By Kevin Sanders
Less than a month to go before Y2K. What to do? Water. You may need water. If the lights go out in New Zealand at midnight on December 30, a sensible response for everyone around the planet would be to immediately clean the bathtub, really well, then wait to see what happens two hours later as Y2K, moving relentlessly westward at a thousand miles an hour, time zone by time zone, hits the East Coast of Australia. If the lights go out in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, fill your freshly cleaned bathtub to the brim and check your emergency supplies against the Red Cross Y2K preparation list (www.redcross.org/disaster/safety/Y2K.html---bookmark it now) and plan to stay in.
The first of the world's 415 nuclear reactors to experience Y2K is in the far northeast of Siberia, in the same time zone as New Zealand. If that reactor goes awry---and especially if you live near one---then get out the potassium iodide tablets (www.anbex.com/test2.htm), a standard antidote to radiation poisoning, and have them ready for yourself and the rest of the family.
Such helpful household hints were missing from NBC's recent special, "Y2K: The Movie." But if things are only one-quarter as bad as they were in the film, then you will need all the help and advice you can get when the millennium rolls over.
Apart from C-Span coverage of Y2K-related conferences, television in the United States---and indeed, in most of the world---has failed to prepare the public for a global crisis. In the United States, the media have taken their cue from the government and adopted a generally reassuring tone.
NBC's "Y2K: The Movie" has been the single major exception. The obligatory denial in the opening credits asserted that the events depicted in the film were "fictional," adding that "the program does not suggest or imply that any of these events could actually occur."
In fact, the events depicted were not purely fictional. The arrival of the year 2000 will cause some disruption, possibly catastrophic, as in the movie when a nuclear reactor starts to melt down. Experts are already concerned. The Washington, D.C.-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) has a report on Y2K-related dangers lurking in the spent fuel cooling systems of nuclear reactors (www.nirs.org/y2k/y2kandnuclearpowerwebpage.htm). The events in "Y2K" are extrapolated from dangers and problems which, however improbable, could occur; they're described as "low probability, high-impact events" in government and corporate reports on the Y2K problem.
There were a lot of missed opportunities in NBC's lowbrow, low-budget pop thriller. In some important details, however, the events depicted in the film were at least conceivable.
For example, in "Y2K" the earliest report of a problem comes from the Marshall Islands in the same time zone as New Zealand, where Y2K occurs first. There are no cities in the Marshall Islands, but there is a U.S. military base there. In the film, a U.S. military plane crashes when controls fail at midnight and planes everywhere are grounded, a not unlikely scenario in both cases.
It is unlikely, however, that the U.S. military will have any planes in the air near the Marshall Islands at midnight. More likely, they will test-fly a plane there, immediately after midnight, and report the results worldwide. Such aeronautical prudence has been proposed for years by the Wall Street guru Ed Yardeni, who in his most recent Y2K report (www.yardeni.com/public/y_19991130.pdf) still thinks there will be problems. Certainly, a Y2K plane failure in the Marshall Islands or New Zealand would result in an order to ground all planes worldwide. Similarly, a failure at the Siberian reactor would probably lead to an emergency shutdown of all nuclear reactors. Such failures along the whole time zone would also signal an unprecedented global emergency at every level that could have an apocalyptic impact on everyone in the world.
Nonetheless, the film concentrates overwhelmingly on the narrow mechanics of planes and reactors rather than peoples' responses to the crisis. The emergency air traffic-control scenes and the meltdown threat at the nuclear reactor are the best developed moments in the film. Indeed, one possible effect of the film might be to ensure a more critical approach by both governments and citizens to airline and nuclear safety during Y2K. Even so, the film does little to help the citizen know how probable such a catastrophe may be or what to do in the face of the immense crisis the film depicts.
For example, in strange chronological jumps, New Zealand, Australia, Japan and China are hardly mentioned in the hours immediately after the plane crash. The first nuclear-reactor problem we hear about is in Sweden. Strangely, the United States still does not turn off its reactors. It even has planes still flying around near Washington. Some of the plot contortions are obviously structural, designed to provide an opportunity for preposterous action-packed heroics by the star, Ken Olin, who plays an omnicompetent expert in computers, airplanes and nuclear reactors, able to single-handedly avert plane disasters and nuclear meltdowns. Nonetheless, he's no help to his family. Not only is he unavailable to help clean and fill the bath, he seems to have neglected the question of how his wife and kids can stay at home safely. Grandpa finally comes to the rescue.
