mabgarstin (05/04/83)
Has anybody out there seen Dr. Strangelove or How I Stopped Worrying and
Learned to Love the Bomb??? What do we do if some overworked technician finally
cracks and pushes the button just to preserve the American internal juices???
Open up an umbrella?????
Even better, what happens if someone accidently leaves his cup of coffee
on the 1403 IBM printer just before it runs out of paper, has the cup fall
onto some controller and causes a short circuit that sends off a spurious
signal that sneds a bomb or tells us a bomb is coming????(Remember, big
computing systems can faulter over very stupid things, I.E. the communication
system in the Andromeda Strain and the piece of paper).
There's a new movie coming out this summer called War Games, it's about
a kid who manages to break into the pentagon computer system and when he thinks
he playing a game called thermal-nuclear-war he is actually commandeering
the DoD missile system and is sending off lord-only-knows what hunk of
isotope off into the wild blue (soon to be white) yonder. I know that it is a
bit incredible that a kid with an Apple II could accomplish such a feat but
then some malichious hanker with a bit more computing power behind him might
have a better chance at doing just that.
I know that this is all fairy tales from movies but are these fairy tales
all that far from what is possible?????????????
Wouldn't it be nice to have some kind of ABM system backup that would
safegaurd us from the possibility of just one wayward missle geting out and
innocently burning 2 megabodies into pencil centres??????
Let's go for it, I'd rather have lasers watching over me at night than
some pseudo-god's mini sun on earth.
MAB