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...
There is a big misconception about nuclear attacks. Full scale nuclear war with a adversary like Russia is indeed an apocalypse scenario, but a single lowish yield nuclear detonation by a nation like North Korea is very very survivable, if you are prepared.
I have a similar evac plan with a bug-out bag that I gave my wife to keep at her work. For nuclear attack specifically, she is instructed NOT to leave her work and hunker down in their concrete basement for two weeks. Even being much closer to an estimated ground-zero, she is far safer in their well-shielded basement than trying to get home in the open fallout zone. The bag has enough rations, batteries, water, first-aid, etc for that period. Fallout zone radiation levels take about 2 weeks to drop to safe levels, at which time she has a printed google map for her to walk the 20 miles home.
My job is to grab the kids at school and hunker down in our basement where we have more exhaustive supplies, and ultimately get the hell out of town together.
Fallout is the biggest killer. Using http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/, and unfortunately fallout is highly dependent on wind direction - an important unknown on that day.
Given the unknowns and the likelihood that roads will be quickly impassible, it is best to prepare at home. It takes two feet of concrete or packed dirt to block radiation to a safe level, and that includes ABOVE you. Wood provides almost no protection. ...but if you do have a basement, then you can make a plan to place very heavy items (appliances & server racks) on the first floor above you and vehicles and stones/dirt/etc around that part of the house.
Fallout settles on surfaces, so it's a good idea to trim bushes and trees directly around that shelter - you want the fallout to hit the ground, not settle at a higher angle above you. ...and if you're in Hawaii or other coastal area and have easy access to a boat, that might be the best option because fallout sinks and there are no traffic jams at sea.
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.
Speaking as a Mormon, we're highly encouraged to be prepared for the future, regardless of if that means losing a job, a natural disaster (hurricane, earthquake, etc), or unstable individuals with big, red buttons on their desk.
The Church has encouraged people to have a minimum of a 72-hour kit (typically a backpack or backpacks with everything your family would need for 3 days away from home), as well as storing as much water and food as is possible in your circumstances, ideally a year's supply.
I suppose living in southern Idaho for nine years makes me qualified to answer this :) Many Mormons are very into prepping (preparing for emergencies.)
For example, when I lived in Idaho Falls, many of the Mormons I knew had thick concrete shelters in their basements, massive amounts of dried food prepared, huge jugs of water stored, and regularly did drills with other members of there community. Additionally, Mormon churches are usually pretty visible (plus, they'd probably be willing to take you in) and common enough that it shouldn't be too hard to get to one.
I saw this in a local documentary about the USA (De Verenigde Staten van Eva). They called these people "preppers". I had never heard of that before. Don't remember if Mormon was mentioned.
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> polygamy, child abuse, and endless fast and testimony meetings
Speaking anecdotally about my experiences in Oregon with Mormon friends, this feels like a gross misrepresentation. I haven't seen any of these situations pop up, and certainly not in any way that would cause it to be systemic.
I’m not a Mormon, or even a Christian, so I have no stake here.
What the fuck? No. I’ve traveled all over, and met a lot of Mormons and have Mormon friends. The most sinister thing they’re into is family game night. Ok, I’m no fan of the missionary thing, but again, as a non-Christian I appreciate that the Mormons take no for an answer, and will still hang out with you.
Their religion is wacky, but so is every religion. They have cults, but so do all religions. So... no.
Of course your anecdotes are true, individual Mormons can be the nicest, most well-meaning people ever, and Mormonism does indeed have a reputation for being a wacky but harmless religion.
However, Utah has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the nation, and one of the highest rates of anti-depressant medication use in the nation. This is in large part due to the unrealistic expectations and pressure its members are subject to.
Sure, they're not as overtly harmful as similar high-demand cults like FLDS or Scientology, but try joining and then not paying 10% of your gross income to the church and see how that works out.
How’s the suicide rate among evangelical Christians? Southern Baptists? If you tell young people to shape up or be damned, some will implode, especially LGBT youth, people struggling with addictions, atheists, etc. Sadly (imo) Mormons are like many other Anrahamic religions (and others) which make life very hard for a significant portion of the population. I also don’t believe they’re somehow different or worse than any others. They have strengths and weaknesses like any large group of humans.
Not compelling, especially when you note that suicide is only one metric, violence against others being another, and so much more. Most of all though, I didn’t say they were wacky in particular, I said that they were wacky as are all religions. I don’t see them as materially different from any other religion, except in some cases, age.
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.
