Trivia: Closely listen to the TV playing in the background, when Mathew Broderick comes home from school, before all his trouble starts with the Feds. The local news is on, and is saying "a fire broke out in a prophylactic recycling factory."
Trivia: A very early reference to computer "firewalls" is mentioned in this film.
Trivia: Broderick changes school information from his home computer just as he does in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Both mothers were also real estate agents.
Trivia: When Joshua starts playing through various scenarios at the end of the film, a list of the scenarios flash over the screen. The research for the film was so comprehensive that they actually managed to acquire the real list of war games the US government had, and the list in the film is directly based on that one.
Trivia: WOPR's name is a historical joke. An early computer used to predict war strategies at NORAD was called BRGR. (Whopper/Burger get it?)
Trivia: The filmmakers originally intended Stephen Falken to be a wheelchair-bound Stephen Hawking-like type. In the end, they just couldn't picture David and Jennifer carrying the wheelchair up and down the stairs in NORAD, so they decided to change his image.
Trivia: Barry Corbin ad-libbed much of his dialogue.
Trivia: The voice on the pocket tape recorder in the infirmary is that of the film's director, John Badham.
Answer: While merely speculation, the WOPR is not alive and knows only what it's been programmed to do. It would have no concept of life or death, and as such would see no difference between the simulation and the real thing. That being said, an easy way to make it see the difference would be to program it to not waste physical resources. It would then see the use of all its actual warheads as less desirable.