Trivia: Closely listen to the TV playing in the background, when Mathew Broderick comes home from school, before all his trouble starts with the Feds. The local news is on, and is saying "a fire broke out in a prophylactic recycling factory."
Trivia: A very early reference to computer "firewalls" is mentioned in this film.
Trivia: Broderick changes school information from his home computer just as he does in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Both mothers were also real estate agents.
Trivia: When Joshua starts playing through various scenarios at the end of the film, a list of the scenarios flash over the screen. The research for the film was so comprehensive that they actually managed to acquire the real list of war games the US government had, and the list in the film is directly based on that one.
Trivia: WOPR's name is a historical joke. An early computer used to predict war strategies at NORAD was called BRGR. (Whopper/Burger get it?)
Trivia: The filmmakers originally intended Stephen Falken to be a wheelchair-bound Stephen Hawking-like type. In the end, they just couldn't picture David and Jennifer carrying the wheelchair up and down the stairs in NORAD, so they decided to change his image.
Trivia: Barry Corbin ad-libbed much of his dialogue.
Trivia: The voice on the pocket tape recorder in the infirmary is that of the film's director, John Badham.
Answer: They were erroneously alerted that an actual nuclear attack was underway, and they had been trained to respond by firing a nuclear warhead. However, one was unconvinced that the US was actually under attack, and he wanted further confirmation from his superiors. The other insisted that they follow protocol and fire the missiles. One man alone cannot launch the missiles, it takes two, and the one with the gun is attempting to force his partner to follow through on launching the weapon.
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