Computers: Brutal Game of Survival

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....

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