Food shortages: Geri Guidetti is a biologist who moderates an Internet forum on Y2K and agriculture. "The writing is on the wall: it is not only possible, but probable that there are going to be food shortages," she says.
That's because modern agriculture and food production have grown heavily dependent on technology. And computers and automated systems are at risk of getting bit by the millennium bug. In addition, agriculture relies on a variety of other industries to put the food on your table.
"It's a global chain," says Guidetti. "We don't realize how much food comes from outside the U.S." Which highlights the fact that America [or any country] is vulnerable to failures in countries which are well behind the U.S. in their efforts to fix their Y2K problems. Even the seeds are susceptible to Y2K. Most are hybrid, manufactured by seed companies.
"So if you're not able to grow the food because of a glitch anywhere in the process or because you're not able to deliver the seed after it is produced--if you have a glitch anywhere in that line--that seed is in jeopardy, your future food is in jeopardy," says Guidetti.
And what if there were other problems? Once the grain is harvested or the cows are milked, the raw produce must be shipped out for processing. And most experts pinpoint transportation as the weakest link in the chain.
"The railway systems, the trucking industry, if they depend upon oil and gas, is that in good supply? Have the oil companies been able to fix it?" asks Peter de Jager, another Y2K expert.
And the factories for processing the food have potential problems of their own. "Computers play an extremely important role in the production of food from factories--many of which are automated--down to the distribution of products," says William James of Grocery Manufacturers of America.
Once food is processed, it is shipped to warehouses. Inventories, temperature controls, and shipping orders are often controlled by computer. And then the food is again shipped by the highly vulnerable transportation system to your local grocery store.
"Most consumers don't really look at the supermarket as a high-tech environment and they probably would be surprised as to how much technology and how much data-gathering goes into making the store operate the way it does," says Michael Sansolo of the Food Marketing Institute. (David Snyder, CBN).
Chaos and accidents
At best, we can expect isolated equipment failures--traffic lights malfunctioning or short term local power blackouts, for example. But wholesale breakdowns could well occur: longer electrical, gas and water supply cutoffs, telephone systems inoperative, fuel and heating oil shortages, failed rail and trucking networks, making it impossible for supermarkets to restock their shelves. (Neal R. Pierce, Washington Post).
Even little problems can be serious on a large scale. Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, the Navy's director of space, information warfare, command and control, said only a 1 percent failure rate in computers at civilian agencies would result in 43,000 faulty medical prescriptions, 27,000 lost Medicare claims, $16 million unrecorded credit card transactions and 6 million pieces of lost mail. (Gregory Slabodkin, GCN).
Accidents could also easily happen. For example, when the Phillips Petroleum Co.
ran a simulation onboard an oil vessel in the North Sea, a safety system designed to
detect a deadly gas, hydrogen sulfide, shut down (Fred
Kaplan, Boston Globe, 21/6/98). Chemical plants
could be affected as well. It only took one faulty valve to cause the catastrophe in
Bhopal, India.
Nuclear power plants are a major concern. Western intelligence sources say some of the 65 Soviet-made civilian nuclear power plants scattered across the former Warsaw Pact countries could malfunction as their computers fall victim to the Y2K glitch. Anxieties about Russian nuclear safety, branded on global memory by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, have not been diminished by Moscow's assurances that the problem is "under control." An intelligence source said: "Russia's nuclear industry is in desperate straits. Throw in Y2K and you could have a giant Chernobyl on your hands." (Matthew Campbell, The Sunday Times).
Electricity and water
"Most of the nation's power systems must be Y2K compliant [checked for potential Y2K problems and prepared for the change-over], or they all go down, region by region, in one gigantic, rolling blackout," warns historian Gary North.
The North American grid is vulnerable to simultaneous failures. Generating facilities in the US, Canada, and Mexico jointly move power through high-tension lines that distribute electricity through four regional interconnectors. Within each region, if one facility goes off line, the others compensate to pick up the slack. But there's not much spare capacity built into the system; the North American Electric Reliability Council, a group that is drawing up a timetable of Y2K fixes for the Department of Energy, admits that if multiple generating facilities fail in one region, this "may result in stressing the electric system to the point of a cascading outage over a large area." (Charles Platt, Wired).
"If the power grid goes down, then it is all over. It doesn't matter if every computer in the country is Y2K compliant if you can't plug it into something. So we are focusing first and foremost on utilities and not just power. The water treatment system in every municipality in this country is computer driven and has the potential of being upset because of embedded chips and bad software. Utilities, therefore, are at the top of the list of the things we are addressing in our committee."(Sen. Robert Bennett, chairman of the Special Senate Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem).
Bennett is worried because even 100 percent compliance by all of these facilities--a goal not even deemed possible at this late date--would not ensure the uninterrupted flow of power to U.S. consumers beginning January 1, 2000. Power utilities, for instance, rely on foreign oil production and transportation. But if the pumping, navigation and propulsion systems of those foreign companies are not Y2K compliant, then U.S. utilities won't have the oil they need to generate electricity. This is known, in Y2K jargon, as "the ripple effect." (Joseph Farah, WorldNetDaily).
Fear
Fear of an impending Y2K "crisis" could prove to be a greater threat to our economic well-being and liberties than the Y2K bug itself. According to a poll released in June at the World Congress on Information Technology at George Mason University, approximately one out of every four U.S. citizens anticipates being directly affected by the millennium bug. This concern could potentially reach the level of widespread panic, culminating in bank runs, stock market volatility, and civil unrest. (Dennis Behreandt, The New American, Vol.14, No.19).
