From: believer@telepath.com Subject: IP: Wired News: Y2Kaboom? Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 02:27:52 -0600 To: believer@telepath.com Source: Wired News http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/16217.html Y2Kaboom? by Declan McCullagh 12:27 p.m.12.Nov.98.PST WASHINGTON -- America and Russia should shut down their nuclear arsenals rather than risk Armageddon because of Year 2000 glitches, a military research group says in a report released Thursday. Y2K errors could cause the systems to go haywire, leading to erroneous early warning reports or even triggering an accidental launch of a nuclear missile, the British American Security Information Council warned in a 36-page report. Both superpowers keep their arsenals in a constant state of readiness -- a Cold War-era strategy that could backfire with devastating results if the computer gremlins strike. "If Y2K breakdowns were to produce inaccurate early-warning data, or if communications and command channels were to be compromised, the combination of hair-trigger force postures and Y2K failures could be disastrous," said the author of "The Bug in the Bomb: The Impact of the Year 2000 Problem on Nuclear Weapons." Nuclear weapons systems are laced with embedded systems -- controlling functions such as ballistics and sensors -- that have not been declared free from Y2K worries, the report says. Most missles also keep track of time since the last monthly or yearly servicing, which could transform weapons into plutonium-packed paperweights if the systems shut down on 1 January 2000. A Defense Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said nuclear weapons systems have received the Pentagon's full attention and will be in good shape. He added that military leaders are already discussing Y2K issues with their Russian counterparts. Those assurances are not enough to allay the fears of Michael Kraig, the report's author. "There are two problems together that make up one big problem: The sorry state of the [Russian] program and the fact that they don't know information about it," said Kraig, a BASIC fellow. "They're still committed to launch-on-warning and hair-trigger alert status. That, combined with the fact that their program is in such a sorry state, makes us worry." BASIC lobbies for international agreements restricting arms sales and supports complete nuclear disarmament. The Defense Department has been battling accusations that it lags behind other federal agencies in making Y2K repairs, something the agency's top officials are acutely aware of. "I think we're probably going to be the poster child for failure," John Hamre, deputy secretary of defense, told Fortune 500 executives in July. "Nobody cares if the Park Services computers don't come on. OK? But what's going to happen if some do in the [Department of Defense]?" The Clinton administration's September quarterly report on federal agencies says: "The Department of Defense has a massive Year 2000 challenge which must be accomplished on a tight schedule. The Department has improved its rate of progress in addressing the challenge, but the pace must be increased to meet government-wide milestones." The administration's report says that as of this summer, 42 percent of the Pentagon's most vital systems -- 2,965 in all -- have been Y2K cleared. But numbers alone don't reveal the complexity of the Defense Department's Y2K woes, Kraig argues. "There are severe and recurring problems across the entire DOD Y2K remediation program, including ill-defined concepts and operating procedures, ad-hoc funding and spotty estimates for final costs, lax management, insufficient standards for declaring systems 'Y2K compliant,' insufficient contingency planning in case of Y2K-related failures, and poor inter-departmental communications," Kraig wrote. In the preface, Paul Warnke, BASIC's president and chief arms-control negotiator under President Carter, says: "The only prudent course may be to de-alert those nuclear systems where date-related malfunctioning in associated command, control, and communications systems poses even a remote possibility of accidental launch." Copyright © 1994-98 Wired Digital Inc. All rights reserved. ----------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ----------------------- **************************************************** To subscribe or unsubscribe, email: majordomo@majordomo.pobox.com with the message: (un)subscribe ignition-point email@address or (un)subscribe ignition-point-digest email@address **************************************************** www.telepath.com/believer ****************************************************