Thursday, April 24, 2025

War Games


WarGames follows David Lightman, a high school student who unwittingly hacks into WOPR (War Operations Planned Response), a United States military supercomputer programmed to predict possible outcomes of nuclear war. Lightman gets WOPR to run a nuclear war simulation, originally believing it to be a computer game. The simulation causes a national nuclear missile scare and nearly starts World War III.

The movie illustrates the very real fear of an 'imminent' nuclear attack during the late Cold War and teaches a valuable lesson in the end.

How was High School different in 1983?

How have computers and the internet changed our lives since then?

Would you like to play the game?

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Doomsday Clock


The Doomsday Clock is a symbolic clock face, maintained since 1947 by the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The closer the clock is to midnight, the closer the world is estimated to be to global disaster. Originally, the Clock, which hangs on a wall in the Bulletin's office in the University of Chicago, represented an analogy for the threat of global nuclear war; however, since 2007 it has also reflected climate change. The most recent officially announced setting—three minutes to midnight (11:57)—was made in January 2015 due to "[un]checked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals". This setting was retained in January 2016.