The year 2000 may bring chaos to nuclear bases, writes John Eason
As the fireworks burst in the sky, heralding the year 2000, could we see larger rockets taking to the air, bearing payloads of nuclear death and destruction?
It sounds far-fetched. Surely the worst the millennium bug could do is close down cash machines for a few days and cause a bit of confusion in supermarkets when fresh food is labelled 99 years past its sell-by date?
But the danger is all too real, according to The Bug In The Bomb, a report published last week by Basic, the British American Security Information Council. It cites a test in 1993 by curious technicians at Norad, the United States early warning radar network. They rolled the system’s dates to January 1 2000. The result: a total systems blackout.
Thomas Neve of Basic says this scenario is more to be feared than the possibility that missiles confused by the date change will decide to launch themselves. “If everyone’s completely blind or they get a false image, things start getting really dangerous,” he says.
But if the danger has been known about for at least five years, surely remedial work is well in hand?
Michael R Kraig and Herbert Scoville Jnr, the report’s authors, have no confidence in the measures taken by the US Department of Defence. They point out that last year the department published an impressive sounding five-point plan for knocking out the year 2000 bug. Last June an audit found that out of 430 machines labelled year 2000 compliant, only 109 had been correctly certified. The procedures were actually vague and ambiguous – for instance, validation through testing was not required before a lower manager certified a system; the only real requirement was that the manager signed the testing slip.
The report highlights the layers of complexity: no one check can be run for all the different weapons and warning systems; many systems incorporate chips and code which are now “obsolete” and there is great difficulty finding experts to work with them; even if a system is “de-bugged”, it could still be “infected” by another system.
Russia is sanguine about the year 2000. Minister of Defence Igor Sergeyev said in August: “This problem mostly affects sectors where they use conventional computer technologies. There is no such danger [for nuclear weapons] since in the Strategic Missile Forces we use special technologies.”
Brave words, but not echoed by Sergey Fradkov, a former Soviet satellite control technician now working in the US. “Russia is extremely vulnerable to the year 2000 problem,” he said. “If the date is used somewhere to track an incoming missile and the date shifts to 0000000 for a brief moment, there is a division by zero – an extremely high value – that fools the system into thinking there is a high probability of an attack in progress.”
The report’s authors call for all the nuclear powers to work together on the problem. Nuclear systems should be taken off alert, they say, or nuclear warheads should be uncoupled from missiles.
The US Ministry of Defence said that a comprehensive year 2000 review was under way with all systems and it was confident there was no risk.
Basic can be found at