Assuming you can survive the initial blast, how do you plan to protect yourself and your family from radioactive dust for 7-10 days (assuming windows are broken by the blast - or by you).
Dunno about OP; I have 3M 7500 masks (small/medium/large as appropriate) with 60921i cartridges for the whole family. They are also used whenever we're doing fine grit sanding, fibreglass work, welding etc. so everyone's used to them. (Helps that they're pink, for the girls.)
Also keep iodine tablets in your bugout bag. And a razor, masks won't do shit if you have more than stubble on your cheek.
It definitely depends on a number of variable factors including the size and location of a detonation. Either way, the leeward side would definitely be a higher risk area.
It doesn't, except for increasing the odds of being able to gain access.
The church is simply the best structure for blast/fallout protection that is accessible from our house within the flight-time of an ICBM launched towards Hawaii.
That being said, it was comforting to have other families to share concerns with.
There are plenty of situations where you have to deal with the reality of a nuclear blast that cell phones would still work. It's not all just ground-zero or nothing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I live in Japan as well & told my family the same a long time back. There aren't that many other specifics you can plan for, with the family typically spread across the city on the average day, but at least grab a bathtub of clean water to see you through a few days till things settle down.
I'm guessing that you don't have children. And no, your plan isn't as good as any other; its just one that suits your own fatalistic attitude toward the risks involved.
Yeah I think it's one of the worst reactions you could have.
Without any indication of how bad the attack actually is, you should really assume the best and set yourself up to be able to survive.
What if it's a conventional bombing, or you're not directly in the blast zone? Or if the nuke fails to detonate?
The immediate aftermath if the most important time. While he's futzing around with Youtube and getting drunk the more intelligent people are coming up with a plan to live.
Whether it's getting the fuck out of there or stockpiling water or climbing into a storm drain, almost anything is better than sending emails and jamming away to cliche songs.
>What if it's a conventional bombing, or you're not directly in the blast zone? Or if the nuke fails to detonate?
Yeah, this has been the most frustrating thing reading all of these accounts. A "ballistic missile" does not necessarily have a nuclear warhead. I don't see anyone correcting this and it seems like an important thing to know.
No country is going to risk that for two reasons in the current global context.
First, everyone will assume the payload is nuclear. Once the launch is detected, literally no one is going to even consider for a single moment that the missile might have a conventional payload. All actions, responses, and threat assessments are going to treat it as a nuke. If you're going to launch ICBMs at people, you might as well mount a nuke to it because the rest of the nuclear club is going to respond as if you had.
Second, the alert was for Hawaii. Given their isolation (they're over 7,500km from Korea), that means the missile is an ICBM. The Hwasong-15[0] can carry an estimated ~1,000kg payload, though it's unknown if it could do so for its full range.[1] That's tiny for a warhead. Mounting it on an ICBM, even if your country doesn't get blown to hell after launch, would just be a waste of money. The same goes for SLBMs as well. The only exception would be for precision strikes, but that's not really relevant to NK.
Context. It's hard to explain to people who didn't go through it. The word "threat" didn't even register. There is no other information to evaluate except the message and the dprk situation. No one is going to launch a conventional ballistic warhead into Pearl Harbor. The ONLY conclusion you can come to in the minute after you just got the info is some serious nuclear stuff is about to go down (but please let it not). The head of our (US) armed forces has been saber rattling for months. The risk of miscalculation is off the charts. Also there was no indication who sent the message (state, fed, ?). You are also in a surreal stunned state. Then you start looking for shelter and yes monitor twitter. Honestly I'm surprised people didn't freak out more and get hurt.
Not all ballistic missiles are nuclear, but anyone throwing one will expect that the recipients will assume it's nuclear and be likely to respond in kind and not wait to find out which. So who would want to launch a ballistic missile without a nuclear payload, if the response is probably nuclear?
The US has tried to build conventional missiles for fast global strike capability but it's somewhat complicated by the Russians being unable to distinguish them from nuclear ballistic missiles...
Yes, but in the minutes you have between warning and impact, how do you make this assessment? I think most people's immediate thoughts after the warning was North Korea and Nuke.
It's not that you need to know definitively, you just need to understand that there is a strong possibility that the warhead is non-nuclear and therefore a strong possibility that the worst-case doomsday scenario won't happen even if the attack is real.
This is apparently really important for people to understand, since so many commenters are saying they'd just wait to die since they assume a nuclear attack is not survivable. Few people would make this assumption about non-nuclear weaponry, so they should know that missile attack is not necessarily synonymous with nuclear weapon.
