
What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived - mathgenius
https://www.newyorker.com/news/as-told-to/what-it-felt-like-in-hawaii-when-warning-of-an-in-bound-missile-arrived?mbid=social_facebook
======
McKayDavis
I live on O'ahu and was holding my phone when the emergency alert came in at
8:07am. I yelled "Oh my God!" and ran to show my wife the message. I've run
through this scenario a few times in my head before and I knew every minute
was critical -- so I went into action mode immediately. I told my two kids to
get dressed _now_ because we were leaving in exactly 1 minute. The reason we
were leaving is our house is single-wall wood construction with no sealed
windows and no HVAC, which is pretty much the least ideal shelter possible in
a nuclear fallout scenario.

The four of us were in the car on the road at ~8:09 and inside the local LDS
(Mormon) Church 0.9 miles away at 8:12am. The church building is the nearest
concrete structure with sealed windows and interior rooms that I knew I could
gain access to. Unfortunately it doesn't have a basement, but very few
structures in Hawaii do.

Thankfully, the doors were already open as there was a family inside doing
some cleaning. We were the first to arrive and at least a dozen other families
showed in the next 10 minutes. We all hunkered in the gym, some crying, some
praying, most just in shock. The first glimmer of hope came when I read the
first report of the it being a false alarm on Twitter at around 8:23am.

The whole incident was absolutely terrifying and I'm very upset that it even
happened. But, we learned some valuable lessons and I'm satisfied with how my
family responded to the incident. Overall, my plan was good and was executed
about as flawlessly as possible. I realize we need to add a "bug-out bag" of
essential items (e.g. medications, cell phone charger, hand-crank radio) that
we can grab as we head out.

It most definitely helped that I had considered this scenario before and knew
exactly what steps I would take. The one good takeaway is that this event has
sparked many similar conversations state-wide (and beyond) of what to do in
these situations. Here's hoping these plans never have to be executed again...

~~~
dmarlow
What will you do if you can't get into your church building?

~~~
McKayDavis
I had considered that too and breaking a window to gain access was an option.

I'm not a member of the church, but I chose this building specifically as it
was most likely to have other people seeking shelter there who also had keys
to the building. Indeed, the first family to arrive after us lived a block
away and I did verify they do have a key.

~~~
cbr

        I'm not a member of the church
    

I'm atheist, but if things were going horribly wrong LDS would be high on my
list of people to be around.

~~~
henrikschroder
Pro: A bunch of them are nutty doomsday preppers, with a lot of food supplies
in their basements.

Con: The polygamy, child abuse, and endless fast and testimony meetings get
kinda old after a while.

~~~
joshuakcockrell
Mormons stopped practicing polygamy in 1890.

~~~
amazingman
How was that decided?

~~~
greggman
the law banned it.

note though all Christian religions claim to believe in a book, the Bible,
that has people who practiced polygamy blessed by God. It's pretty
hypocritical for any one who believes in the Bible to be against polygamy when
the God that book is about blessed the practice.

~~~
tisdy
Where in the Bible is this polygamy blessed by God?

------
IIAOPSW
I'm currently living in Japan. So obviously I have a plan for nuclear war.

First, I'm going to press send on the doomsday draft which is sitting in my
e-mail.

Second, I'm going to go to youtube and play "We all go together" by Tom Leher.

Third, I got a bottle sitting in my desk that I'm going to pop open.
Presumably I'll be in the office at the time so one final round with the
coworkers.

The people in this article seem much more stressed and have not yet come to
terms with the fact that sometimes life ends abruptly (nuclear or otherwise).
If you actually get a nuclear war warning for real, my plan is just as good as
any other. At least I didn't spend my last moments frantically running a
bathtub and panicking.

~~~
warent
I don't know about you but filling the bathtub is my instinctual reaction to
anything that goes wrong. Job going badly? Fill the bathtub. Medical
emergency? Fill the bathtub. Lost my house key? FILL THE BATHTUB.

~~~
sudhirj
Ah. I actually thought filling the bathtub was a measure to mitigate the
effects of the heat wave and maybe the radiation as well.

~~~
komali2
I think it's so if you survive, you have clean drinking water for when the
infrastructure has failed and you're waiting for rescue.

