Wargames Reagan

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War

by Fred Kaplan  · 1 Mar 2016  · 383pp  · 105,021 words

the transitions between presidents, the ideas of cyber warfare were dismissed, ignored, or forgotten, but they never disappeared. All along, and even before Ronald Reagan watched WarGames, esoteric enclaves of the national-security bureaucracy toiled away on fixing—and, still more, exploiting—the flaws in computer software. General Jack Vessey could answer

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who would write NSDD-145, the question was already very old, as old as the Internet itself. * * * In the late 1960s, long before Ronald Reagan watched WarGames, the Defense Department undertook a program called the ARPANET. Its direct sponsor, ARPA (which stood for Advanced Research Projects Agency), was in charge of developing

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even the unlikeliest of plot twists with a grain of authenticity, and Ware gave them that. It was fitting that the scenario of WarGames, which aroused Ronald Reagan’s curiosity and led to the first national policy on reducing the vulnerability of computers, was in good part the creation of the man

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Martin Marietta and RCA, where he remained immersed in these issues. When General Jack Vessey came back from that White House meeting after Ronald Reagan had watched WarGames and asked his aides to find out whether someone could hack into the military’s most sensitive computers, it was only natural that his

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nearly one a week, though often more. (“Movies Watched at Camp David and White House,” Aug. 19, 1988, 1st Lady Staff Office Papers, Ronald Reagan Library.) WarGames was an unusual choice; he usually watched adventures, light comedies, or musicals. But one of the film’s screenwriters, Lawrence Lasker, was the son of

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

by Margaret O'Mara  · 8 Jul 2019

had in the early days of the Eisenhower Administration, the defense agenda once again took a high-tech turn.1 Just three months before WarGames’ release, Ronald Reagan had announced an audacious new program to create a sophisticated missile shield in space using satellites, lasers, and all kinds of computer-controlled technology

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age

by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne  · 9 Sep 2019  · 482pp  · 121,173 words

to Glasnost: At the Center of Decision, A Memoir (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989). Back to note reference 9. David Smith, “Movie Night with the Reagans: WarGames, Red Dawn . . . and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” Guardian, March 3, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/03/movie-night-with-the

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics

by Ben Buchanan  · 25 Feb 2020  · 443pp  · 116,832 words

film in question, The Interview, was a bad one. The aide had a ready comeback: “Sir, it’s a Seth Rogen movie.”1 While WarGames kickstarted President Reagan’s interest in cybersecurity and There Will Be Blood served as an inspiration of sorts for some of the NSA’s counterintelligence efforts, The