On December 30, 1999, Richard Myers, then a four-star general in the United States Air Force, sat down for dinner with his wife of thirty-five years, Mary Jo. They lived on Peterson Air Force Base, at the eastern edge of Colorado Springs. Despite the impending New Year, the mood was sombre. When dinner was over, they got in the car. Mary Jo drove for thirty minutes, leaving Myers at the gates of an immense underground missile-command center excavated inside Cheyenne Mountain, known for its role in the 1983 film “WarGames.”
“I kissed my wife goodbye that night,” Myers recalled, with a laugh. “I said, ‘Well, I’ll probably be O.K. Other than a direct nuclear attack, we can exist for a long time inside the mountain. But I hope you guys on the civilian side will be fine.’ ” Mary Jo drove home. Myers retreated underground to begin a gruelling thirty-hour work shift, waiting for the end of the world.
It can be difficult to remember how scary Y2K really was. In retrospect, it can resemble a fever dream—a secular doomsday whose prophets were deeply, even comically, misguided. To some extent, its status as a punchline reflects the scale of its threat. Things couldn’t possibly have been that bad, we think; surely someone, somewhere, was exaggerating. That’s not how Myers—a man who once flew with tactical fighter squadrons in Europe and Southeast Asia and who later became the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, making him the most senior military official in the United States—recalls it. Without hesitation, he told me that Y2K was the most daunting thing he experienced during his forty years of military service.
Y2K revealed a vulnerability lurking just beneath the surface of things—in their very source code—that, even at the time, seemed both laughably simple and terrifyingly complex. Around the world, virtually all computer systems relied on internal calendars programmed to use just two digits to represent the year. “1998” was “98”; “1999” was “99”; and “2000” was—well, that was the problem revealed by Y2K. When January 1, 2000, rolled around, computers all over the world, from stock-market systems and A.T.M.s to nuclear power stations and gas pumps, would plunge back to “00,” a catastrophic resetting of machine time that, it was feared, could trip them into failure or malfunction. Airplanes could turn off midair and fall from the sky; financial systems might freeze; municipal water-filtration plants could fail, polluting drinking supplies for millions; and electrical plants might shut down, plunging civilization into darkness. What’s more, the effects of Y2K would persist. Computers wouldn’t simply start working again when the clock read “01.” Experts feared that the breakdown of digital infrastructure could push the modern world into a new dark age.
On his way underground, passing through Cheyenne Mountain’s massive, twenty-ton blast doors and concrete-lined, reinforced tunnels, Myers knew that something even worse could be in store when the clocks struck midnight. Military command-and-control systems also risked failure—including the early-warning radar networks used to detect incoming missiles. For years, an international crew of computer experts had been working to upgrade or reprogram American military gear in advance of Y2K. But Myers and his colleagues feared that their Russian counterparts hadn’t done the same. There was, they thought, a very real possibility that some sort of error—most likely a radar glitch—might trigger a fatal overreaction on the Russian side, leading to an unprovoked nuclear attack on the United States.
The Department of Defense began preparing for Y2K in 1996, in a vast military-wide effort. Every piece of equipment—from navigation technology and missile-launch platforms to meteorological equipment and radar, from battlefield signalling systems to international communication networks, and even on-base H.V.A.C.—had to be checked. Teams of mechanics and technical troubleshooters were assembled. Military computer programmers worked alongside engineers, on bases all over the world. The teams would roll forward clocks, add software patches, and reset dates, insuring that the world’s largest military wouldn’t shut down at the dawn of the new millennium, its missiles exploding like popcorn in their submarines and silos.
By 1998, it had become clear that the scale of the undertaking required a new, dedicated leadership structure. General Myers was reassigned from his role as Commander of Pacific Air Forces, based in Hawaii, to Colorado’s snowy Peterson Air Force Base, from which he would lead the global Y2K effort. Joining him in a deputy role, and relocating from MacDill Air Force Base, in Florida, was Harry Raduege, then a two-star general. “We had technicians, globally, who went through the entire U.S. military and checked each piece of equipment in command centers, in squadrons and operational areas, around the world,” Raduege said. Particular attention was paid to strategically or organizationally important sites, such as Naval Station Norfolk, Langley Air Force Base, and Camp Pendleton, outside San Diego. When a piece of gear or a particular computer passed the test, a technician would put a small sticker on it, declaring it Y2K-compliant.