The U.S. Federal Reserve is printing an extra $50 to $70 billion worth of bank notes as a precautionary measure. The central banks of Australia and New Zealand have taken similar steps. Sen. Robert Bennett, who also serves on the Senate Banking Committee, said that without such actions if even a fraction of Americans took $500 out of their credit unions, the result would be "a shortfall of credit unions overall of $16 billion." (Declan McCullagh, Wired).
Recession
Because Y2K is an international problem, global recession is an imminent possibility. Edward Yardeni, the chief economist of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, believes there is a 70 percent chance of a deep global recession in 2000-2001. (WorldNetDaily).
Political instability
Although the most computerized societies may be the most affected, Third World countries may also have severe problems. "We're concerned about the potential disruption of power grids, telecommunications and banking services, among other possible fallout, especially in countries already torn by political tensions," the CIA said in a report.
Given all of the problems surrounding Y2K, a
possible scenario prior to the turn of the millennium is "technofascism."
"Technofascism" is described as a situation where "governments and large
corporations would intervene to try to contain the damage rather than build for the
future," according to the CIA report.
A Bangkok Post article explains that technofascism would take place because the government, which didn't exert any leadership in the crisis, sees the need to crack down on a society destined to fall apart. What would follow is the world's citizens crying for distress as they see their world crumbling right before them and realizing that neither they nor their government can do anything about it. (WorldNetDaily).
The Ottawa Citizen on December 12 reported that the Canadian government is considering martial law in response to Y2K disruptions. Previously secret government documents the Citizen obtained say: "Among the activities that must be done to meet the problems resulting from year 2000 failures is development of relevant emergency orders and regulations required for the invocation of emergency provisions under the Emergencies Act."
The British government is readying a disaster unit reserved for invasion or civil unrest.
In the United States, Senator Robert Bennett has asked the Pentagon what plans it has "in the event of a Y2K-induced breakdown of community services that might call for martial law," and a House committee has recommended that Clinton consider declaring a national emergency. (Declan McCullagh, Wired).
Air travel
Although airlines have tried to reassure passengers that there is nothing wrong with their aircraft, there is concern about the readiness of air traffic control networks. A series of 40 crucial air traffic computers controlling flights from Europe to and across America will not work beyond December 1999, their maker, IBM, has said. An IBM spokesman said that 40 of its model 3083 mainframe computers used at Air Route Traffic Control Centers cannot be debugged before 2000. Peter Quaintmere, technical director of the Inter-national Federation of Air Traffic Controllers, said: "The air traffic controllers said they had simulated the switchover from 1999 to 2000 and found that the air traffic screens went blank."
For planes, the biggest problems concern computer chips that operate automatic systems and may have a built-in response to date and time changes. A Boeing 747 has thousands of control chips. Only a handful have date related millennium problems, but these include flight management computers and internal navigation systems. (Robert Uhlig, Electronic Telegraph).
Military meltdowns
Sometime in 1993 the North American Air Defense Command [NORAD] in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, conducted a test to see what would happen to all their computers--the ones that warn of a nuclear attack--on New Year's Day of the year 2000.
What happened was, everything froze--the screens that monitored the
early warning satellites and radar and other communications systems that would detect a
flock of missiles or bombers coming our way. "It all locked up at the stroke of
midnight," recalled Robert Martin, a top computer specialist.
The problem is hardly restricted to NORAD. The Defense Department has about 25,000 computer systems--2,803 of them classified as "mission-critical systems," meaning that, without them, the military could no longer carry out a major mission.
"The year 2000 problem is the electronic equivalent of El Niņo," Deputy Defense Secretary John J. Hamre said. "This is going to have implications in the world ... that we can't even comprehend."
Real life failures have already taken place that begin to hint at how far-flung the problems might be. A preview of possible military disasters was the incident in the 1991 Gulf War, when a Scud missile blew up a barracks in Saudi Arabia, killing 28 National Guard troops inside. A post mortem of the disaster revealed that the Patriot air defense battery failed to shoot down the Scud because the clock in the Patriot's radar system was not properly synchronized.
John Pike, a weapons specialist at the Federation of American Scientists, explained: "A lot of systems use time-synchronization as a way to establish data links." So, if one computer says it is 1900 and another says it is 2000, "they can't talk to each other." (Fred Kaplan, The Boston Globe).
Nuclear nightmares
Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre cited a need to calm Russian nuclear forces in particular if the millennium bug caused their computers to crash, as many systems may fail worldwide.
He told the Senate Armed Services Committee that cash strapped Russian forces were relying more and more on nuclear weapons "as a safeguard for their national security. And their early warning system is fragile."
Such systems, heavily reliant on computers to mesh data from satellites, radar, and other sensors, are used by Russia and the United States to monitor impending threats such as missile launches and unidentified aircraft.
He said Defense Secretary William Cohen ordered plans drawn up for sharing early warning information so "we don't enter into a nightmare condition where everybody is all of a sudden uncertain, and their screens go blank."
Although the Cold War has been over for years, the United States and Russia each still keep ready to deliver on short notice roughly 2,500 nuclear-tipped weapons on missiles, bombers, and submarines. (Reuters).
This problem is not limited to Russia. After the former Soviet Union went toes up, it held a military fire sale. This means the millennial problems that plague the Soviet system have been inherited by China and North Korea, both of which bought cheap Russian hardware, as well as by Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, former Soviet Republics with nuclear missiles stowed within their borders. (Adam L. Penenberg, Forbes).
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