Although there is little sense in the film of a world outside the United States, it nevertheless alerts us to the importance Y2K time-zone monitoring (www.y2k.govt.nz) will play in determining how people around the world behave and what governments will do in the hours immediately before midnight. For example, if you live on the East Coast of the United States, events in New Zealand will give you an 18-hour head start on any Y2K problems. So if you are in New York or Boston or Washington, D.C., it will be worth getting up at six in the morning on Saturday, December 31 and turning to just about any television or radio station to find out what is happening. You may be sure that every station in the world will be carrying live reports from New Zealand, the first computer-dependent nation to fall under the shadow of Y2K. Indeed, the whole world will be watching New Zealand for the Y2K "First Alert." The watch will continue for at least 24 hours to see what surprises may lie ahead for the rest of the world. A "Zone 2000" website (www.jrwhipple.com/z2k/) will provide live audio and video coverage as Y2k sweeps around the planet. If the lights go out, how long before they come back on? Watch New Zealand. Yet New Zealand is not even mentioned in the movie.
New Year's eve, 2000 A.D., will be a midsummer night in New Zealand. A huge outdoor "First Light" global concert is scheduled to begin at midnight and culminate as the sun comes up over the East Coast. Originally, David Bowie was expected to open the event, but he has since withdrawn on the grounds that the organizers could not ensure "security" (whatever that means). Nevertheless, the beginning of the show, at midnight, will be keenly watched worldwide. If the event is suddenly plunged into darkness as it begins, it will send an unsettling signal. New Zealand ranks high among nations in its Y2K preparations. If the whole island blacks out it will be ominous. Clean the bath. Get ready to ground planes and turn off reactors. And check the bombs.
Two hours later the real test will come in Australia. Some experts believe Australia is the best prepared of any nation in the world to handle Y2K. Certainly, it is up with the United States, Canada and Britain as one of the four most advanced nations in terms of its preparations. For more than two years the Australian government has headed up a vigorous Y2K campaign of information and action in public and private sectors. Even so, some failures are inevitable and the country's systems are so interconnected that Australia is, as the Australian millennium bug researcher Adam Cobb
memorably put it,"only one electron away from failure." If Australia blacks out as midnight sweeps in, then the rest of the world will go into emergency status.
Again, "Y2K: The Movie" touches on none of this. Indeed, despite brief radio reports of overwhelming yet unspecified failures worldwide, midnight comes to an America that still seems largely indifferent and unprepared for disaster. And disaster it is. The lights go out in Times Square and we hear that "the entire Eastern seaboard is blacked out." In the single most chilling image of the film, a satellite shot of North America at midnight shows the stardust of lights going black in one vast area after another.
Yet, on the ground, we see strangely little chaos or confusion. The lights seem to be on in most places. Some people seem unaware that anything has gone wrong. In TV news reports, city lights twinkle in the background. The only person who has prepared is depicted as a survivalist crackpot who later gets shot by a panicky young National Guardsman. In one scene, an angry line of bank customers complains about Y2k bank-withdrawal restrictions, and a hospital has problems with monitoring equipment. But we see nothing of the responses, concerns or preparations of the reported 75% of Americans who, according to Time magazine, plan to stay home during Y2k.
The nuclear problem dominates the final third of the movie. After Y2K hits the reactor in Siberia, the first major test of operating nuclear systems will come as midnight strikes the 50 nuclear power plants clustered in Japan. No mention is made of this in the film, but the world, particularly America, will monitor Japan closely. In the movie, the first nuclear problem appears, improbably, in Sweden, which has one of the world's best nuclear safety records and has done thorough Y2K remediation. A radiation leak in a reactor kills off all the workers. The rest of the film focuses almost exclusively on an effort to prevent a similar reactor in the United States from melting down.
Concern over "the bomb" is mentioned only once in the film, in a passing reference to China, a fear that seems misplaced in light of the fact that all Chinese nuclear warheads are routinely de-coupled from the missiles, whose fuel is removed and whose navigational gyroscopes are turned off. It would take several hours of manually controlled effort to arm a Chinese nuclear missile. Ironically, "Y2K" makes no mention of the 4,400 nuclear weapons that Russia and the United States still plan to keep on hair-trigger alert as we hurtle into Y2K.
Only days before NBC screened "Y2K," the European parliament called for an emergency global nuclear shutdown before Y2K, with weapons de-alerted and reactors switched to emergency power. France is ready to turn its reactors down. In America, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is planing to keep reactors going, but will keep close watch on what happens in Japan.