Actually there is about a 0% chance of a conventional ballistic missile attack on the US. If that. South Korea and Japan, yes, followed by a fire storm not seen since WW2.
Unless you're saying this person is worth less than you, then the plan suited to them is indeed as good as the one suited to you.
A few popular assumptions that aren't necessarily true: Living is always better than dying. Your actions have an effect on the outcome. You can do it. People should always do what they should. It matters.
You would have to ask them. Speaking for myself, I think a few minutes of acting however I wish, even at great peril, might be very tempting compared to living longer as a craven little mouse scurrying from hole to hole. Not sure what I'd choose until I were in the moment of course, but the example seems sufficient to point out that the diametric opposite conclusion is possible.
Like I said, it really depends on the circumstances.
Sometimes having control over your fight-or-flight reaction is better for you, personally, given your value system, than say trampeling fellow coworkers in a panic on your way out the door.
Don't judge too harshly people who don't share your starry-eyed view of the world. Let them have their peace if they're so resolved.
Was it unclear? That these are conclusions from evidence not built in popular assumptions. I don’t believe these things by training and for a long time I didn’t believe them. I’ve grown to believe themninstead.
"I have decided that if I'm ever about to crash my car I will unclip my seatbelt and steer violently to the side. My plan is as good as any other plan"
More like, "if I find out that the airplane is about to crash in a few minutes, I will unclip my seatbelt and roam around the cabin". You have control over your car, you have no control over the airplane or the bomb.
If I survive, I'm a refugee, foreign national with minimal language skills, I'm likely in an active war zone and my nation is probably one of the belligerents. My chances don't look good.
North Korea is estimated to have 10 - 20 bombs [1], and their bombs would have a similar yield to the two that were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Presumably, only a fraction of the North Korean stockpile would be used against Japan (they would also want to attack targets in South Korea).
This is much less than the American bombings of Japan in World War 2, when 60 Japanese cities were firebombed (see e.g. [2]). But even so, the total deaths in Japan in the entire war were something like 4% of the population. If there is a war now, most people living in Japan will survive.
I would think basic knowledge of electrical engineering, solar & battery technology, radio, and mesh networking would make you pretty handy. Front end developers will be the first ones in the stew pot.
I don’t know, if any of those things can expose an API or provide some kind of IoT interface I could see backend skills being very useful.
I figure if most data centers are targeted and destroyed people will probably have to host servers on their own local machines, which at least requires a DevOps person in each community.
We make enough money to live in the suburbs instead of the city and can afford a house where we can store food, water, books (the dead tree kind), tools and firearms.
If you put a machine/wood working shop in your garage + you do your own home repairs you can learn all kinds of useful skills.
> What software development skills will be most useful in a post-apocalyptic world?
At the moment of writing this, North Korea alone is not able to bring about the kind of total apocalypse people are thinking when they talk about "post-apocalyptic world". Assuming China joins in (thought I am unsure why they would, unless US strikes first), according the Wikipedia they have 260 warheads [1], which is enough to bring about a massive catastrophe but I am not convinced that the result would be total collapse of civilization.
> Hopefully survival in the post apocalypse doesn’t hinge on time estimates.
Don't worry, we're implementing Survival KANBAN. Challenges and allocations will happen naturally on a board, while management tracks concurrent Survival In Progress to make sure we're not creating more survivors than we can handle.
Does wine do anything to increase the effective method of action of potassium iodide pill? Or just because? (My just because is to make pancakes in an emergency sit-tight scenario, when the power goes out for 3 days or I'm snowed in)
But being serious another nutrient you could take is Turmeric/Curcumin as an anti-rad supplement. However it isn't easily absorbed. There's a version called BCM-95 that is better. But better then that there's a Liposomal version that you can make at home with a ultrasonic cleaner. The idea is to buy 100% organic tumeric for $11 on amazon, and make the liposomal version. Take massive dosage if you are or about to be exposed to radiation. Sorry I don't have sources, because I'm not in the medical field, you'll have to source them and vet them yourself. If you are in the medical field I'd be interest in your input
> But being serious another nutrient you could take is Turmeric/Curcumin as an anti-rad supplement. However it isn't easily absorbed.
You need to take black pepper with it for absorption of Curcumin. Some of the curcumin supplements already have piperine for absorption, so there is no need to make artificial delivery mechanisms for Turmeric off of Amazon. Plus, the amount in Tumeric is very low compared to just purchasing the supplement with piperine in it. You'd spend all your emergency cash making some drug delivery system that wouldn't deliver much of anything.
