"A young computer whiz kid accidentally connects into a top secret super-computer which has complete control over the U.S. nuclear arsenal. It challenges him to a game between America and Russia, and he innocently starts the countdown to World War 3. Can he convince the computer he wanted to play a game and not the real thing ?"

- WarGames (1983) , IMDB

Through WarGames (1983), it was the movie maker's intent to convey several important messages about technology and the trust we place in it:

Keep a human in the process
Besides setting up the rest of the movie for the impeding conflict, the replacement of humans with the WOPR system is used as a way to show that computers can't be trusted with everything. It is precisely because the operator at the beginning of the movie didn't turn his key to launch the nuclear missiles that we keep humans in the process: to account for errors and a lack of ethical decision making. This line of thought can be further explored through the lens of the true story of the 1983 Soviet Nuclear False Alarm Incident, located to the right of this analysis.

No thing digital is truly secure
Lightman is shown throughout the movie hacking into different systems using his dial up modem, and WOPR is no exception. Though it may be a little far-fetched for a government system to be so unsecure, these systems can and have been breached. The further emphasis placed on the existence of back doors serves to further reinforce this line of thought: we cannot fully trust what is not fully secure.

The line between human and AI
The makers of WarGames (1983) draw several interesting comparisons between humans and AI systems, with the name Joshua referring both to Falken's son and the AI system he designed. However, a clear line is drawn when it comes to ethical reasoning: humans have ethical reasoning, preventing them from turning the key at the beginning of the movie, whilst the AI does not have ethical reasoning, leading it to attempt to launch nuclear missiles unprovoked. This line also shows where our trust in AI should start and stop, as we should not trust machines to make decisions that involve the life or death of other individuals.

In September of 1983 - months after the release of WarGames (1983) - a Soviet early warning alert system reported that the US had launched a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The man in charge of the warning system was Lt. Cl. Stanislav Petrov, who had to quickly decide whether or not to launch a retaliatory attack against the US. Petrov decided to ignore that warning, and his judgement was excellent because this signal was in fact a false alarm [2].

Had Petrov been replaced with the WOPR system in WarGames, it would have undoubtedly made the uninfluenced, unethical decision to launch a nuclear counterstrike, killing tens of millions and triggering the start of a nuclear World War III. We can only thank our lucky stars that this was not the case, as the Soviet Union kept Petrov - a human - in the process, saving countless lives.