U.S., Russia Urged To Lower Missile Alert For Y2K

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U.S., Russia Urged To Lower Missile Alert For Y2K

Updated 7:12 PM ET August 12, 1999By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Citing the risk of an accidental nuclear war, activists are pressing the United States and Russia to take nuclear missiles off hair-trigger alert during the technology-challenging year 2000 rollover.

A network of international groups announced a drive this week to try to persuade President Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin to "stand down" the approximately 2,500 nuclear-armed missiles now poised on each side for immediate firing.

Standing down the missiles means adding steps before they can be fired. The idea is to give commanders more time to make sure they are acting on solid information, not scrambled data caused by a computer glitch.

Rep. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, introduced a sense of the Congress resolution last week calling for the "de-alerting" of as many U.S. nuclear weapons "as is feasible and consistent with national security."

"Today the Russian command-and-control system is decaying," Markey said.

He said the so-called Y2K bug in computers not programmed to recognize the year 2000 made the date change a particularly dangerous period.

The stated fear is that Y2K-related computer glitches could cause the Russians in particular to conclude they are under attack, triggering mistaken retaliation. Russia acknowledges that it lags far behind the United States overall in making its systems ready for 2000 changeover.

Friends of the Earth, an Australian environmental group, spearheaded an effort to send a letter to Clinton and Yeltsin that was signed by 271 groups, including Greenpeace International.

"If Y2K breakdowns produce inaccurate early-warning data, or if communications and command channels are compromised, the combination of hair-trigger force postures and Y2K failures could be disastrous," the groups said in their letter.

They added that there should be a "safety-first" approach to Y2K and nuclear arsenals.

Alice Slater, president of the New York-based Global Resource Action Center for the Environment and a U.S. coordinator of the letter campaign, said activists were organizing grass-roots efforts in many countries to highlight the issue.

"In a sense, Y2K is a crisis and an opportunity," Slater said in a telephone interview.

She described the current drive to de-alert missiles temporarily as a "first step" in a larger effort to ban nuclear weapons altogether.

The Pentagon has invited Russia to send military officers to a proposed temporary joint "early-warning center" in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to avoid any possible missile-launch miscues as the new century dawns. But Russia has not responded since the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, its ally, earlier this year.

Bruce Blair, a former U.S. nuclear missile launch officer who analyzes targeting issues at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said the Y2K glitch itself could not cause accidental missile firings because people had to make the ultimate decisions on both sides.

But he said permanently de-alerting all or most nuclear missiles made sense in the post-cold War world as a safety precaution.

"Yeltsin's the last person you'd want to wake up in the middle of the night with a request for permission to launch" on what might be a false alarm, he said.

========================================= End

Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), August 12, 1999

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