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. 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.