Senator ALLISON (10:06 PM) —I rise tonight to discuss a matter of great international importance: the year 2000 and the chance that computerised control systems for the world's nuclear arsenals could fail at the turn of the century. This is not just some sort of superstitious hype; the issue is very real and very much to hand. Right now Australia needs to be pushing for the world's nuclear weapon states to at least take their nuclear weapons off high level or hair-trigger alert as the year 2000 rolls over. This push is not coming just from the Democrats or the anti-nuclear lobby; peace activists, academics, politicians from many countries and military advisers all over the world are now saying that the consequences of not taking appropriate action may well be serious.

The danger of keeping nuclear weapons on high level alert status was brought home on 25 January 1995, when Russian authorities mistook a Norwegian scientific probe for a US Trident ballistic missile and came within minutes of launching a nuclear retaliation. The authorities quickly alerted President Boris Yeltsin, who stood prepared with the nuclear briefcase—that is, the modem in a briefcase that orders the firing of nuclear missiles. For four minutes the military waited on Yeltsin's response and, just a few minutes short of the procedural deadline for an impending nuclear attack, senior military officers realised that the rocket was in fact headed far out to sea.

Writing in Scientific American, Dr Bruce Blair of the Bookings Institute in Washington DC and formerly of the US Air Force Strategic Air Command, said:

That frightening incident aptly demonstrates the danger of maintaining nuclear arsenals in a state of hair-trigger alert. Doing so heightens the possibility that one day someone will mistakenly launch nuclear-tipped missiles, either because of a technical failure or a human error—a mistake made, perhaps, in the rush to respond to false indications of an attack.

What might happen in the event of a mistaken launch? A single missile from a US submarine in the waters north of Russia is capable of scattering eight nuclear bombs over Moscow within just 15 minutes. Less than 15 minutes after receiving the order to attack, six US Trident submarine missiles at sea could loft roughly a thousand warheads, and several Russian ballistic missile submarines could dispatch between 300 and 400. So the two nuclear superpowers remain poised to fire a total of more than 5,000 nuclear weapons at each other within 30 minutes.

Major urban centres in the United States, Britain, France and Russia are threatened because of this state of high level alert. A typical intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile would cause at least 10 times the devastation of the Hiroshima bomb, which destroyed some 90 per cent of that city in 1945, killing 45,000 on the first day and a further 19,000 in subsequent months. Cold War tensions may have ceased since then but Cold War nuclear policy has not. Both the United States and Russia still hold to the Cold War policy of launch on warning to prevent their respective arsenals from being destroyed. The risk today is not of a premeditated nuclear war between nuclear superpowers, of course, but that a series of malfunctions may result in nuclear accidents.

As senators will know, potential year 2000 computer problems stem from the two-digit programming short cut that causes older computers to read 2000 as 1900, and false readings could cause widespread malfunctions on computer networks. The key concern relating to Y2K compliance and nuclear accidents is that the systems built to control Russian nuclear weapons are now crumbling. The collapse of the Soviet Union has meant that many radar stations are now outside Russian territory, such as the key Latvian radar station destroyed in 1995. This station was responsible for the North Sea and North Atlantic area of the Russian early warning system, and today a backup system provides far less accurate information than that radar station provided.

Many Russian military surveillance satellites are malfunctioning and many radar ships have been decommissioned. In February 1997 the members of the institute responsible for designing the control systems for the Russian strategic rocket forces staged a one-day strike to protest about pay arrears and the lack of resources to upgrade their equipment. At the time the defence minister said:

Russia may soon approach a threshold beyond which its missiles and nuclear systems become uncontrollable.

These concerns were confirmed afterwards by the US Central Intelligence Agency. Power to various nuclear weapons installations has been repeatedly shut off by local utilities after the military authorities there failed to pay their electricity bills. Equipment that controls nuclear weapons frequently malfunctions and critical electronic devices and computers sometimes switch to combat mode for no apparent reason. On seven occasions during the autumn of 1996 operations at some nuclear weapons centres were severely disrupted when thieves tried to mine critical communications cables for their copper.

But the problem does not lie solely with Russia. US military advisers have very real concerns as to the safety of their nuclear arsenal and the relevance of Cold War policy in the light of Y2K problems. Admiral Stansfield Turner was a commander of the nuclear submarine fleet in the US Navy and was also the Director of Central Intelligence under President Carter. In 1998 he wrote a book called Caging the Nuclear Genie in which he developed a proposal for a nuclear disarmament strategy. He said:

I think that one of the first things we should do is take every US weapon off high alert. We have an absolutely insane policy in this country . . . We're in particular danger today because the Russian early warning system has broken down. . .

The US has thankfully taken this issue seriously. With the Russians it has established the new Centre for Year 2000 Strategic Stability in Colorado Springs, home of the US Space Command and the North American Air Defence Command, which can track missile launches worldwide. Here the nuclear superpowers are preparing their likely responses to the Y2K problems.

Whilst it is encouraging to see this development and other support offered to the Russians by the US, both countries continue their Cold War policy of launch on warning and maintain their nuclear arsenals in a state of hair-trigger preparedness. So, come the end of this year, the essential Y2K concern is that Russia's unreliable early warning radar and military surveillance satellite systems will either generate false indications of attack or shut down sensors used to crosscheck the validity of attack indications.

Not one of the nuclear weapon states can guarantee that its computer systems are Y2K compliant. The Russians have been working on the problem with the United States but plans for a New Year's Eve gathering of generals and admirals of both countries at the Centre for Y2K Strategic Stability were delayed recently because Russia was angry over NATO's air war against Serbia.

The week before last, the Senate unanimously agreed to my motion calling on the Australian government to encourage all nuclear weapon states to develop measures to eliminate the risk of nuclear accidents come midnight 1999. The Democrats will keep the pressure on the Australian government to ensure nuclear weapon states do everything in their power to prevent nuclear accidents, and the only way to prevent these accidents is to persuade nuclear weapon states to employ the best solution to the possible problem, and that has to be de-alerting their nuclear weaponry.

De-alerting is recommended by the Canberra Commission on the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons, the United Nations, the Federation of American Scientists, the British-American Security Information Council and many other international organisations. De-alerting is taking nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert by removing warheads from the missiles that carry them. Neither the Russians nor the Americans appear likely to de-alert if the other nation does not. I would like to see the Australian government—perhaps Senator Hill—take this issue up on the world stage and argue as persuasively as he did to stop Kakadu being listed as in danger.

I would argue that if the Jabiluka uranium mine was worth spending $1 million-plus on for public relations and jetsetting around the world to badger developing countries into siding with Australia, then surely we should make an effort to persuade at least Russia, France, the US and others to de-alert their nuclear weapons. It seems to me that the safety of the world is at stake so long as unreliable and extremely dangerous weapons of mass destruction are poised to launch at the world's most populous cities. I would argue that the time to act is now. (Time expired)

Senate adjourned at 10.16 p.m.