Yah I hear ya, but if it's dprk launching a "low yield" device that lands a distance away you aren't going to be too happy with thousands of shards of glass in you because you didn't take some simple precautions.
You can survive a single small nuclear explosion if you're a comfortable distance from it and/or happen to be underground and protected.
Your odds of still being alive five years after a full scale war are tiny, unless you have your own concrete bunker a long way from any likely targets, and it's conveniently equipped with a near-infinite supply of water, food, livestock, seeds, farming equipment, and fuel.
Yes, exactly, thank you. The world has sharp corners and it appears that tourists and people who recently moved to Hawaii apparently have no idea that Hawaii's a fucking target. It's the center of the universe in the Pacific. There is an entire division of troops there, and carriers, and planes, and missiles, and nukes and nuke subs. Hawaii is the most tunneled piece of American soil. All of these people crying on the floor in the fetal position seem to have successfully lived out their lives inside a fantasy bubble where nothing goes wrong. I wonder how they would feel if they knew how dangerous it was to drive on the highway. It was actually less dangerous to go to Iraq than it was to drive on American highways. It's clear these fragile souls have no idea what's out there waiting for them.
> I'm currently living in Japan. So obviously I have a plan for nuclear war.
I can't tell whether this is meant seriously or not, but assuming it's serious, I'm genuinely curious as to why this is "obvious"? Is this historical (Hiroshima/Nagasaki) or due to current political tensions?
I'm also in Japan, and I have a pretty serious go-bag for this kind of thing. It's because of political tensions for me; we're in spitting distance of North Korea.
I'm not sure NK would nuke Seoul anyway - it's too close. A massive artillery barrage or more conventional missiles (or chemical weapons?) seems more likely.
South Koreans seem to be calmer about the entire situation than just everybody else. And I say that as a Brazilian, that is not only on the literally opposite end of the world, but also did not get to see a war since WWII and even then had minimal involvement.
You certainly know something that nobody else knows.
Perhaps because they understand the reality of the situation better?
Look, almost everyone gets the situation with North Korea wrong. NK has exactly one deterrent from being invaded, and that is a ton of very boring, very conventional artillery that is within firing distance of Seoul.
In the case of NK being invaded, they would immediately start shelling Seoul and trying to reduce it to rubble.
If you start evacuating Seoul, NK will assume they're going to be invaded, and start shelling it.
In the improbable case that NK would start something, they would start by shelling Seoul.
All of these scenarios end with NK being reduced to rubble by the overwhelmingly superior force of South Korea + Japan + USA. That's the deterrent we have against them.
The nuclear missiles that NK is barking about is not a real threat. Everyone is watching NK 24/7,they cannot launch anything undetected. If something is detected, then South Korea, Japan, and the US will compete with each other about who can shoot the shit down first. And they will shoot the shit down. And after they've shot the shit down, they will invade NK to reduce it to rubble so as not to have to go through that again, at which point NK will start shelling Seoul, which sucks, but at that point it's an acceptable loss.
Every single scenario ends with NK reduced to rubble. They know this. They have zero reason to move the status quo. Instead, the real reason for them barking about their nuclear capabilities is to get more leverage in sanction discussions. And everyone goes through with this dog-and-pony show, because we can't openly state the exact capabilities of the anti-missile defense systems that are in place around NK.
I think this is mostly right, but there is still some room for concern. First off, those anti-missile defenses have never been tested in anger and we can't be 100% sure they will work. (I'd love to think we have an effective boost-phase defense in place, but I gather that's not going to be a reality for a few years yet, at best.) Second, what I think Kim really wants to use those nukes for, besides leverage in the sanctions discussions, is to pry apart our alliance with South Korea, by making it too dangerous for us to come to their aid once NK attacks Seoul. Even with Pyongyang flattened, there could still be launchers hidden in the mountains and one of those rockets might get past our defenses. Would you really want to risk Seattle or San Francisco or even Honolulu?
On the other hand, I think everyone except possibly Kim and his minions wants peace and stability on the Korean peninsula. The Chinese certainly do, and I think even the Russians, though they have less at stake, would not want to see war break out — certainly not nuclear war, which would endanger Vladivostok. What I don't know is how badly Kim wants to conquer South Korea. He likes to argue that his nukes are for defensive purposes, and that's not unreasonable under the circumstances, but the problem is that they can be used offensively as well. What I would like to see is a peace treaty that obliges not just us and Japan but also China and Russia to participate in obliterating North Korea should they attack South Korea or anyone else.
