RAND employees worked in a very different way to military strategists – indeed, they often argued that since no military personnel had experience of nuclear warfare, they were not well suited to thinking about its unique nature. Throughout the Cold War the corporation received contracts from the US government to develop new thinking on security and defence issues, especially in relation to the ‘nuclear world’ that had been ushered in by the use of atomic weapons against Japan at the end of World War two.
The RAND corporation had been established in 1948, as an independent think tank, staffed by civilians, often from scientific or academic backgrounds. For defence research institutes like the RAND Corporation, however, ‘gaming’ was more than just a metaphor – it was through the development and playing out of sophisticated ‘war games’ that they hoped to be able to develop strategies that might enable a positive outcome to any conflict that might arise with the Soviet Union or its allies. The delicate pursuit of ‘balance-of-power’ global politics was often likened to a game of global chess, in particular. Indeed, many key policy advisers in the US security community during the Cold War drew explicitly on this notion to describe the tactics and strategies of the United States and the Soviet Union during this time. Many historians and analysts often describe the Cold War as being ‘like a game’.
What his character doesn’t know is that he has hacked into a US military supercomputer, and that by starting the game he puts into process a chain of events that will lead to automatic retaliation by the computer, against the Soviet Union, in the form of an actual nuclear strike. Intrigued, he eventually hacks his way into the system and starts a game of ‘global thermonuclear war’, playing as the Soviet Union.
In this film Broderick plays the character of a young computer hacker, who inadvertently comes across a protected computer system which has a file of ‘games’: classic strategy games such as chess, backgammon and checkers, but also games with titles like ‘global thermonuclear war’. But the film War Games is a useful place to start thinking about the relationship between war, games, and the particular historical period referred to as the ‘Cold War’. There is now an established academic literature that argues that much of our understanding about international politics comes via reference to popular culture, and I suppose this is but one example. When I hear the term ‘War Games’ I am initially reminded of the 1983 movie of the same name, starring Matthew Broderick.
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