War Games-The.Dead.

Code
Synopsis
During a secret live fire exercise of a nuclear attack, many United States Air Force
Strategic Missile Wing officers prove unwilling to turn a required key to launch a missile
strike. Such refusals convince 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, programmed to continuously run military simulations and learn how to play
better 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 and modem 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).

While dialing every number in Sunnyvale, California to find a set of forthcoming

computer games, a computer that does not identify itself intrigues him. Lightman finds
a list of games, starting with general strategy games like chess, checkers, and poker and
then progressing to titles like Theaterwide Biotoxic and Chemical Warfare and Global
Thermonuclear War, but cannot proceed further. Two older hackers 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 he was seeking.

Unknown to Lightman, the Sunnyvale phone number connects him to WOPR (War
Operation Plan Response) 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 human military attendants that actual Soviet nuclear missiles are
inbound. While they defuse the situation, WOPR 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 WOPR 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 inevitably on a
path to nuclear holocaust. The teenagers convince Falken that he should return to
NORAD to stop WOPR.

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 nonexistent attack. WOPR 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 WOPR 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. WOPR obtains the missile code but before
launching, it cycles through all the nuclear war scenarios it has devised, finding they
also all result in stalemates ("WINNER: NONE"). The computer concludes that nuclear
warfare is "a strange game. The only winning move is not to play." WOPR then offers to
play "a nice game of chess", and relinquishes control of NORAD and the missiles.