Word: y2k
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...problem is that there is no clear agreement, even among sober experts, of how bad the Y2K computer problem will be. Mike McClure, who is in charge of making sure that Georgia's electric-power giant Southern Co. is Y2K compliant, has the attitude of a lot of the techno-savvy elite. In safeguarding his personal affairs, McClure says he will be "very diligent" in keeping bank and stock records for the months prior to January 2000. He will file away his 401(k) statements and buy plenty of candles and water and withdraw several weeks' worth of cash...
...really knows how bad things will get until the witching hour arrives. The Pentagon insists that 95% of its "mission critical" computers will be fixed by June and all of them before Dec. 31. But nuclear weapons systems in all nations--including Russia, where the state of Y2K preparations is anybody's guess--are computer dependent. In November the British American Security Information Council, a nuclear disarmament group, warned that a Y2K glitch could lead to erroneous early-warning reports or even trigger the accidental launch of a nuclear missile. Nuclear power plants could be vulnerable to the same difficulties...
...that kind of uncertainty that some religious millennialists are seizing upon, and in the process moving quickly from the plausible to the hyperbolic. In pulpits and on videotapes, on Christian radio stations and Internet websites, there are dedicated prophets of doom. They warn of a cascade of Y2K calamities--massive power blackouts, the failure of hospital, factory and fire equipment, the collapse of banking, food shortages, riots. A Y2K article posted last year on the website of the Christian Coalition speculated that President Clinton might use the chaos that Y2K unleashes as an opportunity to seize dictatorial powers. The televangelist...
...Second Coming. Genuine Christians disappear to heaven. Everyone else is abandoned to suffer a terrible earthquake, wars and the whims of the Antichrist, a.k.a. U.N. Secretary-General Nicolae Carpathia of Romania. Collectively the books have sold more than 3 million copies. LaHaye also offers maximalist warnings about Y2K. It "very well could trigger a financial meltdown," he warned recently in an online- chat event, "leading to an international depression, which would make it possible for the Antichrist or his emissaries to establish a one-world currency or a one-world economic system, which will dominate the world commercially until...
Among the Y2K-worried there are also more secular survivalists, believers in the worst-case scenarios who, while they may be Christians too, don't know or care whether the chaos they foresee is any part of God's plan. They are just sure something bad is coming. One of the best known is Ed Yourdon, a computer theorist whose book Time Bomb 2000 is in its 12th printing. Yourdon and his wife are moving from Manhattan to an adobe house near Taos, N.M., that has solar panels and soon a windmill to provide power. "There are so many things...