Raduege possesses an avuncular joviality, discussing life-and-death matters as though they’re plays in a football game. This made him an excellent ambassador for the Defense Department. Throughout the autumn of 1999, he led a series of town-hall meetings, held in high-school gymnasiums and other places in Colorado Springs, meant to address local questions. “Some people had become very concerned and were stockpiling food and water, with the anticipation that power would go out in major sectors of the United States,” he recalled. “Now, ‘conspiracy theories’ isn’t the right word, but there were a lot of overblown fears that people had. They were really full-spectrum—everything from, ‘Am I going to be safe?’ and ‘Am I going to have food?’ to the possibility of the end of the world.”
Raduege sought to put such fears in context—but the fact of the matter was that he and his team were taking concrete steps to avert the apocalypse. In December, 1999, an exchange program began between the governments of Russia and the United States. Greg Frazier, a civilian employee of the Department of Defense who worked on special communications projects—he helped maintain the emergency teletype system connecting the White House and the Kremlin—was dispatched to Moscow to help install a network of satellite telephones through which the American and Russian governments could communicate during the New Year’s transition. Meanwhile, on December 22nd, nine days before the 2000 rollover, Generals Myers and Raduege welcomed a group of eighteen Russian military advisers to Colorado Springs. The Russians planned to stay well into the new year, and to help their American counterparts watch for signs of global catastrophe.
At Peterson Air Force Base, officials went to great lengths to make their Russian guests feel comfortable. Because federal regulations prohibited smoking indoors, they constructed an outdoor smokers’ deck; apparently, they temporarily revised the base rules so that small quantities of vodka could be kept inside the Russians’ observation room. (He also vividly remembers that, when the Russians first arrived at their Colorado Springs hotel, they drank all the miniature bottles of spirits in their minibars.) Members of the Russian delegation received a daily stipend from the U.S. government; compared to their salaries back home, it was apparently quite luxurious. Some used it to pay for dental work; others got prescription eyeglasses. Many bought expensive winter parkas and gloves from Colorado’s numerous sporting-goods stores. Hundreds of social invitations flooded in from local families who wanted to host the Russians for a friendly lunch or dinner. When the delegation stayed in, they arranged for free rentals at Blockbuster.
In Moscow, Frazier had a different experience. His Russian hosts were never less than generous, but the intense pressure of his Y2K-preparation work quickly became exhausting. When he landed, he learned that the U.S. Embassy had been evacuated because of safety concerns over Y2K; he would be working alone. Travelling from his hotel to the local telegraph station, where he could communicate securely with Generals Myers and Raduege, required commuting through Siberian-scale winds and snowstorms. Within days of his arrival, Frazier simply gave up, checked out of his hotel, and began sleeping on a couch in the telegraph office. “The Russians were having such a good time back in Colorado,” he recalled. “Everybody was buying them drinks.” Meanwhile, one night in Moscow, the pipes froze; Frazier had to go to the bathroom outside in the snow.
In Colorado Springs, the Russians weren’t allowed into the Cheyenne Mountain complex: the Air Force feared espionage, assuming that their Russian counterparts would try to gather all of the intelligence they could. “That would be normal,” said General Myers. The Russians were, however, equipped with an elaborate system of computer monitors, wired to display a live feed of the U.S. satellite and military-radar data that tracked global missile launches.
After dinner with his wife, Myers and Raduege settled in for their thirty-hour New Year’s shift. The generals and their staffs looked to U.S. military facilities in Guam, an island in the mid-Pacific, where the date-change would happen first. They were relieved when no computers there failed. New Year’s rolled relentlessly west, washing over U.S. bases in Asia. The lights stayed on. Electronic armaments did not malfunction. American warplanes did not fall from the sky. Wary personnel inside Cheyenne Mountain watched their monitors for anything amiss as the new millennium swept, one time zone at a time, across the great landmass of Russia.
The Moscow rollover was the big one. The Russian military’s highly centralized command-and-control system meant that anything truly catastrophic would occur in Moscow first, then radiate outward through linked computer systems or trigger human errors farther afield. Among the Americans’ greatest fears was that a Russian missile commander might receive incorrect early-warning information from a Y2K-affected radar system; this could inspire needless retaliation. (In September, 1983, just such a malfunction had occurred, creating the impression that the U.S. had launched a nuclear attack; a single Soviet officer, Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov, acted alone to declare a false alarm, single-handedly averting World War Three.)