As for the bomb, the U.S. military plans to conduct joint monitoring of nuclear weapons with Russia during Y2k. In the film, a U.S. general simply declares "everything" "Y2K ready" at a board meeting. However, only de-alerting and "no first strike" policies would ensure complete safety against accidental or mistaken launch during possible global Y2K confusion. In the call for nuclear weapons de-alerting, the European parliament is joined by a chorus of similar resolutions in the United Nations, the senates of Australia and Canada, a U.S. congressional resolution by Ed Markey (Democrat, Massachusetts,) and a report from the strategic thinktank BASIC (British-American Security Intelligence Commission), "The Bug in the Bomb." (www.basicint.org/y2krept.htm)
Britain has de-alerted all of its nuclear bombs. This important but little-known fact, unmentioned in the film, was first reported, to the best of my knowledge, in "The Nightmare Scenario," a March 15, 1999 cover story I wrote for The Nation. (www.thenation.com/1999/990315.shtml) Apparently, the U.S. government was unaware of this development before the publication of my article. Washington asked me what "leaked documents" I had acquired. I directed inquiries to a lengthy quote from the "1999 United Kingdom Defense Review" on the BASIC website; the quote in question noted that the U.K. Navy had "modified time to fire" of its Trident missiles from "a few minutes" to "several days"(www.basicint.org/nufu3-2.htm#2.3). Officially, the decision was described as a response to the changed post-cold war political environment, but Y2K concerns may have been played a role. Great Britain has a highly developed Y2K preparedness program, complete with a devilish-looking bug logo.
So the only two nuclear powers the world still has to worry about during Y2K are the United States and Russia, who will both be on 90-second, hair-trigger alert. Citizen's movements worldwide are now calling on Clinton and Yeltsin to order mutual, verifiable de-alerting before Y2K (homepages.tig.com.au/~foesyd/). The Japan-based movement WASH (World Atomic Safety Holiday) is calling for a global weapons de-alert and reactor standdown before Y2K (www.y2kwash.org/).
An emergency shutdown is a stress on a reactor at any time. There may be special difficulties during Y2K. The movie's control-room scenes capture the tension with some accuracy and detail. But we don't see anyone taking his or her potassium iodide pills, a routine precaution for reactor workers at such a time.
We do learn something about reactors from the film. "Y2K" explains how nuclear power plants need power both to keep running and to close down. And even when they close down, they need water to cool the radioactive core to keep it from melting down. If the water stops flowing, a core meltdown can begin in 30 minutes. It takes six months to cool down a reactor, not five days as they say in the film. Until then, a million gallons of water must be pumped through the core every minute---a swimming pool's worth of water every 15 seconds. So all reactors have emergency back-up power. In the film, a back-up water pump in a reactor fails. In a technically absurd but visually spectacular solution, the hero blows up the blocked pump.
If a loss of outside power seems imminent, reactors can be put into emergency shutdown, with the back-up cooling systems for both the reactor and spent-fuel cooling pools up and running before the outside power is lost. This would probably begin the moment a plane crashed in the Marshall Islands or the lights went out in New Zealand. Meanwhile, congress is still calling for better Y2K preparations in at least a dozen U.S. reactors. This film may sharpen such concerns, though probably not enough---ratings were low, and emergency information services reported no increase in calls the day after the film was aired. In the final analysis, "Y2K" was a trivial film about a serious issue.
There will be lessons small and great from Y2K: The Reality. No attempt is made in the film to even consider what they might be. Clearly, however, the world must learn to think ahead. Decades ago, Arthur C. Clarke warned that failure to use four-digit year codes in computers would be a problem in the year 2000. No one listened. Now, a foundation called "The Long Now" (www.longnow.org/) is building a 10,000-year clock and library to draw attention to long-term implications of present-day actions, among them the accumulation of nuclear waste and the locking-in of computer date codes. Among other things, The Long Now is calling for a global date code to be set at five digits instead of four, so that 8,000 years from now, when the clocks tick over from the Year 9,999 to the Year 10,000, people will be spared the problems we are having now. That's how a modern civilization should evolve. The futurist Stewart Brand, one of The Long Now founders, has written: "We'll know that shift has happened when programmers begin to anticipate the Year 10,000 Problem, and assign five digits instead of four to year dates. '01998,' they'll write, at first frivolously, then seriously."
But the year 10,000 lies ahead. First, the bathtub. If nothing happens, you have a clean bath. If "Y2K: The Movie" is even half right, it may save your life. And in the unlikely possibility that the film will "scare" the world and its governments into a global nuclear de-alert and shutdown, then the nuclear menace would be one less thing for everyone in the world to worry about. (www.redcross.org/disaster/safety/Y2K.html)
But why wait for New Zealand? Why not clean the bath ahead of time? Why not fill it anyway? That way, even if power stays up worldwide, you won't waste the water. There may be delayed disruptions, aftershocks; learn to live for a day or two with a full bathtub. Study how you use water. Rediscover priorities. If the film is wrong, if the lights stay on in New Zealand and no planes crash in the Marshall Islands and nothing happens at the Siberian reactor, then Americans, at least, can break out the chilled champagne. And if the lights stay on in Australia, Australians might consider going out to celebrate when midnight reaches the United States. But before you leave, check the latest news from New Zealand, the Marshall Islands and Siberia one last time. If everything is still OK, you can expect to welcome the millenium with no major problems and a clean bathtub.
- Kevin Sanders is Director of the War & Peace U.N. Bureau and a former CNN science editor. In 1996, he wrote, produced and presented "Judgment in The Hague," a documentary about World Court hearings on the legality of nuclear weapons.
