WarGames<\/em> \u2014 the fictional military supercomputer that, forty-three years ago, taught an entire generation of hackers a fairly simple lesson: in a global thermonuclear war, there are no winners.<\/p>\n\n\n\nToday, as we’re having very real conversations about artificial intelligence in weapons systems, I decided to bring JOSHUA back and make it open source.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not just as a tribute to one of the films that shaped the imagination of my generation of computer nerds, but as an executable reminder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
AI, weapons, and the news right now<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Over the past several months, apocalyptic AI scenarios have piled up at an accelerating pace, now even in mainstream press. We’ve gone from “AI will take everyone’s job,” to “American AI as an extension of US imperial ambition,” to “cheap, open source Chinese AI as a tool for technological conquest.” And periodically, the Skynet risk resurfaces too \u2014 if you’re not nerdy enough to recognize that reference, it’s worth a quick search.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To be clear: I’m not a neo-Luddite. Quite the opposite \u2014 I use AI heavily, I experience its benefits daily, and I think it’s one of the most important technologies we’ve had access to in decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And I don’t just mean chatbots that save us a few hours of work. AlphaFold cracked protein folding, a fifty-year-old biological mystery, and won its creators a Nobel Prize. The impact isn’t just theoretical: this past August, AI helped create a custom mRNA vaccine against melanoma that, in clinical trials, is actively preventing the cancer’s recurrence and metastasis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But computational power is agnostic. AlphaFold and the melanoma vaccine show what happens when a machine tackles the right problem. JOSHUA is a reminder of what happens when we hand it the wrong one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meanwhile, in the physical world<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
While we debate AI’s possible futures, wars continue in the physical world, new ones start, and existing ones keep growing in scale and complexity. And AI is moving into military systems: intelligence analysis, operational planning, target identification, autonomous systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2026 this even became the subject of a public clash between Anthropic and the U.S. Department of Defense. Anthropic refused to lift certain restrictions on Claude’s use in military contexts \u2014 specifically around mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. In apparent retaliation, the Pentagon classified the company as a supply-chain risk. In late August, a federal judge blocked that designation, ruling it improper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What’s striking is that we’re no longer talking about a science-fiction scenario. We’re talking, today, about which decisions an AI system should be allowed to make inside a military structure, and where a human must remain, by requirement, in the loop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is where psychology comes in too. A well-documented phenomenon in human-machine interaction, automation bias<\/em>, describes our tendency to over-trust a solution simply because an automated system proposed it \u2014 and to gradually stop evaluating it as just a recommendation.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWeapons systems also introduce a “diffusion of responsibility.” The promise is that AI makes warfare more “surgical.” The risk is that it instead provides a mathematical alibi for atrocious decisions. If a system has already identified the target, calculated a probability, and suggested the action, the decision can start to feel like something the machine has already made \u2014 with the human left only to confirm it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s where cognitive delegation can become moral delegation. The operator who presses the button on the AI’s recommendation no longer feels like they’ve killed someone \u2014 they feel like a system operator validating a statistical output. (This maps closely onto what Albert Bandura called moral disengagement<\/em>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n“Human in the loop,” at that point, risks becoming a reassuring formula. The human is technically still there. But they may only be there to press Enter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which brought me back to a risk we’ve been discussing about AI for at least forty years, and which, paradoxically, feels far less like science fiction today than it did then: what happens when we hand a machine an ever-larger share of the decisions that can lead to the use of weapons?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nOctober 28th<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
October 28th marks the anniversary of the Italian theatrical release of a film built entirely around that question: WarGames<\/em> (1983).<\/p>\n\n\n\nDavid Lightman is a teenage computer enthusiast who, while trying to find a game company’s servers, accidentally dials into WOPR, the NORAD supercomputer, through his modem. He finds a list of games and picks the one with the most tempting name a teenager staring at a terminal could ask for: GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR. What follows brings the world within minutes of real nuclear war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Told that way, WarGames<\/em> might sound like a 1983 version of what we’d today call “AI gone rogue.” But that reading is too simple.<\/p>\n\n\n\nJOSHUA \u2014 the AI’s nickname, given by its creator \u2014 doesn’t go insane, doesn’t develop a will of its own, doesn’t rebel against its creators, and doesn’t suddenly decide humanity should be eliminated. It does, essentially, what it was designed to do: analyze scenarios, study actions and countermoves, simulate strategies, and search for an optimal solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The problem starts earlier \u2014 and it’s laid out in the film’s opening minutes. During a drill, some of the military officers responsible for launching nuclear missiles, convinced the signal they’d received wasn’t real, hesitate or refuse to carry out the launch. The people running the system conclude the problem is the human factor. Their solution: remove it. Operational control is handed to WOPR, a computer designed to run war simulations continuously and learn from the results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And this, maybe, is the part of WarGames<\/em> that has aged best. The automated system is seen as preferable precisely because<\/em> a human, faced with an irreversible decision, might stop. Might ask for confirmation. Might refuse. Might exercise judgment.