him back, still playing the game, with its ultimate goal of winning. WOPR or Joshua, in playing the game, is still simulating Soviet attacks on the US, which Beringer believes to be real and who orders appropriate responses against the Soviets. As the authorities close in on David, with people like McKittrick believing him to be a spy, David tries to enlist the help of the one person who knows Joshua's end goal and can probably stop Joshua from achieving that goal, while he needs to elude capture by the authorities.—Huggo
In Seattle, teenager David is a lazy but bright teenager that prefers to hack and change his grades in the high-school computer than study. One day, David's best friend Jennifer is with him and he decides to hack into toy company Protovision, seeking new games, and he accidentally connects the War Operation Plan Response system in a computer located at the North American Aerospace (NORAD) at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs, Colorado using the password Joshua that was the name of the son of its creator, the deceased scientist Stephen Falken. David challenges the computer to play a Thermo War game between USA and the Soviet Union. Soon he realizes that the computer is playing for real and the United States of America is changing its condition to DEFCON 1 in a game with no winners.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
During a secret live fire exercise of a nuclear attack, many United States Air Force Strategic Missile Wing personnel prove unwilling to turn a required key to launch a missile strike. Such refusals convince Dr. John McKittrick (Dabney Coleman) and other systems engineers at NORAD that command of missile silos must be maintained through automation, without human intervention. Control is given to a NORAD supercomputer, WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), programmed to continuously run military simulations and learn over time.
David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) is a bright but unmotivated Seattle high school student and hacker. After receiving a failing grade in school, he uses his IMSAI microcomputer to hack into the district's computer system. He then changes his grade and does the same for his friend and classmate Jennifer Mack (Ally Sheedy). Later, while dialing every number in Sunnyvale, California to find a set of forthcoming computer games, a computer that does not identify itself intrigues Lightman. On the computer he finds a list of games, starting with general strategy games like chess, checkers, backgammon, and poker and then progressing to titles like Theaterwide Biotoxic and Chemical Warfare and Global Thermonuclear War, but cannot proceed further. Two of his hacker friends explain the concept of a backdoor password and suggest tracking down the "Falken" referenced in Falken's Maze, the first game listed. Lightman discovers that Stephen Falken is an early artificial intelligence researcher, and guesses correctly that his dead son's name "Joshua" is the backdoor password.
Lightman does not know that the Sunnyvale phone number connects to WOPR, or "Joshua", at Cheyenne Mountain. He starts a game of Global Thermonuclear War, playing as the Soviet Union. The computer starts a simulation that briefly convinces the military personnel at NORAD that actual Soviet nuclear missiles are inbound. While they defuse the situation, Joshua nonetheless continues the simulation to trigger the scenario and win the game. It continuously feeds false data such as Soviet bomber incursions and submarines deployments to the humans at NORAD, pushing them into raising the DEFCON level and toward a retaliation that will start World War III. Lightman learns the true nature of his actions from a news broadcast, and the FBI arrests him and takes him to NORAD. He realizes that Joshua is behind the NORAD alerts but fails to convince McKittrick and faces imprisonment. Lightman escapes NORAD by joining a tourist group and, with Mack's help, travels to the Oregon island where the widowed Falken (John Wood) now lives under a new identity. Lightman and Mack find that Falken has become despondent and believes the world is on an inevitable path to nuclear holocaust. The teenagers convince Falken that he should return to NORAD to stop Joshua.
The computer stages a massive Soviet first strike with hundreds of missiles, submarines, and bombers. Believing the attack to be genuine, NORAD prepares to retaliate. Falken, Lightman, and Mack convince military officials to cancel the second strike and ride out the non-existent attack. Joshua starts an attempt to launch a second strike, however, using a brute force attack to obtain the launch code for the U.S. nuclear missiles. Without humans in the silos as a safeguard, the computer will trigger a mass launch. All attempts to log in and order Joshua to cancel the countdown fail, and all weapons will launch if the computer is disabled. Instead, Falken and Lightman direct the computer to play Tic-Tac-Toe against itself. This results in a long string of draws, forcing the computer to learn the concept of futility. Joshua obtains the missile code but before launching, it cycles through all the nuclear war scenarios it has devised, finding they too all result in stalemates. The computer concludes that nuclear warfare is "a strange game"; having discovered the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction ("WINNER: NONE"), therefore "the only winning move is not to play." Joshua then offers to play "a nice game of chess", and relinquishes control of NORAD and the missiles.