~~~
torstenvl
This is exactly the thought. Water is the #1 survival necessity but an
enormously fragile resource. Electricity can go out, pipes can burst, water
supplies can be tainted. Some people keep years worth of canned food around
but almost nobody has a year's supply of water.

~~~
sjg007
Don't forget that the water heater has 50 gallons in it.

~~~
greggman
not in Japan. Japanese water heaters are on demand heaters. I love them
becahse unlike US style tank based heaters Japanese on demand heaters never
run out of hot water.

~~~
sjg007
Ok but maybe it’s worth having a two stage system? In the event of the
apocalypse..

Also a high school will have massive water heaters and a chiller..

------
ourmandave
_Nearly forty minutes passed before a second message went out: “There is no
missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii._

 _...“It was a mistake made during a standard procedure at the changeover of a
shift, and an employee pushed the wrong button.”_

I've seen some shitty Admin Panels, but somebody "pushed the wrong button" and
an end-of-your-world false alarm was going off for 40 minutes?! WTF?

~~~
herbst
Exactly my thoughts. Errors happen, Developers are lazy and interfaces suck.
However this is definitly not a excuse, multiple things have to be completely
wrong that it even could get this far.

~~~
beamatronic
I've built a lot of alerts. The "This is not a drill" text should not have
even been entered until the system was fully tested and operational.

------
brndnmtthws
I live in New York City and I felt a small degree of panic when the reports
showed up on Twitter. However, my initial instinct was "either the system
doesn't work, or someone messed up".

If someone started firing missiles at the US, the risk that we'd start
shooting them back seems high, and I think NYC would be a city that would get
pummeled in retaliation. This is probably true for a lot of major coastal
cities, especially Seattle, Vancouver, SF/LA, NYC, Washington DC, and Boston.

Fun NYC fact: the city is littered with fallout shelters:
[https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1Zm18xuBxp8kSysodfr...](https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1Zm18xuBxp8kSysodfrxm-
hYxu_E&hl=en_US&ll=40.807352561683786%2C-73.922393&z=10)

~~~
ashleyn
Growing up I got the impression that a fallout shelter was a purpose-specific
room deep underground. So every time I saw the "Fallout Shelter" sign on a
building, I figured it was built with one of these "secret underground rooms".
Think dedicated, locked stairwell that goes a thousand feet underground; after
all, that's how it was pictured in my "Way Things Work" book. When we went to
the bank, it was something of an intrigue, where the door to this secret
underground cavern really was and what was inside.

As I got to go into more city buildings throughout my life, I noticed many of
the rooms designated "fallout shelters" were just some spare room in the
basement, complete with ventilation to the outside and really, not much
farther than a few steps to the front door.

There may be a lot of "fallout shelters" in NYC but I get the impression that
the labeling wasn't very strict and that many of these "shelters" won't really
protect you from "fallout".

~~~
JKCalhoun
Looked through the index of my early German (English translated, published
around the 1960's, I believe) "The Way Things Work" volumes I and II and
didn't see fallout shelters.

It occurred to me though — when did they start calling them "fallout" shelters
rather than "bomb" shelters?

I'm guessing (after having read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb") that this
would be about when the hydrogen bomb came along.

It was sobering to read how dramatically more powerful the fusion bomb was
compared to the first fission bombs. Suddenly the idea of going into a
basement shelter to "survive" the blast became laughable. If you were far
enough from the blast though your only comfort could come from a shelter from
the fallout.

~~~
burfog
It's not laughable.

The building code in Switzerland specifies that residential construction must
contain a shelter that withstands a 12 megaton blast at 700 meters. The
country has more shelter than people.

Another thing to note is that the multi-megaton weapons aren't in style
anymore, due to improved targeting accuracy.

~~~
ddxxdd
>Another thing to note is that the multi-megaton weapons aren't in style
anymore, due to improved targeting accuracy.

I think it was due to the opposite, actually. The development of Multiple
Independent Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs) made many small nuclear warheads more
valuable than fewer large nuclear warheads.

If an ICBM is a shotgun, then kiloton-level MIRVs are like birdshot, which is
seen as more valuable than megaton-level buckshot.

~~~
QAPereo
Completely right. The major military uses of nuclear weapons are as sources of
powerful shockwaves which are devastating to drag-sensitive targets, and as
firestarters. In both cases, you can optimize for these effects over a given
area by using 100kt-1mt warheads, and airbursts with overlapping blast radii.

