5 years ago... Millennium bug could cause nuclear holocaust

16.09.98 Accidental nuclear missile launches caused by the Year 2000 bug could be a real danger, according to industry observers.

Ian Hugo, assistant director of Taskforce 2000, claimed developing nations that fail to fix the problem could pose a nuclear threat. "The frightening aspect of defence is the fact that all defence departments in countries that have computers run some kind of real-time monitoring. A typical failure on these is that screens go blank. I hope someone is explaining to Saddam that if monitoring screens go blank, he's not under nuclear attack, it's just a computer bug," said Hugo.

Graham Titterington, analyst at Ovum, said countries are under threat from two potential sources; missiles triggering themselves and the collapse of early warning systems. "Missiles launching themselves could just happen but it is extremely unlikely. The risk of mistaken attacks is more real as it could be triggered by false readings of a nuclear warning screen," he said.

16.09.03 Of course now we know the millennium passed with nary a computer glitch. But, as we've noted before, at the end of the 1990s, all kinds of scare stories were doing the rounds. Something like this could have happened - but it didn't.

Perhaps the only thing left to say is that such concerns must have at least focused minds in ridding systems of any glitches, though of course they also helped fuel an unsustainable tech boom at the time.