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe danger, then, isn’t necessarily a machine that stops obeying humans. It can be a machine that obeys perfectly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Forty-three years later, as we debate real limits on AI in autonomous weapons systems, this distinction feels far from archival movie trivia. We’ve read about errors and innocent casualties in bombings where targets were identified probabilistically by AI systems (see Israel’s Lavender system or Palantir’s U.S. deployments), with reliability thresholds that were too low or final human oversight that was thinner than intended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There’s a second layer here too: JOSHUA approaches global thermonuclear war exactly the way it approaches any other game \u2014 it looks for the best strategy. And it’s perfectly rational that it does, because that’s exactly what it was built to do. Only at the end does it grasp something the humans should have understood before ever switching it on: some problems are ones where searching for the optimal move is itself the mistake. Because none of the available strategies produce a winner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The limit, then, isn’t just about whether the machine chooses well. It’s in the earlier, human decision to turn a given problem into something a machine should optimize in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes real intelligence means recognizing that you shouldn’t play the game at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From a ZX80 to JOSHUA<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
For me, though, WarGames<\/em> isn’t just an interesting film to revisit \u2014 it’s one of the films that made me, and thousands of other hackers, dream. “Hacker” in its original sense: someone driven by curiosity, by the desire to understand how systems work and, ideally, to get them to do something their designers never intended. Not necessarily a cybercriminal \u2014 a distinction that matters enough to me that I dedicated a page of my personal site to it back in 1996.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhen the film hit Italian cinemas in October 1983, a home modem was still an almost exotic object. The internet, in any everyday sense, barely existed. Watching a teenager connect a computer to the phone network through an acoustic coupler felt like glimpsing something straight out of the future. I remember promising myself that one day, I’d have one too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The year before, a genuinely visionary middle-school teacher had run an after-school computing course, where I first got my hands on a Sinclair ZX80. Neither the ZX80 nor WarGames<\/em>, a year later, turned me into a computer scientist overnight \u2014 that passion took shape gradually, over years. But looking back, I think they were two of my strongest early motivators: they showed me that behind the screen wasn’t just a tool to use \u2014 there was a whole system to explore.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAn Easter egg on my website<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Rebuilding my personal site in 2025, one of the recurring threads was my interest in the intersection of psychology and computing. Along the way, paying tribute to WarGames<\/em> became almost inevitable.<\/p>\n\n\n\nI had fun recreating what happened on screen in the film, trying to stay faithful to its atmosphere, dialogue, and most recognizable beats, while keeping the stripped-down, retro look of JOSHUA’s terminal. I built the project into my site’s structure, buried a few directory levels deep, then decided to also turn it into an Easter egg triggerable straight from a terminal-style shell built into the site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The command isn’t documented anywhere \u2014 not in a manual, not in any public listing, not even in autocomplete. You either know the film, guess it might exist, or stumble on it by typing random commands. And judging by my site’s traffic logs, people type some very random things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Find the command, and the site’s usual terminal disappears, replaced by the JOSHUA TERMINAL.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
JOSHUA is available in both English and Italian. I’d personally recommend trying it in English first \u2014 it’s the version that best captures the feel of WarGames<\/em>, not just in the text and terminology, but in the system’s voice, which stays much closer to the film’s atmosphere in English. The Italian version is there for anyone who’d rather follow the whole simulation in that language.<\/p>\n\n\n\nI won’t describe in detail what happens after you find it \u2014 part of the fun is discovering it yourself. What I can say is that the simulation follows the narrative logic of WarGames<\/em> and lets you run different global thermonuclear war scenarios. You can switch sides, choose who strikes first, and change the scenario. The system recalculates strikes, responses, and escalation every time.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe moves change. The targets change. The numbers change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One thing doesn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There’s no winner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From Easter egg to executable reminder<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
