We learned back in the very first episode of this season that the Pentagon's been researching climate change since the 1950s, the Navy technically.

Shouldn't be a surprise, right? It's the military's job to anticipate bad things happening

foreign adversaries possible attacks unexpected threats and part of that preparation

means simulating those scenarios so we can figure out how to react.

Would you just to set the table a little bit, I think when the lay person hears war games,

they imagined some computerized, super sophisticated, very high-tech simulation of actual war fighting.

You know, we're doing this oral history project as part of our

initiative at Hoover. Jacqueline Schneider is the director of the Hoover

War Gaming and Crisis Simulation initiative at Stanford.

I've started asking everyone that we interview, what do you think a war game is?

And I think one of the most remarkable things we found is that no one has the same idea

of what a war game really is. What we generally think of

in the popular world is this something that's kind of a newer version of the Matthew Broderick War Games.

Shall we play a game?

Matthew Broderick, 1983, the movie, War Games, playing a teenager who almost starts World War III by hacking into a Pentagon

computer from his bedroom.

How about global thermo nuclear war? Global Thermo Nuclear War.

Where we're playing computer games, they're very closely representing combat realities

and that there's kind of like synthetic experience.

But the history of war games is actually more about kind of human behaviors and

human players.

So if you look back to you know the 1950s and the 60s and the

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