Carl Sagan would have hated Sierra’s brilliant war game, World in Conflict. Sagan spent a great deal of effort trying to convince us to think of the Third World War as something different than all the wars that have come before: It was a war that no one would survive. We boomers grew up in fear that someone would decide to test Sagan’s notion that the superpowers were like two men sitting in a lake of gasoline threatening to throw a match at the other.