The problem is that as yield rises, the losses to the upper atmosphere are
proportionally greater, as is fallout. Multiple targeting with smaller
warheads solves that as well, which critically allows for more efficient
burning of nuclear fuel.

Finally, the larger the fireball, the more likely you’ll have it touching the
the ground leading to losses, and kicking up more debris which will mix with
fission products and unburned fuel. Of course that’s also one way to use a
standard nuclear weapon in a manner more consistent with an enhanced radiation
weapon, real “salting the earth” stuff. That is generally comsidered to be bad
form, even among nuclear powers.

------
baursak
A good piece of perspective on this -- it's what many civilians feel day in
day out in places like Pakistan when killer drones are flying over.

~~~
anotheryou
Until it becomes the sad norm and you just get on with your life I guess.

~~~
anotheryou
(Just for clarification, this doesn't make it any better or less traumatizing.
It is probably much more traumatizing, people just have to cope with it,
because you can't live in constant fear forever.)

~~~
akkat
I have friend who in Jerusalem Israel during the second intifada. Terrorists
were blowing themselves up on busses killing or maiming nearly everyone on the
bus. Yet the locals continued to take busses because they needed to get to
school or work and stopping normal life until after the terrorism stopped was
out of the question. Not everyone can simply go on a vacation until everything
fixes itself.

~~~
stordoff
Reminds me of a half-jokey comment I saw a few times after one of the more
recent London attacks: Non-Londoners were desperately avoiding central London;
Londoners were complaining the Tube was delayed.

------
gdubs
It’s interesting how people (anecdotally) don’t seem to have any plan for a
nuclear attack, as opposed to, say, an earthquake or a fire.

I think there’s a stigma around even considering the possibility. However, it
makes sense to at least talk with your family about what you would all do.

According to what I’ve read on the gov sites, it’s very survivable for a lot
of people if you take key steps: surround yourself with as much building as
you can (the middle floor of a high rise, or a basement three stories deep,
etc.) Shower and dispose of any clothing that may be contaminated. Wait out
the initial 24 to 48 hours until you’ve gotten official instructions (a hand
crank radio is good to have.)

Generally, having a first aid kit, water, and food, is common sense for any
potential outage of the infrastructure.

Sucks to consider the possibility, but worth having a conversation.

~~~
macintux
I think many people consider nuclear war an end of the world event. Working
hard to survive just to be left adrift in the ashes of civilization with
likely long-term health effects seems counterproductive to some of us.

~~~
rectangletangle
The US/Russia/France have already detonated thousands of full power nuclear
weapons all across the globe, primarily for testing. Although major cities
would be ash, with millions lost in the senseless conflict, life would go on.
You'd likely only have health problems if you had acute exposure to the blast.
If you live somewhere irrelivant, radiation exposure won't be much more of a
concern than it already is currently; whatever enviromemtal impacts nuclear
weapons have, have already taken place.

Though the standard of living for survivors is sure to plummet, as famine and
other secondary problems start to take precedence.

End of the world? No. Set back industrialized society two centuries? Sure.

~~~
cgmg
Why two centuries? Most areas of the world are extremely unlikely to be
involved in a nuclear conflict and/or receive significant damage.

~~~
rectangletangle
Two centuries is somewhat arbitrary, because there are so many assumptions in
the notion of "large scale nuclear conflict" as is. Areas that aren't direct
targets of nuclear weaponry will still suffer major setbacks, as supply chains
for various goods and resources are disrupted. Present day problems, like
hunger, access to medical care, and safe drinking water would just become
magnified. For example, a nuclear conflict could potentially cascade into a
much more dangerous famine, because supply for modern pesticides and agro-
chemicals is temporarily destroyed. Supply chains for antibiotics could be
disrupted, resulting in outbreaks of various preventable illnesses. If you
total all the possibilities up, I suspect the secondary impacts of nuclear
conflict would be worse than the actual warfare.

~~~
macintux
If oil production is destroyed, I assume the secondary impacts will be
catastrophic.

------
tomalpha
I always struggle with news interviews that go along the lines of “So you’re
entire family’s been killed. _How do you feel?_ ”.

I realise it’s easy to lose the impact on people’s lives behind a few words in
a headline, and maybe I’m just too much of a cynic.

Pleasingly (to me) this article’s focus on feelings has some real meaning:
namely the widespread panic that was caused by the false alarm.

(Like other folks in the previous HN thread I hope constructive lessons can be
learned at all levels from this)

~~~
maxerickson
I don't struggle with those interviews at all, they are outrageous and
shameful.

