MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia admitted on Wednesday it would face serious transport problems as a result of the millennium computer bug, but said an army of specially recruited experts would keep Russians moving across their vast territory.

"We are not expecting a catastrophe as Russia is less computerized than other countries," said Aleksander Menshikov, deputy director at the Transport Ministry's computer center, referring to a worldwide fear that the bug could paralyze transport networks.

Officials said there was a serious threat to Russia's transport posed by the bug, a fault in which computer software first developed in the 1960s and 1970s could fail to recognize the year 2000 and think it is back in 1900.

But thousands of specialists who had been drafted in would keep Russia's vast rail and air networks going, they said.

"Problem 2000 is a most serious problem for trains as our computer system works on many levels," Valery Panferov, head of automatic systems' development for the Russian rail network, said at a round table discussion.

He said that if the network's main computer failed, signals could stop working, leading to a potential disaster on all of Russia's far-flung railways.

"I cannot assess how big the damage will be to our network, but we have specialists working especially hard on the project to solve any problems. Even if the network does stop it will start again," he said.

Russia is playing catch-up with other countries in the race to combat the millennium bug threat, but computer experts said the impoverished country was also hampered by a shortage of specialists.

"The first problem for us was that we believed up until a year ago that the 2000 problem was not a serious threat," said Mikhail Salnikov, chief editor of Compulog magazine.

"Unfortunately, many specialists left the state sector and went to the commercial market during perestroika (under former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s) and now there are not many people left in the public sector to assess this problem."

The U.S. Defense Department said on Monday an American delegation was due to visit Russia in mid-February to share information about millennium bug problems, but Russian experts denied the need for direct help from the West.

"Russia can solve this problem herself," Salnikov said.

The Pentagon said the delegation was expected to discuss the implications of the bug for nuclear early warning systems. The Russian Defense Ministry has not confirmed that the team will come but said this week it considered the bug a problem.

Last Friday, Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov approved the creation of a government commission to combat the threat.

Some Russian officials said the country would fare better than Western countries which had spent more time and money on countering the threat.

"According to some reports, transport in America will be stopped for three months because of the '2000 problem'," Menshikov said. "We will not have such a big problem."

Link at

http://www.sightings.com/ufo2/y2ktransport.htm

Andy

1 mistake.

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), January 30, 1999

Answers

Funny - I've entered the Web time warp. I saw the title of this thread, about an article I saw two days ago, and I thought to myself "that's old news."

Hmmm. Of course, it's valuable to post it again, massive threadage on the forum and all, thanks Andy. Just an observation...

-- pshannon (pshannon@inch.com), January 30, 1999.