Another case involving a movie influencing Reagan, US policy and related to nuclear weapons is The Day After:
> 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.
Just talking to someone about "Threads" yesterday. IMHO the best "after the nuclear holocaust movie" (even more so than The Road), I think of all movies it was the one with the biggest immediate psychological impact on me (a rare thing)...I remember watching it and quite simply not wanting to get out of bed the next morning as I just felt a nuclear war was inevitable, we were all screwed anyway - and humanity sucked.
It is so terrifying that the guy with his finger on the nuclear button had given so little thought to nuclear policy that a movie could change his mind. He should have known everything The Day After had to teach before even taking office.
You could say that about so many subjects for which heads of state are responsible. It's not possible for candidates to be knowledgeable about everything. In this case, it's not possible for people without military or scientific backgrounds to really have a grasp on the magnitude of stuff. 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.
> You could say that about so many subjects for which heads of state are responsible. It's not possible for candidates to be knowledgeable about everything.
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.
I wasn't commenting on whether the idea of an ignorant candidate is terrifying. I was commenting on whether a fully knowledgeable candidate is feasible. Admittedly, it seems that you're talking about wisdom and capacity for empathy, while I was talking about knowledge of facts.
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.
Recently re-watched this movie thanks to Ready Player One: so great to see plausible hacking in a movie (as much as I enjoy Hackers for the entertainment value) - I love this behind the scenes snippet about the movie and its real world impact!
I love how David researched Stephen Falken in his search for plausible backdoors -- by going to the library, looking through the card catalog, and checking books and magazine and newspaper articles about him.
Rate limiting would have killed that dictionary. Just the connection speed: 300 baud means roughly 300 bits per second, or roughly 2250 characters per minute.
But what kind of credentials would he have? Would he even gain access to the games he was after?
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.
What do you mean that wasn't super realistic. People have figured out peoples passwords and security questions by researching their target. Its basic social engineering.
This movie launched my love to computers and I owe my career to it. I was in awe how broderick got to hack all computers, have the adventure and get the girl. Perfect, I'll have some of that please. I still want to thank him one day.
If you haven't seen it recently, I really can't recommend this movie enough. I showed it to my then 6 and 8 year old boys, and they totally got it and loved it. It just holds up incredibly well.
I rematch it almost yearly and I never tire of it, though of course I know it all off by heart by now.
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.
Likewise. It was the first we rented, when my dad bought a shiny new VHS player. The movie stayed in my head for weeks, and is what hook me with computers.
Steve Jobs was an asshole through and through, but come on, man. If you can't bear to hear his name mentioned in even a neutral context, that's your problem, not ours.
Comments where someone you don't approve of is mentioned totally neutrally, in passing? I dunno if it's going to have the intended effect, friend. People mention people, it's just kinda how folks work.
> 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...