There's an argument to be made about conveying the scope of a tragedy to the
public but it's also pretty clear that cameras are being shoved in people's
faces.

~~~
pmoriarty
I feel exactly the opposite.

It's critical that the real impact of death and destruction be effectively
conveyed in the media. All too often it's trivialized, sugar-coated, or made
to seem like a video game.

People need to realize how devastating such violence is, instead of viewing it
as a game or a joke, if there is to be any hope of reducing its incidence.

~~~
maxerickson
I mentioned that I understand that in the second paragraph and expressed that
I don't think they do a good job of it.

Much of the media treats victims of tragedies like shit. All the time. It's a
race to who knows where.

------
politelemon
> and an employee pushed the wrong button

I would assume that was how it was explained to the governor, and that the
actual system is software based (right?) - there couldn't possibly be an
actual physical 'ballistic missile alert' button right next to the 'shift
change' button.

In which case, the triggering of this alert is probably a bit more complex.
However, this is treated as a sensitive system so there likely will not be an
actual post-mortem on the incident

~~~
dbbk
According to the Washington Post, it was a dropdown with two options next to
each other - "Test missile alert" and "Missile alert". It's really that bad.

[https://twitter.com/ericuman/status/952719318688718850](https://twitter.com/ericuman/status/952719318688718850)

~~~
jmcqk6
It's shocking it doesn't happen more often then.

------
v4n4d1s
Anyone got data (Heartrate etc.) from Apple Watches / Fitbit / Other Tracking
devices?

~~~
McKayDavis
This [1] reddit thread has a fitbit graph.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Hawaii/comments/7q6hzg/average_card...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Hawaii/comments/7q6hzg/average_cardio_workout_for_the_state_of_hawaii/)

~~~
anigbrowl
Is that for real? It looks too simple. I do appreciate your sharing it and
think this sort of quantitative data is absolutely valuable in helping to
measure externalities.

------
joewee
Went through two major disasters. The most critical thing is to have a plan.
Make everyone in your household aware of the plan. Then execute it, practice
once a year if you can. Execution during the disaster helps distract you from
the emotional turmoil.

------
jernfrost
Must be a terrible thing, if anything good can come out of this I hope it
alerts people to the horrors of nuclear war. I am puzzled by why we speak so
much about global warming but almost nobody talks about nuclear war.

Global warming is not remotely as dangerous as nuclear war. Sure it will make
crops fails some places, cause water shortage for some millions, force people
to move off the coast etc. But it will not kill billions of people. Nuclear
war could do that.

As long as the US and Russia stockpile huge quantities of nuclear weapons the
whole world is in jeopardy. The number of times nuclear war has almost gotten
triggered due to mistakes like this one in Hawaii is scary to think of.

How many human errors or hardware/software failures need to happen before one
day, an actual launch of nuclear missiles happen by default?

These weapons are far too dangerous to stockpile in such huge quantities.
There should be a push to reduce the stockpile to something like 20-30
missiles.

It isn't hard to imagine a president in the style of Donald Trump, acting
irrational and making a rash and stupid mistake which puts the world on fire.

~~~
namelost
If nuclear war is that close to happening, then we are already too far gone to
address it. Who is going to be the one to convince Trump to decommission some
of America's nuclear weapons?

~~~
burfog
Putin has more nuclear weapons. Shouldn't he decommission his first? He has
already risked kicking off WWIII several times. He took a chunk of Ukraine,
broke two chunks off of Georgia, make a bunch of border incursions into
NATO/EU countries up north, and is currently supporting a civil war in
Ukraine.

The situation is pretty crazy. Russia is far from the world's biggest economy,
yet it is the nation with the greatest nuclear capability. There is clearly a
desire to hold the rest of the world hostage, strongly equating fear with
respect.