At some point I realized what I’d built for my personal site could become something more than a small personal tribute to one of hacker culture’s iconic films \u2014 it could become a collective project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A very nerdy way to do it, admittedly, but one perfectly consistent with the story it tells: a way to put a message back into circulation that still feels worth remembering. Because we’re once again talking about wars, preemptive strikes, and escalation as though they were perfectly controllable tools \u2014 sequences of moves to which a perfectly rational countermove can always respond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which is exactly the game JOSHUA is trying to solve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The arsenals have changed. The technology has changed. The ability to gather intelligence, identify targets, decide, and strike faster has changed enormously \u2014 and now we’ve added AI to that chain too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The outcome hasn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s why I decided to turn JOSHUA into an open project \u2014 something that can be studied, modified, improved, and shared. Not a perfect replica of the fictional software from WarGames<\/em>, not a military simulator, and not another nostalgic exercise about the 1980s. The idea is to use working software as a cultural artifact, to make one simple point clearly: some systems don’t get safer just because the machine gets better at finding the best move. Because the problem is<\/em> the game itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhy open source, and why AGPL<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
I could have picked GPLv2, which would have fit the project’s nostalgic tone nicely, but JOSHUA is first and foremost a web application, and the traditional GPL doesn’t require someone running a modified version on a server to share the source with the people using that service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I chose the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0-only), designed specifically to extend copyleft principles to software used over a network. Anyone can publish JOSHUA on their own site, turn it into an app, or even use it in a commercial project, as long as they follow the license terms. Independent forks are welcome too, though I’d love to see improvements flow back to the main repository as pull requests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The license covers the code and the project’s original content. WarGames<\/em> and its related elements belong to their respective rights holders. JOSHUA remains an independent, unofficial tribute.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThere’s a paradox in this choice that I like: WarGames<\/em> tells a story about humans progressively handing over ever-harder decisions to an automated system whose workings become impossible to observe, question, or interrupt. What I’m doing with JOSHUA is close to the opposite: the code is open. Anyone can see how it works, challenge its assumptions, change the data, fix a bug, propose an alternative, build a different version, and put it back into circulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIt’s a kind of intentional feedback loop: using open source’s transparent, verifiable, decentralizing force to push back against the idea of handing irreversible decisions to opaque systems that can’t be inspected, questioned, or corrected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Opening up JOSHUA, then, isn’t only about improving the software. It’s about making the message itself modifiable, verifiable, and shareable. Maybe that’s the most coherent form a reminder like this could take.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Building it: an audit-first approach with AI<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
JOSHUA’s first prototype came together largely through what people now call vibe coding \u2014 I had no prior game development experience, and at first the goal was simply turning a fairly clear idea of the experience I wanted into something that actually worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Once I decided to publish it on GitHub, though, I changed approach. Before touching the code, I used an AI coding tool from the command line strictly as an auditor, not a programmer: read-only access, an explicit ban on modifying any files, and a structured request to reconstruct the project’s architecture before suggesting anything be changed. The first prompt looked more like an audit checklist than the usual “improve this code” request \u2014 roughly summarized, it asked the tool to reconstruct the runtime architecture purely from the code: entry points, the relationship between the English launcher, the Italian launcher, and the shared game engine, script load order, modules, shared mutable state, assets, data, localized content, remote dependencies, and deployment assumptions \u2014 then flag bugs, architectural issues, maintainability concerns, and test coverage gaps, ranked by priority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Only after that did the actual “housekeeping” begin: bug fixing, refactoring, splitting things into modules, and regression checks. A meaningful part of the work went into automating verification too \u2014 I added automated tests, including end-to-end tests with Playwright, to check sequences and behaviors directly in the browser that I’d otherwise have had to re-test manually after every change. That’s one of the parts of AI-assisted development I find most valuable: not just speeding up writing code, but offloading the most mechanical, repetitive checking so a human’s judgment goes where it’s actually needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By that stage, the work had moved well past vibe coding into something closer to spec-driven development: not generically asking an AI to “improve the code,” but giving it specific goals, constraints, things not to touch, and clear criteria for evaluating the result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is where it gets interesting. There are game developers, designers, and engineers out there with skills I don’t have, who can see possibilities and limitations I can’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There’s plenty of room to improve: the interface, gameplay, mobile behavior, accessibility, browser and screen compatibility. Contributions could also touch the simulation’s content itself \u2014 verifiable, aggregated data on arsenals, updated population figures, more reliable estimates of immediate casualties and medium-term humanitarian impact, and more transparent models for communicating the scale of the consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some of this work has already come from the community: a contributor helped recover scenarios shown in WarGames<\/em> by digging through Reddit communities dedicated to the film, where \u2014 nearly half a century later \u2014 fans still reconstruct dialogue, screens, and WOPR details with near-forensic precision. Some of JOSHUA’s scenarios were drawn from exactly that material.