Brutal Game of Survival

By Philip Faflick

A new Army program simulates the carnage of nuclear warfare

A select group of 15 U.S. Army officers went to Livermore, Calif, last year to do what no one had done since Hiroshima and Nagasaki: set off nuclear weapons in a battlefield situation. The action took place, TRON-like, entirely with in the circuitry of a large research computer, but the officers sitting in front of the machine's display screens were not just playing video games. They were in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at the Pentagon's request to test the world's most powerful combat simulator. The fate of the earth after the fall out cleared is classified information, but it is no secret that the sophistication of the computer program that created the war game made a big hit with the brass. Says Lieut Colonel Robert Crissman of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command: "It exceeded our expectations."

The five-week session was the start of a $2.45 million Army project called Janus, after the two-faced god that guarded Rome in wartime. Beginning next year, the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., which trains high-ranking officers for top command positions, will use a copy of the Janus program as a regular part of its ten-month curriculum. "Janus," says one of its Livermore admirers, "is light-years ahead of any Atari game."

Conventional war games date back to the late 18th century, when they were laboriously played with wooden blocks on colorfully painted boards. Today's high-speed computers, with their prodigious memory banks and supersmart silicon processing chips, can paint realistic playing fields and speed the action up to nearly "real time." While aspects of the Janus program remain classified, it could be described as a computer-age variation of the children's sea game, Battleship. Janus, which is played on land pits the U.S. against forces modeled after the Soviets'. Two teams of players divide into separate rooms in Livermore's Combat Simulation Laboratory. Sitting at $100,000 battle stations jammed with the latest computer hardware, they slide plastic "pucks" across electronic graphics tablets to command the full paraphernalia of modern war: tanks and personnel carriers, jets and helicopters, artillery pieces chemical munitions and an arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons. A few typed commands to a VAX 11/780 minicomputer conjure up rivers, mountains and cities. Drawing on the resources of the Defense Mapping Agency, the machine can display in full topographical detail any 15-sq.-mi. slice of the earth, from the Straits of Hormuz to the Falkland Islands, although the game is most often played on West German real estate near the Iron Curtain.

A Janus computer war typically starts with a column of Soviet tanks (red symbols on the video screen) lumbering into sight and rolling through pastureland toward the town of Bad Hersfeld, some 120 miles east of Bonn. The tanks skirt green-shaded woods and head for the blue line of the Fulda River. The Livermore programmers have lavished colorful detail on their simulation: as the action mounts land mines explode in flashes of white, and helicopter symbols appear over enemy outposts. Artillery fire slashes across the screen like a laser sword. The flight time the shells is preprogrammed to the millisecond; even reloading is figured in. The computer, executing 2 million programming instructions per second, takes 20 seconds to analyze the effects of a ten-kiloton blast. Towns are reduced to rubble. Forests erupt in flames, represented by flickering red dots. Temperature, humidity and wind speed must be reckoned with; they affect the way fallout will blow and how fast a fireball will spread. "You get a real feeling for the dynamics and time pressures of combat," says Lieut Colonel Crissman.

The Defense Department believes that the Janus program can train officers to think more clearly about the costs and benefits of battlefield strategies. As one retired officer puts it: "You don't learn about these weapons on the rifle range." Certainly participants learned some pointed lessons at Livermore. One was the tendency of even veteran officers to "go nuke" indiscriminately. "If they were caught out of position, they would try to retrieve the battle with nuclear weapons," says Janus Director Donald Blumenthal, a retired Army colonel working at the California weapons-research laboratory. One officer who let his position deteriorate beyond recovery reached into his megaton arsenal, picked the largest weapon and dropped it where he guessed the Red Army had massed.

The bomb detonated in a flash of orange. A growing white circle indicated that he had destroyed his opponent's forces. But the weapon he chose was so powerful that it also wiped out his own troops. His only comment: a subdued "Holy smoke." Says George Smith, one of the program's designers: "The rapidity of casualties surprised them all."

The Army argues that such lessons are best learned well in advance of real-life combat situations. It's a fantastic tool for training " says Lieut. Colonel Robert Turner, a nuclear-weapons specialist at the Pentagon. Others are not so sure. Jerome Wiesner, former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and sometime presidential science adviser, suggests that no amount of computer training will enable U.S. generals to prevent Europe from being turned into a big lake" if there is a nuclear war on that continent. One young computer buff who recently used Janus found the experience extremely unsettling: 'It's all so coldblooded. I felt like I was looking into a coffin."

Says M.I.T. Sociology Professor Sherry Turkle, an expert on the psychological impact of computer games: "The training could go two ways. It could have a numbing effect, making nuclear war more linkable, or it could heighten the revulsion. The computer is confronting us with something we tend to repress: the brute tact that we are playing with the survival of the planet."

-ByPhilip Faflick. Reported by Dick Thompson/San Francisco

With reporting by Dick Thompson/San Francisco

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