Note that Ukraine once had nuclear weapons. They gave them up, being assured
that Russia would not threaten territorial integrity and that the USA would
help ensure this. We see what those promises were worth. Giving up the nuclear
capability was obviously a mistake. There is no way that Putin would have
annexed Crimea under the threat of nuclear retaliation.

~~~
codetwelve
I would suggest you take a bigger look at geopolitics. What Nato is, how it's
made and how it's really an extension of the US army. Gorbachev was promised
that America and Nato would not expand to the east. Little by little they
encroached on Russia's borders and meddled with countries to expand there
power. There are now Nato and American military bases at Russia's doorstep and
Ukraine was set to be next. That is why Russia took a stand.

I don't agree with Russia's policies, also not an American, but just taking a
look at the last few decades, you can see the build up and America is not
innocent in any of it.

------
qbaqbaqba
During the Cold War in Poland we had no nuclear shelters only huge stockpiles
of Lugol's iodine, which is said to be blocking intake of radioactive
isotopes. It came handy after the Chernobyl.

------
ggsp
Stupid question: why would you fill up your bathtub?

~~~
stevenleeg
Stocking up on drinking water or having a source of water to flush the toilet
with (by manually refilling the tank).

~~~
asdjasldkjkljd
Drinking water. Don't flush the toilet because you might eventually need the
water in the tank too.

~~~
ddxxdd
I've never understood this. What do you do when you need to defecate?

~~~
MagnumOpus
Poo in a bucket, put a lid on it. If the alternative is eventually dying of
thirst or having to venture out into a contaminated neighbourhood, necessity
compels.

------
peter303
You know how people born before 1985 felt when there was the ever present
global thermonuclear war threat. We used to practice duck-and-cover in grade
school. Woulnt help if very near a bomb explosion, but a little helpful from
distant blasts. Plus there were near misses of a launch in 1962 and 1983 on
news. Plus several other secreat incidents revealed years later. Contributed
to hippie malaise that boober parents were fucking up the world.

------
rawnlq
AskReddit is really good for these kind of questions. There's a large thread
going on right now:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7q6gys/reddit_me...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7q6gys/reddit_members_in_hawaii_what_initially_went/)

------
Myrmornis
I'm amazed this isn't being considered a bigger deal - I would expect the
government to announce a major inquiry into how this happened and what to do
to prevent it ever happening again, and I would expect heads to roll.

------
bahmboo
We sat next to a water tank on the side opposite of Honolulu. No other
options. A year ago if we had gotten the same alert it would have just been
wtf instead of terror. Hacker angle: we need different levels of emergency
alerts. People turn them off because they don't want yet another irrelevant
flood warning for some place 20 miles from them or an Amber alert at 3 am. In
this particular case the lucky ones had them turned off. 38 minutes to send
out correction. Just sayin

------
rpmcmurphy
This should give everyone serious pause. If this false alarm had been sent by
NORAD (it has happened before, read Command and Control), it's very likely
that several million people in both Koreas, Japan and possibly the US would be
char-grilled nuclear krispies right now. There needs to be a serious re-
evaluation of our alert systems and launch on warning posture.

------
hedora
How close did we get to nuking them “back”?

~~~
Symmetry
The US military never thought that there was any nuclear attack inbound so not
at all. The real danger was that either North Korea thought that this alarm
was cover for us preparing for a counterstrike after we preemptively nuked
them, causing them to decide to launch, or that Trump saw the news on Fox and
ordered a launch and didn't let himself be dissuaded.

------
rdlecler1
I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw PTSD.

~~~
dude01
In fact, I would say that it was the goal of this event -- inducing PTSD on a
small part of the U.S. (the state of Hawaii).

------
WillReplyfFood
Technical Support will come riding through the apocalyptic wasteland on a
technical, robbing those who for years refused to read the manuals.

------
hoppelhase
Any study/articles on how the boundary of starting a nuclear war and being the
first one to launch a missile is much lower after that incident?

------
EldonMcGuinness
Thanks for this, when I heard about the announcement my mind just went blank
and I'm nowhere near Hawaii!

------
SQL2219
3 words: Software alert fatigue.

------
m3kw9
I’m waiting for the Colbert interview with the man of the moment

------
xcodevn
Now let's think about the feeling of people in other countries when be
attacked by US missiles.

------
chiefalchemist
I think it's safe to assume the 100,000+ Iraqi civilians killed in the
conflict in Iraq received no such warning. It's shameful how completely
unaware most Americans are of the terror their MIC imposes on others.

Ironically, this incident in HI will feed the collective fears and the wrath
of the MIC will extend further still. The opportunity to question the status
quo will be lost.

