(The Hill)
Morgan Wright 01/30/19 11:30 AM
In 1983, a young Matthew Broderick played a young hacker named David Lightman who accidentally discovers a military supercomputer and gets it to play “Global Thermonuclear War” with him in the movie ‘War Games.’ The computer stages a first strike involving hundreds of missiles, bombers and submarines, and the U.S. military, believing the Soviets are attacking us, prepare to respond with real nukes.
Fortunately, global thermonuclear war is averted by the end of the movie. But the perpetuation of the belief that complete and total destruction will be the result of massive nuclear strikes continues to this day. And it’s wrong.
A little more than 21 years before the movie, a more real and worrisome event was taking place. The Air Force Special Weapons Center delivered a preliminary plan in November of 1961 under the entirely unassuming name of Operation FISHBOWL. This operation was a “proposed series of high altitude nuclear effects tests.”
According to the plan, which was only declassified on April 6, 2007, the primary objective of the series of tests was to “…obtain data regarding the interference to radar and communication systems produced by a high altitude nuclear burst.” At the time, the scientists and defense specialists suspected that a such a blast could cause a blackout with “serious implications for critical defense systems such as BMEWS, Nike-Zeus, ICBM penetration and many communication systems, and conversely that its employment may be an effective ICBM offensive tactic.”
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