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.
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 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.”
