The Only Winning Moves: From JFK to WarGames 1983

In 1983, the film WarGames gave us a countdown to the end of the world.
Beneath the blinking lights and Cold War tension was an idea first spoken by a president more than twenty years earlier.
"Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind." - John F. Kennedy, The Strategy of Peace, 1960
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In Kennedy's book, written betore he took office, he warned that nuclear weapons had made victory itself obsolete.
That in an atomic world, winning was a fantasy, survival was the real goal.
Two decades later a machine came to the same conclusion. "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." That line could have been written by Kennedy himself. By playing tic tac toe against itself a million times, the computer learned certain outcomes had no winner.
Only draws. Both saw that in the nuclear age, the logic of competition collapses.
There is no longer an "us" versus "them."
Only everyone or no one.
In his book, The Strategy of Peace, Kennedy urged not domination, but dialogue.
"we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children's future." - John F. Kennedy WarGames wasn't just science fiction.
It was Kennedy's warning, retold for the computer age.