That sounds like a pipe dream, but consider this. We could provide South Korea with nukes. Yes, it would be in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. (I wouldn't suggest abrogating the treaty altogether, but it has clearly failed its purpose in this instance. A case can be made for restoring the regional balance of power.) We shouldn't bluff, but a credible threat to nuclear-arm South Korea might bring China and even Russia to the table.
Wow... Apart from the NPT (which is just a piece of scrap paper anyway, see Israel, India, Pakistan), last time someone thought putting nukes near adversaries on the other side of the world was a great idea, the world almost ended.
The entire incident is now known as "Cuban Missile Crisis", although it started with the great idea of placing Jupiter missiles in Italy and Turkey against USSR, continued with USSR placing missiles against USA in Cuba and ended with a single officer on a Soviet submarine, out of three required, objecting to launching a nuclear torpedo while being attacked from a USA ship above. Seeing how easy it is to spark a full war (e.g. Gleiwitz, Gulf of Tonkin), the Doomsday clock had its leap second that day.
Stationing nukes in the SK, close to both China and Russia would be such a major shift in power balance, that I would really like to see the crazyman who would go to China/Russia to even mention that.
What would be the point of arming SK over having a nuclear sub in the area? Would anyone really believe SK could launch them of their own volition? Surely they would be nothing more than US bombs in SK soil.
It controls the political risk of a rift in the alliance or cold feet on behalf of the United States.
The situation you see playing out in Europe, where Trump’s affinity for Russia puts NATO’s integrity in question is an example of why a smaller party like South Korea would want an independent deterrent.
No, I get why SK would want them; my question is about the US giving them nukes - more specifically, why would anyone believe that those nukes, even if the US did put them in SK, could actually be fired by the Koreans independently.
I don't think the US can convince anyone that they would really unconditionally give nukes to SK to do whatever they wanted with them.
Seems to me that if Kim thought there was even a possibility that South Korea could retaliate on its own, with nukes, it would make him less likely to launch an offensive attack.
But you're right. We don't really want to put nukes under the control of the South Korean government. Convincing the Chinese and Russians that yes, we really will do that if we see no alternative, wouldn't be easy.
Western people are largely indoctrinated with the idea of life being sacred and the necessity to protect it all costs; many Asian cultures are much more matter-of-fact about death as the worldview is more cyclical than teleological and reincarnation is quietly assumed as the natural order of things.
Change western people to Americans and you might be correct. My experience is that a lot Europeans, New Zealanders and Australians tend to be pretty relaxed about world events. Not to say we don’t have our panic merchants but they do tend to be in the minority.
Sorry Canadians, I didn’t mean to lump you in with your southern neighbors.
Thanks for the reply. Living on the (sort of) other side of the world, in the UK, I don't feel under immediate or direct threat from current tensions. I am truly thankful that, for my generation at least, that this is the case. It's easy to forget, or minimise the experiences of people much closer to current political tensions and IMHO healthy to be reminded of them periodically.
We worry about the big, less likely risks than the common, more likely. In a major UK city you might become a victim of a terrorist attack - limited in scope but played out far more in the media - vs getting hit as a pedestrian by a car or a car accident.
In the US, we've completely gone down the way of sucking on the fear teat vs the actual dangers in our reality (cars, guns, heart disease, etc) and pay a pretty penny for it, whether security theater at the airport or our current political environment.
And I - just as genuinely, and not attempting to troll - am curious how anyone could be in doubt, current reports of red buttons and impressively coiffed heads of state taken into account.
Taking this in good faith (I didn’t downvote you :-) I’ll take a stab at responding:
I was curious as to whether there might be historical or cultural factors in play beyond the immediate political tensions. It’s also worth pointing out that I live in the UK and whilst we get regular news headlines on the state of US politics we’re somewhat removed from much of the immediate political tension. Generalising perhaps, but I also feel less emotionally involved than my US-based acquaintances as a result.
Thank you - but several others found me worth downvoting :)
I'm live just across the North Sea from you, in Denmark, and I am completely decoupled from internal US politics. And of the distinctive coiffures, I must say I find young Kim by far the most worrisome, seeing as he probably doesn't have a functioning set of checks and balances to keep him grounded if he really does go mental some day. Were I living in Seoul or Tokyo, I really would have this on my mind every day.
Really I was just picking up on the word “obvious” in the parent post. Whenever I see that I always wonder if the writer’s “obvious” is the same as my “obvious”. It usually is but, surprisingly often, is not.
