There is an article in WIRED stating Reagan liked the movie....so did NORAD.
The Soviet loving dupes were used by Andropov to scream and howl against the Gipper’s placement of nuclear missiles into Western Europe, where they could hit Soviet targets.
The left made movies like this back then openly implying that the dangerous US would cause or even wanted, a nuclear war. They never did admit they were wrong, and now they bring back their flawed thinking as nostalgia.
You look into things too much. War Games ruled. And Ally Sheedy is hot.
Computer hackers were dangerous!
Wardialing was dangerous!
But America was the Home of the WOPR!
In 1979 a programmer ran a test program simulating a Soviet Nuclear Attack and forgot to take the computer off-line leaving NORAD to believe we were under attack. the threat was so real that we launch bombers and the "Dooms Day" plane took off before NORAD figured out it was not real. After that date, NORAD built a separate facility with identical computers that were not linked to the rest of the defense network to run test and war games on.
November 9, 1979: Computer Exercise Tape
At 8:50 a.m. on November 9, 1979, duty officers at 4 command centers (NORAD HQ, SAC Command Post, The Pentagon National Military Command Center, and the Alternate National Military Command Center) all saw on their displays a pattern showing a large number of Soviet Missiles in a full scale attack on the U.S.A. During the next 6 minutes emergency preparations for retaliation were made. A number of Air Force planes were launched, including the President's National Emergency Airborne Command Post, though without the President! The President had not been informed, perhaps because he could not be found. ( To be fair, it was Carter and the Military figured 'why bother')
No attempt was made to use the hot line either to ascertain the Soviet intentions or to tell the Soviets the reasons for U.S. actions. This seems to me to have been culpable negligence. The whole purpose of the "Hot Line" was to prevent exactly the type of disaster that was threatening at that moment.
With commendable speed, NORAD was able to contact PAVE PAWS early warning radar and learn that no missiles had been reported. Also, the sensors on the satellites were functioning that day and had detected no missiles. In only 6 minutes the threat assessment conference was terminated.
The reason for the false alarm was an exercise tape running on the computer system. U.S. Senator Charles Percy happened to be in NORAD HQ at the time and is reported to have said there was absolute panic. A question was asked in Congress. The General Accounting Office conducted an investigation, and an off-site testing facility was constructed so that test tapes did not in the future have to be run on a system that could be in military operation
There is an article in WIRED stating Reagan liked the movie....so did NORAD.
“The Day After.” The movie that warned us that after a thermonuclear war, everyone will look like Senator Alan Cranston (according to a National Review quip).
It was part of a larger group of films about the then fast growing PC craze and how ‘computers can do anything man!’(Tron, Superman 3, Electric Dreams). The screenwirters later created ‘Project X’, another Matthew Broderick film about a goverment/military project gone wrong.
The Soviet loving dupes were used by Andropov to scream and howl against the Gipper’s placement of nuclear missiles into Western Europe, where they could hit Soviet targets.The left made movies like this back then openly implying that the dangerous US would cause or even wanted, a nuclear war. They never did admit they were wrong, and now they bring back their flawed thinking as nostalgia.
Ironically it was in this period of Soviet history, that THEY almost launched a Mutually Assured Destruction attack on the United States of America and our allies. The cause? A faulty "response" signal received on Russia's side. The man receiving the signal to launch dismissed it saying that there was nothing in the political climate to suggest that we had just launched an all out attack on Russia. He was repremanded and much later he was celebrated for not killing us all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov (September 26, 1983)
And I know that wiki isn't great for all details or biases, this at least gives people a name with which to start more in depth studies if they want.
I don’t see the movie as all that anti-nuke. If anything, the computer comes to realize that mutually assured destruction is a real, effective deterrent.