In the 1980s, David Cotton, retired brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force and current strategic security adviser at Pratum, was stationed in the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, which housed the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Cotton was a computer scientist for the Air Force, right around the time a little film called “WarGames” hit theaters. 

“I was the lieutenant they drafted to say, ‘Lieutenant, go write the presentation to tell the public why what you see in the movie cannot happen,’ ” Cotton recalled at the Secure Iowa Conference in Ankeny on Oct. 9. 

Cotton maintained the software on the automatic exercise generator, which the movie version of NORAD called WOPR. “Their name was cooler, but mine actually worked,” Cotton joked.

Thankfully, a teenager hacker never careened us into World War III.