Not sure but in Japan there are a lot of preparedness measures for earthquakes. Everyone goes through disaster training, people have survivals kits at home, are aware of evacuation centers, etc. There is some overlap between these measures and nuclear war but I'm not aware of a lot of planning for nuclear war itself.
Yeah, this isn't "obvious" at all. North Korea is not at war with Japan. What could it even gain from it anyway? Just war for the sake of war and have their country destroyed and their government overthrown? This doesn't make sense at all. Don't forget a lot of NK elite including Kin Jung-Un himself were educated in Europe. They know the state of the world.
So when I'll go to Japan again latter this year as a scholar, NK is the millionth thing I'll care. Because the risk isn't real, it's mostly propaganda towards a country that is trying hard to exists. I think the most important thread are actually the US and how they're unnecessarily adding fuel to the fire at any occasion.
In addition, I would mention that the mere existence of NK is a by product of the US intervention in the Korea War. Should the communist forces won like they did in China & Vietnam, the country would not have been parted like it is. And the situation towards capitalism would have started a normalisation like in China and Vietnam.
It depends if you have kids or not that you are responsible for. We can all make that choice for ourselves, but when you have kids most of us have a moral code to protect them from ‘sudden death’.
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.
It remaining like that for 40 minutes is a bad sign, but it being easy to issue a warning seems reasonable (the counter-story is "No warning of the genuine threat was issued, due to the process for doing so being too involved/difficult").
That suggests an interesting question: if you issue a false alarm should you retract as soon as you can or can it be better to wait a while?
I could see retracting quickly leading to even more confusion as you then have a mix of people who have received (and believed the retraction) trying to resume normal activity and people who still thinking they have to get to a safer place right away. I could see this leading to some escalating tension and even violence.
It might be better to wait until a good majority of people have reached their shelters and stopped moving before you issue the retraction.
If the alarm is as easy to trigger as pushing a single button, then issuing an update that it was a mistake should be designed for. Ideally just a couple presses, something that can be done in under a minute.
Firstly, I think you're mistaking "pushing the wrong button" with "pushing a single button". Not that we know either to be true, but anyhow..
..that's not what I asked. The EAS, EBS, DEAS, etc. they've all had issues with false alarms and operator error before. What kind of provisions and procedures for case like this do you think have been made?
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.
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".
It takes far less to be an effective fallout shelter than you might think. If you look at lethal ranges on H-Bombs you see incredible destruction, but if you're protected for the first 1hour after a blast you can be surprisingly close to the blast and live.
I’m less concerned about the blast than what it would take to keep me alive and reasonably healthy after. I’d like my fallout shelter to include some food and water.
Some used to: I distinctly remember boxes and boxes of crackers in some underground shelter as a child.
One way of looking at these shelters is what % of radiation can you avoid for a blast X miles away. 90% and 99% are both easy to reach and would save vast numbers of lives as many decay products have half lives under a minute making them temporary, but significant problems. 99.99% gets really expensive because of longer half lives and the need to better filter air etc.
PS: Further, there is a tradeoff as unless it protects you from x% of radiation protection from the blast is basically pointless.
Fallout shelters only need to be used for 12-48 hours. People can survive without food or water for that long. Definitely better to have supplies, but proper shelter is more important for fallout.
Fallout shelters aren't about protecting from the nuclear blast but from the fallout that comes afterwards. The secret to surviving fallout is to put as much distance and stuff as possible to places where fallout collects like the ground. And then stay there for 24-48 hours. Looking for buildings with basements, or the center of multi-story buildings.
The advice I have heard is if not in proper shelter, like house without basement, to shelter in place to survive blast, and then move within the first 15 minutes to better fallout shelter.
I mean blast in terms of timing. You can get a leathal radiation doses in the first seconds well outside the fireball.
Moving from shelter A to B is very high risk. It might work, but you are unlikely to get far and would want someway to avoid breathing dust on the trip. If your in the center of a large office building for example you probably want to stay there for the next hour unless a great shelter is less than five minutes away or the building is on fire etc. http://www.businessinsider.com/nuclear-explosion-fallout-rad...
Off-topic, but if the book you’re referring to was the How It Works encyclopedia set, that was how I also learned about everything. My grandpa gave the set to me, and it included an incredible amount of material - illustrated and fascinating for a wide range of ages (this was long before we had internet). It is how I also learned about nuclear weapons, though I don’t specifically recall fallout shelters.
