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To: Secret_Agent_Man who wrote (9019)	11/28/1998 7:35:00 PM
From: Secret_Agent_Man	Respond to of 10786

NYTIMES ARTICLE TODAY>>>November 28, 1998 Arms Agency's Computers Lacked Year 2000 Testing By MATTHEW L. WALD ASHINGTON -- The agency responsible for managing the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons told the Pentagon last summer that it had no year 2000 bugs in three of its most important computer systems, but auditors say those systems were never independently tested. The agency, the Defense Special Weapons Agency, defended its actions by saying in a letter dated Sept. 30 that it was not required to test the systems under Pentagon rules in force this summer when it made the report. The Pentagon inspector general's office, in an audit released on Oct. 30, reported that the agency had listed three computer systems in the category of "mission-critical" as ready for the year 2000 even without independent testing. The auditors said that unless the agency made further progress, it "may be unable to execute its mission without undue disruptions." The audit was first reported today in USA Today. A malfunction of the computer systems would cause problems, Pentagon officials said, but the computers are not involved in controlling nuclear weapons use. The Defense Special Weapons Agency, absorbed last month into the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, manages nuclear weapons stockpiles and helps cope with nuclear weapons accidents. The agency is also charged with maintaining the scientific expertise to insure that advanced conventional systems, nuclear systems, and command and control systems will continue to operate if nuclear war is threatened or occurs, the auditors said. Jay C. Davis, the head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said the Defense Department's initial plan for year 2000 issues "did not require testing" and left the job to the people who ran the computers. The computer problem, known in shorthand as Y2K, involves computer systems that store the date as a two-digit number and might be unable to distinguish 2000 from 1900. Some of those systems, some computer experts warn, might stop working, stop communicating with other systems or deliver bad data when 1999 rolls over to 2000. The Pentagon set a deadline of this Dec. 31 to analyze, fix and test its computer systems, and will conduct large-scale tests involving multiple computer systems in the first quarter of 1999. Robert J. Lieberman, assistant inspector general of the Department of Defense, said in a telephone interview today that the Defense Special Weapons Agency was "by no means alone" in failing to bring in outsiders for an independent test, or to maintain adequate records of testing. Auditors have ordered several agencies to retest equipment under a revised policy issued as a draft last June but, with 13 months to go, not yet adopted in final form. "By waiting so long to really get into high gear, we have made this a much higher-risk proposition than it would have been had we really gotten serious two years earlier and approached this in a much more systematic fashion," Lieberman said. "Right now it's difficult to say whether we have managed to make the problem unmanageable or not." "A lot initially was left up to the discretion of whoever owned and understood each system," Lieberman said. "It was felt that, given the sheer magnitude of systems, it was necessary to decentralize the whole operation, to give people a lot of latitude as to what they did. In retrospect, everybody agrees that that approach was a mistake." The programs needed for targeting and launching nuclear weapons, as well as other major operational systems, have been reviewed for year 2000 compliance already, military officials said. Lieberman said, "I think that when push comes to shove, the military operators are probably the most capable group in the Government for handling contingencies; they are used to doing without systems for whatever reason. Davis said finishing testing in the spring "gives plenty of time for tests of the systems in full-up, integrated mode before the year clocks out." He said that the early certification, with which the auditors had found fault, included his agency's acceptance of assurances from software vendors about their products, rather than direct tests. He added, "The principal failure is in documentation and planning, the particular details that the devil lies in."