To the immense relief of the Russians and Americans in Colorado Springs, the Moscow rollover happened without incident. All of Europe and North America had yet to transition—but, the generals thought, the greatest danger had passed. Earlier, the Air Force had arranged for CNN to film a short segment about Y2K in a room within Cheyenne Mountain that had been cleared, or “sanitized,” of any classified materials. With danger averted, Myers invited the cameras in.
Wary personnel inside the Cheyenne Mountain missile-command center watched their monitors for anything amiss as the new millennium swept, one time zone at a time, across Russia.
The camera crew was setting up its shots. “Then, just as we start,” Myers recalled, “the alarm went off.” Missiles had been launched in southern Russia. A set of strategically placed curtains was whisked closed, blocking views of computer screens deeper inside the base, and the camera crew was hustled out of the room. Myers’s team quickly deduced that three SCUD missiles had been launched by the Russian military at break-away extremists in Chechnya. The generals raced to the satellite phone Frazier had set up. “We highly recommended that they stop this activity,” Raduege recalled. “We just said, ‘This is not a good time to be launching missiles.’ ”
Back in Moscow, it was twenty below, and snow was billowing in great, forty-mile-per-hour gusts. The threat of a war triggered by Y2K had become a thing of the past; Frazier’s system had worked, and he figured he could relax. But the night would be surprising, after all. At about five o’clock in the morning, the phone rang in the telegraph office. It was one of Frazier’s contacts in the Russian military; the man sounded excited. He told Frazier that everything was changing. Boris Yeltsin had just stepped down. Taking his place was an ambitious, young political operative and former K.G.B. officer named Vladimir Putin.
Frazier’s sat-phone system went on to produce a minor intelligence breakthrough. The American government was paying for the Russians’ use of the telephone system, and they continued to do so for nearly a year after Y2K. The Russians, Frazier said, didn’t realize this—and this meant that the U.S., which received the bills for the system, could see, in real time, exactly whom Russian military officials were calling, as well as when and for how long. It was an early glimpse of the value of telephone metadata as a surveillance tool.
The wider legacy of Y2K is debatable. Around the turn of the millennium, the writer and former software engineer Ellen Ullman worked on many Y2K-vulnerable computer systems; she documented those experiences in an essay, “What We Were Afraid of As We Feared Y2K,” published in her 2017 collection “Life in Code.” “The thing about Y2K,” she told me recently, “was that it illustrated, in very direct terms, how software gets deployed. Pieces of software are black boxes to one another. Different manufacturers. Different companies. Those interfaces are often muddied, misunderstood, and badly documented.” In her view, though the specific risk of Y2K might be over, the broader, systemic risk presented by computer-system interconnection is still very real. “I feel like the lesson has just passed us by, which is the sad thing,” Ullman said. “There’s now a generation or two that really doesn’t know about Y2K, that doesn’t even have any memory of it.”
When I told Ullman the story of Generals Myers and Raduege, she wasn’t surprised. In fact, she said, their experience was typical. At the time, Ullman interviewed many people working to avert Y2K. “They all had a sense that things were pretty well in hand,” she said. “But then they slid off into: ‘What about these other people? Can I trust the banks? Can I trust the suppliers?’ The fear of this systemic failure infected people, one after another.” Y2K wasn’t just a technological crisis; it was a social one. It exposed widespread fears of dependence and interconnection that bordered on paranoia. Even if you took precautions, someone else could trigger the end of the world. The failure would happen out there—in what Ullman refers to as “outer darkness.”
For Myers and Raduege, it’s been disappointing to see Y2K fade from memory. Instead of being heralded as an example of how government agencies, working together both domestically and internationally, might solve a global problem, Y2K is generally perceived as an overreaction among officials who didn’t know very much about computers. This attitude frustrates Ullman, too. “There were great legions of technical people—programmers, systems analysts, managers, testers—who had spent years making sure the world did not blow up metaphorically, and, in the case of those generals, literally,” she said.
The seeds of the more dismissive view were probably sown early. While Myers was working through the night beneath the Rocky Mountains, his own adult children were celebrating the start of the new millennium. “They were probably at a party that night,” he said. “So, you know, not worried about much.”
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