~~~
sschueller
Or the continued drone war that is inflicting a continuous terror on many
civilians. Now considerd standard operating procedure and no longer mentioned
in the media.

Imagine living your life not knowing if the coffee place you are visiting is
in a drones cross hairs. Then image what kind of hate you would feel towards
the country inflicting this terror on you.

This is not how you solve extremism and bring peace. This is how you make it
worse.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Yup. The USA has actively created plenty of shitholes - in places where the
faces are not pure European white - and that gets zero public reaction.

The current POTUS uses the word shithole to describe a group of countries and
he's X, Y and Z.

Yeah, Trump is a moron. But the hypocrisy of the press and the public is a
moral violation.

~~~
totalZero
The USA has contributed to the development of plenty of flourishing economies.
Panama is a rich nation thanks in large part to international cargo shipment.
American tourists spend heavily in several other Latin American and Caribbean
economies. South Korea is one of the most highly developed nations in the
world, despite having been relatively poor prior to the Korean War. Canada and
Mexico have benefited for years from NAFTA. World War 2 would have been very
different for the Allies if it weren't for American weaponry and involvement.
NATO may not have withstood the Cold War were it not for American might.

Maybe you can give some examples to support the narrative of Americans
creating poor conditions in non-European countries. It's certainly not
Afghanistan, which had been a warzone for a long time before 9/11, which
provoked American involvement. And though it's possible, it's hard to argue
that Iraqi instability was the sole result of American invasion, as Saddam had
massacred several hundred thousand of his own citizens and was trying to
change the ethnic makeup of northern Iraq to dampen Kurdish separatism.

So I'm not sure to which countries you are referring.

~~~
newfoundglory
America’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t start after 9/11.

~~~
nbsd4lyfe
the first gulf war was in 1990 and the US was a party to it

~~~
newfoundglory
In 1955 the US was part of the creation of the Baghdad Pact. In the 1970s the
US supported a Kurdish uprising against the Iraqi government.

------
usnigg
I for one am convinced this is all part of a fear-mongering tactic of the US
army aimed at psychologically pushing US citizen into supporting another war
(crime). Unfortunately, Americans are all to easy to scare and the probability
that they will in panic commit the most unspeakable of all war crimes (which
they have already committed twice in the past) is much too high. The truth is
NK couldn't shoot a missile at the US even if they wanted to.

------
nkurz
I saw a high-effort self-post on Reddit that gave a good framework for
evaluating what might have happened. I thought it was good enough that I've
recopied it here in full hoping that author appreciates reaching a larger
audience and that discussion here might be better than that on Reddit.
Repeating, I'm not the author of what's written below.

\---

 _A couple of possibilities for what REALLY went down in Hawaii yesterday_

I used to work on the Minutemen 3 ICBMs for a high profile company. Can't
share too many details for obvious reasons. But I think the "mistake" of an
employee accidentally pressed the mass alert button is very unlikely. In fact,
I can think of a lot of things way more likely. Here's my two cents, in no
particular order:

 _The threat was real, the missile was shot down_

As others on this subreddit have already pointed out, the amount of time it
takes an ICBM to travel from Southeast Asia to Hawaii is approximately 20-30
min ( ~10 min to hit ICBM max speed of 7 km/s, ~7200 km, (7200/7)/(60) = ~17
min for total travel time of ~27 min, not accounting for earth's rotation in
that time period). The amount of time it took for the false alarm to be sent
out was 38 min. Now, the way the US's ABM system works is that they basically
launch a giant chunk of metal at the ICBM and hit it really hard. The ABMs
have no ordinance or anything, they just destroy the incoming missile through
shear impact. However, even though our ABM system is the best in the world,
it's still only successful around 50% of the time. So when the incoming threat
was discovered, it would still be protocol to alert the intended target of the
threat in the event that the ABM systems fail (and whatever other defenses we
have that I don't know about). I think it's at least feasible that the threat
was real, and the threat was dealt with successfully (and thankfully). The
question that tears this theory apart is: why would the US not tell us they
shot down an enemy ICBM? The most likely answer I can come up with is that
Trump doesn't want war. Maybe he just talks a big game. Or perhaps it's not
financially beneficial to start a war when there were no causalities. Whatever
it is, it's not that we don't know who launched the missile. When those things
take off we pretty much immediately know where it's going and where it came
from. So if there was a real threat, the US Gov is for whatever reason not
sharing this information with the public. Maybe they don't want to cause
panic. I don't know.

