Peace and Environment News* April 1999
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Peace and Environment News * April 1999 |
by Robin Collins and Alan Phillips
The "Y2K-bug" problem is being both wrongly exaggerated and wrongly ignored. There is hype, yes, but if the governments of the countries with nuclear weapons choose to ignore the problem, we might have a nuclear war by accident, and that would be the first and last mistake of the next thousand years.
How serious is the Y2K bug risk for nuclear weapons?
The most authoritative study to date, "The Bug in the Bomb," authored by Michael Kraig for the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) in November 1998, notes that two questions need to be asked if there is to be intelligent evaluation of risks. First, what is the nature of the problem?, and second, how effectively are the U.S. Defense Department and the Russian Duma, owners of most of the globe's tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, dealing with it?
The problem is that programs and equipment could malfunction by incorrectly interpreting the change from "99" to "00" in the 2-digit shorthand for dates next January, when the year changes to 2000. It is a problem of software that was written with what are now "virtually extinct" programming languages, and full documentation of the software no longer exists. And equipment may be reliant upon subsystems that are difficult to locate, let alone repair. The complexity of this interplay of software and hardware and potential rippling down of errors is particularly ominous for the US military.
The highly technical US military sector is comprised of one and a half million computers, with 28,000 automated systems that talk to one another through the coding of 70 different computer languages. Some of those languages, according to Kevin Sanders in "The Nightmare Scenario," a March 1999 Nation article, "are so obscure there is no one alive who can even read them. And all military systems are riddled with embedded computer chips [which are] perhaps an even greater challenge than the computers themselves." 10 million software applications have Y2K problems and between 2 and 5 percent of all chips will fail. Part of the difficulty is that without testing them all, it is not known which ones will fail.
The problem is global
The US is not the only nuclear-armed state with a problem. There is no confidence in the readiness of any of the other nuclear weapons states, declared or undeclared: Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, India, Pakistan and Israel.
The situation in Russia is grave. The Kremlin has appealed for US$3 billion in financial aid for Y2K efforts, and that is for an economy expected to produce only $20 billion in revenue this year.
The report from BASIC (British American Security Information Council) recommends that: "All the nuclear weapons states should stand-down nuclear operations...[including] taking nuclear weapons off alert status or de-coupling nuclear weapons from delivery vehicles... By verifiably taking forces off alert on a multinational basis, leaders could be highly confident that there is no danger of a preemptive attack..." So far, this sensible suggestion falls on deaf ears. We have the absurd situation whereby Russia is getting American financial aid and has agreed to seek NATO expertise in assessing the problem. This means that, rather than both countries temporarily shutting down their nuclear weapons systems, which would guarantee safety, the two traditional enemies are collaborating on a strategy to keep their hair-trigger alerts intact, and their nuclear missiles only a few minutes from firing off at one another.
Both the US and Russia have a "launch on warning" strategy in which the plan is to launch retaliatory missiles on detection of an enemy attack, and before the first incoming nuclear warhead can explode. The supreme commander of either side has at most 12 minutes to confirm the warning and decide.
False alarms
What is in question in the Y2K context is whether systems will correctly confirm or not. It is said that weapons are de-targeted, but de-targeted weapons can be re-targeted in ten seconds and thus: "the combination of hair-trigger force postures and Y2K failures could be disastrous" (BASIC report).
The worry is not that there would be an unauthorized launch of a nuclear weapon, or that a warhead would explode within its silo. That eventuality "is not plausible," says Kraig in his recent article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. There is a three-step process to a missile launch, the last of which is not an automatic switch, but a human thumb manually hitting "the button."
John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a non-profit agency based in Washington D.C., agrees with the implausibility of "missiles leaping unbidden from their silos the second the new millennium dawns," but believes that problems might snowball after component failures, and where a series of human decisions may lead to a crisis.
False alarms have been common throughout the nuclear era, even after the end of the Cold War. The sort of thing that could lead to the disaster of a nuclear war which neither side intended would be: a false alarm followed by confusing information due to computer glitches, or a blackout with no information, which could easily be misinterpreted as due to enemy action. Or Y2K glitches might themselves cause a false alarm and contribute to subsequent confusion.
Even the remotest possibility of an accidental nuclear war is completely unacceptable. Spending billions of dollars in the hope of removing all Y2K glitches cannot possibly guarantee success.
De-alerting is essential.
Distrust and old hostilities
There remains the dilemma of distinguishing a false alarm from a real alarm. It may seem ridiculous that any member of the nuclear club would take advantage of Y2K confusion to really launch an attack. But if nuclear weapons cannot be "stood down" for the period of the Y2K event (and there are other dates in addition to midnight December 31, 1999 that are problematic), then sadly we must conclude that distrust and old doctrines persist. This perhaps is perhaps the best explanation of why the nuclear club refuses to de-alert or decommission their weapons for Y2K.
If we as People of the world can somehow persuade Leaders to de-alert this year, then instead of being a disaster, "Y2K" might prove to be the opportunity to keep these terrible weapons off alert for always. The governments and people of the other states, including Canada, will have to do a large part of the persuading. Letters from many voters to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy will help to encourage our government to do its bit.
Some Web resources:
Federation of American Scientists: www.fas.org/
BASIC Report: www.thebulletin.org/issues/nukenotes/ma99nukenote.html Summary in Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, March/April 1999
Alan Phillips is with Science for Peace and Physicians for Global Survival. Robin Collins is with the local branch of the United Nations Association in Canada.
Converted October 17, 1999 - Lg
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