Moscow and Washington have agreed in principle to share missile early warning information at a centre in Colorado over the New Year to prevent nuclear missteps if Russian satellites are blinded by a millennium bug, US officials said today.

Details still have to be worked out, but Defence Secretary William Cohen will discuss the US proposal with Russian Defence Minister Igor Sergeyev in Moscow this month, a defence official said.

Pentagon officials hoped an agreement will be reached.

"There is an agreement in principle," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The September 13 meeting between Cohen and Sergeyev, which was announced in Moscow on Monday but has not been officially confirmed by the Pentagon, would be the highest level talks on the US proposal since March, when Russia broke off discussions in anger over the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia.

But lower level talks resumed recently and Pentagon officials have urged the Russians to send officers to the centre in Colorado Springs, officials said.

Washington is worried that if computers in Russia's nuclear command and control system fail when their internal calendars turn over to the year 2000, confusion could lead to potentially dangerous misunderstandings.

"The concern isn't that a rocket could be launched automatically," said Major Michael Birmingham, a spokesman for the US Space Command who noted that US and Russian launch procedures preclude that.

"The concern is that satellite systems that detect missile launches or observe missile launches will have a Y2K problem that will cause the country's satellites to go blind," he said.

It is believed that computers programmed to read the calendar year as two digits will be stumped on January 1 when the year 2000 registers as "00," throwing entire systems into turmoil.

US military officials report that all but two US nuclear-related "mission critical" systems are now Y2K compliant, but they worry that Russian systems may not be.

As a hedge against that, the US military has set up a small centre at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs where US and Russian military personnel can exchange unclassified information about launches in the days before and after the New Year.

"The intent is to have an American and a Russian side-by-side to ensure strategic stability," Birmingham said.

It would consist of two Russian officers sitting alongside a US officer and a senior non commissioned officer, who would be in voice communication with the US early warning command centre inside nearby Cheyenne Mountain.

The US-Russian centre will have a hotline linking it to Moscow, Birmingham said.

If any anomalies do occur in the Russian early warning system, the Russian officers could consult the Americans and report back to Moscow.

Plans call for the centre to operate from December 27 to January

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