 _The EAS was hacked to provoke reaction from Trump_

The EAS has been hacked before, it's possible that it was hacked again. The
person or persons who hacked the system either did so for shits and giggles,
which is extremely fucked up considering how many people could have died if we
had retaliated, or they did so to intentionally cause a retaliation from Trump
in order to make him look bad. See, ICBMs function on something called
Mutually Assured Destruction. If someone like Russia launches their full force
of ICBMs at us, we have that half hour to retaliate. In a situation like that,
both countries lose. Using ICBMs against another country with ICBM's is
essentially committing suicide. If we had launched missiles towards Southeast
Asia, they would then have a chance to retaliate against us. I have hard time
believing that any hacker would do this, but then, there are some truly crazy
people out there. This could also explain why it took so long for them to send
out the second alert, because the system was hacked or down and they needed to
regain control or reset it. Also, if one of the employees didn't send the
message, they may not have even known about it for several minutes after.

 _The EAS was commandeered by a disgruntled employee_

This is the scenario I find most likely. Trump tends to piss an enormous
amount of people off. Perhaps one of the workers manning that operation
decided to try and make Trump look bad by sending out a false alert. It
certainly is a bit embarrassing to send an entire state into full panic mode
on accident. This is going to be a national incident for several days still.

 _The monitoring system used to look for incoming threats malfunctioned_

This happens more often than you would think. The early alert systems are very
sensitive. They're a lot better than they used to be, but they've detected
false missiles before. I've heard of them being triggered by sunlight
reflecting off large pieces of metal. They're sensitive for a reason, I mean
better safe than sorry, right? Somehow, yesterday, the conditions were just
right to trigger a false alarm. Instead of sharing with everyone how fallible
the system really is, the Gov decided to blame it on a careless employee. It
would cause a lot less panic.

 _The "false alert" was staged_

In an attempt to distract the MSM from some policy he is currently pursuing,
Trump ordered the "fake" threat. Now the news cycles will be dominated day and
night by this "mistake" allowing him to pursue his true intentions. Or,
alternatively, he wanted to demonstrate to the people that the U.S has an
early warning system, although I don't think this is likely as the amount of
panic that the alert would have caused (car crashes, heart attacks, etc) would
not have been worth it.

 _The mistake was exactly that; a mistake_

Honestly, I have a hard time believing that any operator could accidentally
send out a message like that. These guys are trained for months before they
are put at that station, and it seems to me like sending out a state wide
alert takes more than just one press of a button. Also, the operator would
have immediately noticed that the alert went out, and they would have been
able to correct it much faster (not the 38 min that is did).

Whatever really happened yesterday, I don't think it was just an errant press
of a button. But no matter what the actual cause was, this event was still a
tragedy. Why? If there ever is a real threat and people get this message, they
are now less likely to believe it, and that means they are less likely to seek
shelter or prepare in anyway. Remember guys, don't let this turn into a "the
Gov cried wolf" story. If you ever get a notification like this, your first
thought should be finding shelter, then questioning.

Good night everyone.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/7qax47/a_couple...](https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/7qax47/a_couple_of_possibilities_for_what_really_went/)

~~~
jjeaff
Regardless of the credentials of the poster, the fact that it was posted in
r/conspiracy makes me think it's not that useful of a comment. r/conspiracy
attracts a certain type of poster, one who finds possible consiparcy in
everything.

------
ultim8k
Well, if Trump wasn't there we wouldn't be talking about this "engineering"
problem. He is the one that triggered the whole nuclear story.

------
spraak
Pedantic pet peeve: spelling it as Hawaii instead of Hawai'i

~~~
nkurz
Is your peeve that you believe there exists some unwritten requirement that
all place names must use identical spellings without consideration of the
language they are written in? If so, I don't think this is reasonable.

