  A noisy damping parameter in the equation of motion of a nonlinear oscillator
renders the fixed point of the system unstable when the amplitude of the noise
is sufficiently large. However, the stability diagram of the system can not be
predicted from the analysis of the moments of the linearized equation. In the
case of a white noise, an exact formula for the Lyapunov exponent of the system
is derived. We then calculate the critical damping for which the {\em
nonlinear} system becomes unstable. We also characterize the intermittent
structure of the bifurcated state above threshold and address the effect of
temporal correlations of the noise by considering an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck noise.
