A homogeneous color magnetic field is known to be unstable for the fluctuations perpendicular to the field in the color space (the Nielsen-Olesen instability). We argue that these unstable modes, exponentially growing, generate an azimuthal magnetic field with the original field being in the z-direction, which causes the Nielsen-Olesen instability for another type of fluctuations. The growth rate of the latter unstable mode increases with the momentum p_z and can become larger than the formers growth rate which decreases with increasing p_z. These features may explain the interplay between the primary and secondary instabilities observed in the real-time simulation of a non-expanding glasma, i.e., stochastically generated anisotropic Yang-Mills fields without expansion.