Pentagon wants to avoid misunderstandings over nuclear weapons related to millennium bug.

The United States has again asked Russia to join in minimizing the risk of a missile-launch misunderstanding at the height of Year 2000 computer uncertainties, the U.S. Defense Department said Tuesday. Moscow has not yet replied to the latest U.S. overture, said a Pentagon spokesman. At issue is a proposed temporary "early warning" center that would keep missile-launching commanders constantly aware of what the other side was seeing and doing during the potentially troublesome date rollover. Simulations have shown that older computers and microchips could crash or malfunction by misreading the year 2000 as 1900, the result of an old programming shortcut based on a two-digit date field. A facility designed to be shared with Russia to head off any false alerts has already been set up by the United States at Peterson Air Force Base, near Colorado Springs, Colo. President Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin set the project in motion when they met in Moscow last September as part of a post-Cold War plan to share early warning data about long-range missile launches. Before the bombing of Serbia drove U.S.-Russian ties to their lowest ebb of the post-Cold War period, the United States and Russia had been talking regularly about 2000-related computer issues. Pentagon officials say they are fully confident, based on extensive testing, that critical systems in the U.S. nuclear chain of command will work flawlessly during the date change. They also say they see virtually no possibility of accidental launches because humans must make final decisions in both countries.