The Pentagon withheld news of a major Y2K computer glitch that had cut access to a critical satellite intelligence system, telling the media only after the big millennium celebrations in Washington and New York ended.

Throughout New Year's Eve, Pentagon officials told members of the news media that the change to 2000 was proceeding without a hitch throughout the defence establishment.

But on Saturday, the same officials revealed that the ground-based computer system that processes information from a major satellite intelligence network failed after 2000 began at Greenwich Mean Time.

"One of our intelligence systems - a satellite-based intelligence system - experienced some Y2K failures last night, shortly after the rollover of Greenwich Mean Time. And for a period of several hours, we were not able to process information from that system," the Deputy Defence Secretary, Mr John Hamre, said.

As Rear-Admiral Robert Willard, head of the Y2K taskforce for the joint chiefs of staff, was speaking to reporters, military programmers were completing a temporary repair of the processing unit that allowed it to start working again, though at reduced capacity, officials said.

About 2am, well after the crystal ball had descended at Times Square and the nationwide television audience had shrunk substantially, word of the computer failure was leaked.

The small West African nation of Gambia emerged as the only country seriously affected by power cuts and other disruption, some of which could be traced to the millennium computer bug, Y2K experts said.

Significant power cuts were evident in Gambia, while major or significant disruptions crippled air and sea transport, the financial sector and government services, reported the Washington-based International Y2K Co-operation Centre, which assembled data from 118 nations.

The centre pointed out, however, that the power cuts were not Y2K-related and the problems in the other sectors could not be blamed entirely on the bug.

Failures have been reported in the Gambian Treasury Department, the national tax service and at the Customs Service, according to the centre. Experts attribute the problems to a delay in international assistance promised to Gambia to prepare for Y2K.

Gambia has declared today a holiday to reduce pressure on its crippled services.

The centre said it was "working with Gambia to help resolve this problem" and urged the World Bank to help re-establish the affected services.

Y2K Centre director Mr Bruce McConnell warned that while "no significant problem" was reported around the world on the first day of the new millennium, "we are not out of the woods".

The Y2K computer bug also hit France's Syracuse II military satellite system but has had no operational effect, the defence ministry said.

Syracuse II, which is shared between the military and France Telecom, is a system of four satellites launched in 1996. It is the main communications channel linking the military command with French forces in Kosovo.

In Japan, computer-related faults struck four nuclear power plants but only one could be related to the millennium bug, officials said.

"A system to monitor radiation levels malfunctioned at a nuclear plant in Ishikawa, central Japan.

"This incident is probably related to the Y2K problem," said Mr Shigeru Komatsu, from the Government's natural resources and engery agency.

Two monitors for a coastal nuclear power plant in Takahama, north of Osaka, failed to properly transmit data on radiation levels from 1am.

At another plant in Fukushima, north of Tokyo, a panel displaying the state of control rods in a reactor malfunctioned about 9am.

Those two glitches were believed to be unrelated to the millennium bug, Mr Komatsu said.

Fears about nuclear power have increased in Japan since September 30, when three workers at a uranium processing plant in Tokaimura, north-east of Tokyo, set off the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

The Washington Post and Agence France-Presse

-- Rick (rick@wmrs.edu), January 02, 2000