PRESS RELEASE

7 November 1998

Millennium Bug in Nuclear Weapons Requires a 'Safety First' Stand-down of Arsenals

The Pentagon has belatededly reconized that the so-called Millennium Bug problem, caused by computers mistaking the year 2000 for 1900, may result in the crash of nuclear weapons and related systems. A new report by BASIC, The Bug in the Bomb: The Impact of the Year 2000 Problem on Nuclear Weapons, finds that:

• The US Department of Defense (DoD) predicts some "mission-critical" systems will fail unpredictably;
• Key civilian staff in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense resigned in February 1998, leaving programs in disarray;
• The Joint Staff have blocked public access to an unclassified September report on the Y2K bug and Nuclear Command and Control;
• The DoD Y2K remediation program faces severe problems, including ill-defined operating procedures, ad-hoc funding, insufficient standards for declaring systems "Y2K compliant," and poor contingency planning for failures.

Probably one out of five days I wake up in a cold sweat thinking [Y2K] is much bigger than we think,…everything is so interconnected, it’s very hard to know with any precision that we’ve got it fixed. U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre

The Millennium Bug could shut down communications between commanders, create logistical logjams, and disturb operations in Trident submarines, B-52 bombers, and ICBM launch centers. The Department of Energy’s warhead maintenance, dismantlement, and modernization programs may also be affected.

We have to expect that we will not get everything fixed and there will certainly be the ‘known unknowns’ -known problems with unknown solutions- –and a few ‘unknown unknowns.’
Lt. General William Donahue, Air Force Communications and Information Center Commander.

U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons remain on hair trigger alert, and Russian early warning systems have deteriorated drastically. The combination could have disastrous consequences, a fact that led to the September agreement between Clinton and Yeltsin on sharing early-warning data. However, US command, control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) systems also may not be fixed in time.

The only prudent course may be to de-alert or even de-activate those nuclear missile systems where date-related malfunctioning in associated command, control, and communications systems poses even a remote possibility of accidental launch. Amb. Paul Warnke; Former. Assistant Secretary for Defence

Urgent political action must be taken to ensure a "safety first" approach. Countries should de-couple warheads from delivery vehicles, or take comparable "de-alerting" measures to allow time for Y2K fixes and to ensure system shutdowns or accidents do not lead to catastrophe.

The Bug in the Bomb: The Impact of the Year 2000 Problem on Nuclear Weapons
By Michael Kraig, November 1998, available from BASIC.

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