For as long as AI has existed, humans have had fears around AI and nuclear weapons. And movies are a great example of those fears. Skynet from the Terminator franchise becomes sentient and fires nuclear missiles at America. WOPR from WarGames nearly starts a nuclear war because of a miscommunication. Kathryn Bigelow’s recent release, House of Dynamite, asks if AI is involved in a nuclear missile strike headed for Chicago.

AI is already in our nuclear enterprise, Vox’s Josh Keating tells Today, Explained co-host Noel King. “Computers have been part of this from the beginning,” he says. “Some of the first digital computers ever developed were used during the building of the atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project.” But we don’t know exactly where or how it’s involved.

So do we need to worry? Well, maybe, Keating argues. But not about AI turning on us.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

There’s a part in A House of Dynamite where they’re trying to figure out what happened and whether AI is involved. Are these movies with these fears onto something?

The interesting thing about movies, when it comes to nuclear war, is: This is a kind of war that’s never been fought. There are no sort of veterans of nuclear wars other than the two bombs we dropped on Japan, which is a very different scenario. I think that movies have always played a kind of outsize role in debates over nuclear weapons. You can go back to the ’60s when the Strategic Air Command actually produced its own rebuttal to Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe. In the ’80s, that TV movie

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