ENVIRONMENT: Y2K Bug Causes Fears on Nuclear Security

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Danielle Knight

WASHINGTON, Mar 9 1999 (IPS) - The horrors of an inadvertent launch of nuclear weapons and the possible meltdown of nuclear power plants could be some of the possible – although unlikely – consequences of the year 2000 computer glitch, say US lawmakers and nuclear watchdogs.

The trouble stems from the so-called “Y2K” bug. After midnight on Dec. 31, many computers and electronically-controlled machines will read 00 for the year 1900 rather than 2000, or will not interpret it at all, and will malfunction by freezing or spewing out incorrect data.

If the millennium bug is not remedied, are nuclear catastrophes really possible?

“Absolutely,” say peace and security analysts who participated in a congressional symposium here Monday.

An accidental missile launch is considered highly unlikely but such a launch could take place within several minutes of a computer failure in existing “early warning” or “alert” launch systems on which so many nuclear weapons still operate.

So says Michael Kraig, a fellow at the British American Security Information Council (BASIC), a think-tank with offices here and in London. “Failure of any element of the early warning system could lead the United States or Russia to believe it is under attack,” he warns.

The United States and Russian military already are planning to share early-warning information to guard against such launches based on faulty surveillance data caused by the Y2K bug. British, Chinese, India, Pakistan, and other nuclear powers are also beginning to address the problem, said security analysts.

Yet, the problem remains very complicated – technically and diplomatically – according to panelists at Monday’s conference.

The US military, for example, reportedly has more than 1.5 million computers and 28,000 automated systems embedded with computer chips and using more than 70 different computer languages.

“One out of five days I wake up in cold sweat thinking (the Year 2000 computer problem) is much bigger than we think, and then the other four days I think maybe we are really on top of it,” Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre admitted last year.

“Everything is so interconnected, it’s very hard to know with any precision that we’ve got it fixed.”

Bruce Blair, an arms and security analyst at the Brookings Institution told the symposium that Russia’s early warning system is especially vulnerable to the computer problem because the government lacks the resources to adequately mitigate Y2K dangers.

“If the date shifts to 0 for a brief moment…that fools the system into thinking there is a high probability of an attack in progress,” said Sergei Fradkov, a former satellite control technician, according to a report written by Kraig.

Last month, Russia appealed to the United States and NATO to help fix what it estimates as a three-billion-dollars Y2K problem, which includes not just nuclear weapons systems, but also nuclear power plants.

Earlier this month, Vladimir Dvorkin, head of a Defense Ministry department in charge of missile-warning systems, said Russia would be much less likely to retaliate if there was a if tensions between Moscow and the US and NATO were not as high because of the bombings of Iraq and the threat of air strikes against Yugoslavia.

“The risk of making the wrong decision is higher when international tensions escalate,” he was quoted as saying by Russia’s Interfax news agency.

At Monday’s symposium, Kraig and Democratic Party politicians Ed Markey and Tom Harkin called for all US and Russian nuclear weapons to be taken off alert or “launch-on-warning” status.

“The cold war is over, these nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia should not be on alert status,” said Markey, a Representative from the state of Massachusetts.

Nuclear power plants also vulnerable to the Year 2000 computer glitch, according to the panel.

“It is becoming clear that not every nuclear utility will be Y2K compliant in time for the millennium,” said Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Washington- based Nuclear Information and Resource Center.

“Further, the possibility of electrical grid instability and local and regional blackouts cannot be ruled out,” he said. Such a power failure could cause core meltdowns at nuclear power plants or the accidental release of radiation since reactors require large amounts of electricity for essential cooling even when closed.

Computer chips embedded in devices used to control, monitor or assist the operation of nuclear power plants, may also prove catastrophic if the US Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRC) does not do more to address the problem, said David Lochbaum, nuclear safety engineer at the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists.

The NRC has spent tens of millions of dollars on the Y2K problem, said Lochbaum. But, it has only tested about a dozen power plants across the country to see how they react to the computer bug. Markey and Harkin called on the agency to test all reactors.

They also demanded the agency to ensure that reliable back-up power sources exist so that nuclear power plants do not risk overheating.

The NRC currently requires every reactor to have on-site at least two diesel- powered generators to provide emergency power. But according to Helen Caldicott, founder of the Nobel Prize- winning organisation Physicians for Social Responsibility, these generators are only 75-95 percent reliable and frequently out of service.

“If a physician says your heart is 95 percent reliable, you would hardly take comfort,” said Caldicott. “We should view diesel generators in the same way.”