I hadn't thought of that as a serious possibility, but a friend and I considered writing a novel on it.
The basic idea was that a bunch of US weapons systems wouldn't work due to Y2K - things like ballistic missile navigation. So the US was frantically trying to get all this patched so that they would have a credible defense after Y2K. The Chinese knew this, and launched on New Years Day...
... and completely missed, because they had used borrowed Russian code for their ballistic missile navigation. The Russians had stolen US ballistic missile navigation code, which had the Y2K issue in it.
So it was not actually eight zeros but apparently 6 zeroes and the "key under the doormat" (in the safe, but not really something you needed the president to access, the opposite of what was claimed then).
""The board wishes to point out," they added, with the magnificent blandness of many official accident reports, "that software is an expression of a highly detailed design and does not fail in the same sense as a mechanical system." (...)
(...) really important software has a reliability of 99.9999999 percent. At least, until it doesn't. "
The statistics is against that generous number of nines.
The basic idea was that a bunch of US weapons systems wouldn't work due to Y2K - things like ballistic missile navigation. So the US was frantically trying to get all this patched so that they would have a credible defense after Y2K. The Chinese knew this, and launched on New Years Day...
... and completely missed, because they had used borrowed Russian code for their ballistic missile navigation. The Russians had stolen US ballistic missile navigation code, which had the Y2K issue in it.