I agree with you. One more youth-oriented film with Matthew Broderick as an insufferable-to-some-and-lovable-to-others brat. I missed him playing these roles after this and Ferris Bueller. The humor is really good for defusing tension caused by the threat of nuclear war.

Turns out that reality is even funnier. The one thing this movie got wrong was it wouldn't have taken Joshua that long to launch the nuclear missiles considering until fixed in 2004 all the missile codes in America were "00000000" according to the testimony in a congressional hearing at that time (though the Air Force denies it...but of course they would).

I don't know how much it makes me a happy partaker of schmaltz, but I love it at the end when the computer realizes, IIRC, that the only way to win the war game is not to play it.