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBring your semantic hacking skills too. If you’re a data scientist, connect JOSHUA to public sources tracking conflicts, geopolitical escalation, arsenals, or population data, and use them to update the simulation’s context in real time. Not to build a more realistic military simulator, but to do the opposite: make clear that what’s on screen doesn’t belong only to 1983. Imagine a risk indicator built from real data, or scenarios that shift as geopolitical conditions shift. It doesn’t need to teach anyone how to fight a war better. It needs to make it harder to forget how possible that war still is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Right here, though, I want to draw a clear line: I have no interest in JOSHUA becoming a military simulator. It doesn’t need real base coordinates, operational procedures, or tools for optimizing target selection. The goal isn’t learning to fight a nuclear war better \u2014 it’s making unmistakably clear why it can’t be won.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The game is playable on my website, and the code is on GitHub.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From here on, though, JOSHUA doesn’t have to stay exactly what I built. Open source, in this case, isn’t just about more eyes on the code or a few extra pull requests. I’d love to see what happens when a lot of people take the same small artifact, adapt it to their own skills and sensibilities, and build different versions of it. A “better” JOSHUA doesn’t have to mean one single better version \u2014 there could be a hundred. A more accessible one. A better-looking one. One with more current data, or translated into another language. One built for classrooms. Or one that tells the same story in a way I haven’t thought of yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As long as one thing stays the same: the outcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Light it up on October 28th<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
It would be fun to see, on October 28th \u2014 the anniversary of WarGames<\/em>‘ Italian release \u2014 all of these versions show up at once. JOSHUA hosted or relaunched simultaneously by dozens, maybe hundreds, of sites. And on social media, screenshots of the different versions all carrying the same reminder:<\/p>\n\n\n\nTHE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nNot necessarily a hundred identical copies. Honestly, it’d be far more interesting the other way around: a hundred different JOSHUAs, all born from the same code and the same message \u2014 a kind of distributed digital flash mob.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I say this with zero ambition of “mobilizing the masses” \u2014 not exactly my area of expertise. But I suspect a community of curious developers, if it wanted to, could have a lot of fun lighting up a few servers in sync.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And there’s time: between now and October 28th, you can modify JOSHUA, improve it, deploy it, spread the word, bring other people in. Then, that day, switch it on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not to promote a product. Not to make a GitHub repo famous. But to make the same reminder WarGames<\/em> left us in 1983 pop up, at the same time, in lots of small corners of the internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBecause if JOSHUA stays confined to retrocomputing fans, hackers, and film nostalgics, we’re just telling each other a story we already know. The whole point is the opposite: to get that message outside the circle that already remembers it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So go improve JOSHUA. Fork it. Transform it. Deploy it. Run it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And on October 28th, switch it on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If someone manages, in the meantime, to build a strategy that actually produces a winner, they probably haven’t solved nuclear war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They’ve found a bug.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because sometimes, the only way to win is not to play.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What does a 1983 supercomputer, a teenager with a modem, generative AI, and an open source project released today under an AGPLv3 license have in common? The answer is JOSHUA. You may know it better as the WOPR from WarGames \u2014 the fictional military supercomputer that, forty-three years ago, taught an entire generation of hackers… Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":352,"featured_media":36578,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_editorskit_title_hidden":false,"_editorskit_reading_time":0,"_editorskit_is_block_options_detached":false,"_editorskit_block_options_position":"{}","_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[11923,14344],"collections":[],"class_list":["post-36632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-stories","tag-open-source-2","tag-wargames","entry"],"yoast_head":"\nJOSHUA is now open source. 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A journey through AI, autonomous weapons systems, hacker culture, and human responsibility.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.codemotion.com\/magazine\/dev-life\/stories\/joshua-is-now-open-source-the-arsenals-have-changed-since-1983-the-outcome-hasnt\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Codemotion Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/Codemotion.Italy\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-09-10T12:28:07+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-09-10T12:28:08+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.codemotion.com\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/joshua_small.png\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1024\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"574\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Marco Iannacone\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@CodemotionIT\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@CodemotionIT\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Marco Iannacone\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"15 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.codemotion.com\\\/magazine\\\/dev-life\\\/stories\\\/joshua-is-now-open-source-the-arsenals-have-changed-since-1983-the-outcome-hasnt\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.codemotion.com\\\/magazine\\\/dev-life\\\/stories\\\/joshua-is-now-open-source-the-arsenals-have-changed-since-1983-the-outcome-hasnt\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Marco Iannacone\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.codemotion.com\\\/magazine\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/b307df6dc7f46ee8df1f1e82d4846ea6\"},\"headline\":\"JOSHUA is now open source. 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