> A future nuclear war would not only reduce cities and towns to ruins. Fallout from the nuclear explosions would spread through the atmosphere, bombarding the land with lethal amounts of radiation. The only means of escape would be to live in deep underground shelters away from the fallout. This imprisonment would have to last until the radiation decreased to an acceptable level, which could take many years. Even then, climatic changes, shortage of food and the threat of disease would make life above ground a grim business.
Incidentally, the book is most memorable for lucid and well-explained diagrams involving woolly mammoths, and I highly recommend it for explanations of anything mechanical. The section on nuclear physics is a bit lackluster, however.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> It occurred to me though — when did they start calling them "fallout" shelters rather than "bomb" shelters?
Sometime after the nuclear bomb was developed and first used to end the second world war. The "fallout" in "fallout shelter" refers to "nuclear fallout" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout) which would not have been a term that would have existed prior to the creation and first use of a nuclear bomb.
So sometime circa early 1940's to mid 1950's timeframe would be a good guess.
"Growing up" those shelters were considered around smaller, kiloton and low-megaton sized weaponry. The whole civil defense project fell apart after the 1950s once 100 Megaton hydrogen bombs become the norm. There's no sheltering from a city killer inside of a city, hence the reason the US quit pretending there was.
I still like Switzerland's idea of civil defense, but then nobody is going to attack the place where all the world's criminals keep their wealth anyways, so even there it's a complete sham.
I only get two posts on here because HN mods hate me, so I'm going to just add this: You don't have to worry about North Korea. At. All. The threat is already over.
As far as the false alarm in HI goes, maybe ask questions in the direction of "who is it that would like to embarass the current US Administration?"
> However, my initial instinct was "either the system doesn't work, or someone messed up".
Why? What really surprises me the most is that this seems to be a common thought. Did that happen before? Do you simply misstrust your government so deeply that you can not even assume something important like this is done right?
Really if i would get such a message on my phone (not even sure if my country does that) i would definitly expect the worst and act like that.
I felt the same way, but its not because I distrusted the government. The situation didn't feel like one wherein nuclear missiles would start being fired (or any missiles of any kind).
There's got to be some sort of build up before a conflict before it can't catch people in shock (hence the rational of actual surprise-attacks).
If tomorrow you read that Canada had invaded New York City, would you believe it instantly out of trust for your news agencies and government, or think that perhaps someone somewhere screwed up or was making a silly joke?
Personally i dont think a attack to the U.S. would be to much of a surprise. But true there is currently no direct tension in that direction. Also as someone else said, Hawaii really is a unlikely target.
The emergency alert system has been used here in Minnesota for tornadoes, amber alerts, and flash flooding. Sitting in a room and hearing every phone go off or waking up to your own phone making the warning tone is quite alarming.
If I received one about a nuclear missile I'd assume it's legitimate and at least take some minor precautions while trying to verify the alert. It's foolish to assume every unlikely alert is a false alarm.
That said, a single nuclear missile seems incredibly unlikely to me. I'd expect multiple missiles and an associated cyber attack if another nation state was willing to start a nuclear exchange. A single missile is just inviting the wrath of the US and rest of the world for little benefit.
What would NK have to gain by nuking Hawaii? It would cause the US to retaliate massively, while not doing serious damage to its military capabilities.
No amount of nuclear missles would do much to prevent the US from retaliating with it's nuclear arsenal. The majority of the US nuclear arsenal is floating underwater in always moving, undisclosed places via submarine spread throughout the world's oceans.
You think the US would actually retaliate against a limited nuclear attack in an isolated place with a massive nuclear counterattack? (I can see it in a cold war scenario against the USSR, with tanks moving into Europe and the world order at stake)
I think the US woudln't and, of course, shouldn't. The usual game-theoretical reasonings in this regard are misguided and shortsighted.
I'd be interested for you to expand on your last sentence, because it seems to me that we would have no choice but to respond massively. Once Kim demonstrated a willingness to launch an offensive attack killing or endangering civilians, we'd have to assume he would do it again, and would therefore have to do our best at destroying all his launchers, and make every effort to kill him. He knows that, of course, which is why he's not going to do anything so stupid.
I think the most extreme and remotely plausible thing NK could want to do (but that would already mean taking an incredible risk) is to direct a nuclear missile to explode somewhere on the ocean, far from any populated place but close enough to the west cost of the US to send a clear warning about their capabilities to reach a major US city if provoked.
NK is never going to actually attack the US first, it would simply mean squandering all the effort made so far in building a credible deterrence. Deterrence is not deterrent anymore when you force the enemy to respond.