Words are allowed to change when they are taken from one language to another.
It's spelled (and pronounced) Hawai'i when written in Hawaiian. But when
writing in English, as the article is, it's typically spelled (and pronounced)
Hawaii.

~~~
spraak
Both the symbol/mark and the sound exist natively in English text and speech,
so it bothers me in the same way someone might be bothered by mixing up
their/they're or your/you're.

~~~
__david__
Yes the mark exists, but it has a completely different meaning. It's used in a
way that's not a plural, a contraction, or an indication of dropped letters.
The mark makes zero sense in English.

~~~
spraak
You could say the same about most symbols in words that are used in English
but that are not from English. Your point doesn't stand.

Edit: I.e. it doesn't make it a reason not to use it. Even in English there
are many sounds that are not pronounced how they're written. We still take the
effort to put the 'w' in 'sword', but most will say 'sord'.

------
exabrial
Everyone is talking about nukes... I doubt nk has a compact nuclear warhead
that can fit on a ballistic missile. Maybe in another 5-10 years, but not
right now.

They most likely have chemical and biological weapons, as confirmed by the nk
soldier that defected and had anthrax antibodies in his blood.

~~~
mejari
We already know they have compact nuclear warheads

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-
security/north...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-
security/north-korea-now-making-missile-ready-nuclear-weapons-us-analysts-
say/2017/08/08/e14b882a-7b6b-11e7-9d08-b79f191668ed_story.html)

~~~
exabrial
Well that sucks. Guess I'm behind in the news. Wow, that's a lot of nukes...
60??

------
ageofwant
It's reasonable to assume that a adversary can and will use overreaction
against perceived threads as a strategic 'unconventional weapon'.
Unconventional defence would include educating a modern populace on critical
thinking, thread model evaluation and even things like stoicism.

[https://youtu.be/ciStnd9Y2ak?t=14m5s](https://youtu.be/ciStnd9Y2ak?t=14m5s)
is relevant, in which the fear of the thing killed 1500, while the thing in
reality is benign.

------
sneak
If someone did launch a missile, and it were destroyed with a secret weapons
system, this is precisely the timeline (alert, not a drill - passage of 30+
mins to write a cover story about shift change, “oh sorry false alarm”) and
news articles I would expect to see.

The only thing we know is that we won’t ever receive the truth.

Can you imagine how much worse it would be if the story were “US anti-missile
defense destroys weapon headed for Hawaii”?

~~~
holman
The likelihood of this being the case seems so close to nil. For one, the
coverup required would involve thousands of military and non-military
personnel. But secondly, if we really did destroy an incoming warhead, well,
that would constitute an attack — _the_ attack — and I can’t fathom the US
military not counter-attacking.

So no, I don’t think you have to worry about that. Just a fat fingering, no
more.

~~~
sneak
> For one, the coverup required would involve thousands of military and non-
> military personnel.

Over a million people have a TS clearance.

As for not fathoming the military counterattacking—that is an excellent motive
for keeping such an event secret.

------
bvod
I find it really annoying that top two articles on HN are completely separate
from engineering. Since when have posts from news sources been able to not
just make it to the front page, but dominate the front page?

Years ago, coming to this site helped me to become an engineer and changed the
way I think about problems. But now I don't get that, and instead get plenty
of feel-good articles and useless posts that don't contain any real
information. I think the articles here should be different from the front page
of reddit, but increasingly this viewpoint has become unpopular here.

~~~
10dpd
You might find it useful to read the HN Guidelines [1]

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
bvod
So any article under the sun is relevant for HN? That's definitely not the
case as mods frequently remove posts, and as much as they would like to be,
mods are not arbiters of intellectual curiosity.

~~~
icebraining
The guidelines are vague, but the site was still never intended to be
exclusively about engineering - hell, initially it was called Startup News.

I find it useful to look at the submissions by the site's creator[1], before
he passed over the site's management to others, back in 2014. As you'll see,
it actually has very little engineering content, and on the contrary, has many
articles from mainstream sources.

I'm sure HN has ebbs and flows on the ratio of engineering articles, but it
was never supposed to be dedicated to those; maybe you just joined at a moment
when the ratio was bigger.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg)

