Drinking-water would be unavailable, the most pessimistic pundits feared, and chemical plants could malfunction, releasing clouds of toxic waste. Some even believed that a nuclear missile or two could mistakenly be launched. "I was expecting to wake up this morning and see bombs dropping out of the sky, or at least some sort of news," said Raj Modha, 21, an employee with AT&T Wireless in Santa Ana, California. "But it is just a regular day." "The Internet is up, the lights are on, I got dial-tone when I picked up the phone (and) terrorists did not attack the New Year's celebrations," said George Washington University professor Paula Gordon, noting that she had expected some Y2K fallout. "In short, the world has not ended," she concluded.

In western nations, political leaders emphasised that the absence of major Y2K hitches was confirmation that the billions of dollars spent on readying IT systems to handle the date change had been money well spent. "Had the effort not been made, had the money not been spent, we would be in a very different situation here right now," said John Koskinen, President Bill Clinton's Chief Y2K adviser. "I'm pleasantly surprised," he added.

"We expected that we would see more difficulties early on, particularly around the world" in less developed countries. The US public and private sectors together invested more than 100 billion dollars over the past three years - about 365 dollars for each person in the United States. And Koskinen estimated that the rest of the world had spent between 100 and 150 billion dollars on Y2K preparedness. "The fact that there was so much preparation done accounts for the fact we have encountered so few problems," said Don Meyer, spokesman for the US Senate special committee on the Year 2000 technology problem.