I can't think of a scenario where a US counterattack isn't more damaging to NK than whatever damage NK would manage to inflict on the US by nuking Hawaii.
I don't think a normal, sanely led US would do that either. More likely the president and joint chiefs would sit in a room and discuss "a proportional response". Turning most of North Korea uninhabitable for generations does not meet that standard.
On the other hand, I can see President MAGA saying "turn the entire peninsula into one large crater," a series of Generals trying to talk him out of it and getting fired. An apocalyptic Saturday Night Massacre until he found the just-promoted-ex-Colonel who would issue the order for him.
Not sure why this has been downvoted. It may have been lyrically written but the point is sound. The guy with his finger on your button is a fucking madman.
Tragically "the US" now means "Donald Trump" specifically regarding their propensity/ability to retaliate to a nuclear strike. Yeah, I think he'd do it. He's a maniac.
No, because the DPRK can't even do reentry right, let alone actually fit a nuke on a missile, for all of those huge swaths of people assuming it meant a nuclear attack. Regardless, it is uncontroversial that aiming at a target like Hawaii and actually hitting it is at this time beyond the technical means of the DPRK.
I wasn't in Hawaii, but I also imagine that I would assume that an alert like this is a false alarm. I've just lived through too many scenarios like this, albeit not on the same scale (think false fire alarms.)
Upon reflection, however, this seems like the definition of survivor bias.
I remember an occasion when I lived with a partner - the fire alarm had gone off and I immediately got out of bed and started putting my pants and shoes on. She asked why, I said "so we can go outside. What are you doing? Let's go."
She said she didn't understand the point - if it was a REAL fire, wouldn't they just come get us or tell us?
I don't know how prominent this thought process is, or why so many people don't take things like fire alarms seriously. Selection bias, perhaps you're right. Every fire alarm most people has ever heard was a drill.
This has happened twice at work now, even my manager was teasing me for telling people they should leave. Eventually I left on my own.
I wouldn’t expect someone to come get me if there was a fire, but I suspect I would have a fairly low sense of urgency. Fire alarms in my experience have had an incredibly high false positive rate, either due to unannounced drills, pranks, or “correct” operation (e.g. smoke from the stove).
I was in a club once (in a basement) and the fire alarm went. Music stopped, everybody looked around confused for 30 seconds, no one saw an immediate fire, and then the music started up again twice as loud to drown out the alarm.
I think it makes sense to be prepared to evacuate by doing things like getting dressed or packing your bags. But you don't have to leave every time the alarm goes off. If you don't smell smoke, hear a rushing/roaring sound or feel heat coming from somewhere it probably is a false alarm.
They might not have known - a good question to ask might be "why did that user think it was ok to recommend a non-urgent action in response to a fire alarm? Why did that user think it's ok to wait for evidence of a fire outside of an alarm?" Somewhere, society is failing to instill a proper respect for emergency indicators.
1. Your most logical thinking doesn't occur at 8am on a weekend when you just woke up.
2. Hawaii has a more ingrained trust of the EAS than most other states. We test our sirens and EAS monthly. Sirens for tsunamis aren't that uncommon, and there are several horror stories in Hawaii of how people have ignored the sirens and warning signs in the past and got killed.
3. It's a lot easier to determine its a false alarm in hindsight. At the time, you have no information other than the alert and the knowledge about the current tensions with North Korea. We all knew there was a chance it was a false alarm and sure hoped it was, but when your life is on the line it doesn't matter.
Depends on who was shooting them. The North Korean missiles are notoriously inaccurate and if Kim shot one off with a live warhead, there's a decent chance it would detonate within his own border.
Let's be honest - most people don't want to hear that the people living in drone target areas of Pakistan, Yemen, etc feel this way, else we'd be seeing many more stories about the psychological trauma faced by these folks.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Moscow alone was targeted with at least eighty nuclear weapons, and every Russian city with a population greater than 25,000 would be hit by at least one."
There was a great article which I can't find now about all the missiles still pointing from the US to Russia and vice versa, where after the fall of the Soviet Union a General formerly in charge of the Soviet arsenal met his British counterpart and assured him that in the Soviet nuclear war preparedness plans, the entire UK was a complete overkill zone.
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.
A reasonable point, but it's sad that people consider surviving a nuclear war a more practical endeavor than altering the political direction of the country. Admittedly they are somewhat orthogonal, but I'm trying to highlight the problem of equating war with natural disasters as opposed to something over which we have any sort of political control.
According to game theory, the easiest way to win a game of Chicken is to tear off your steering column and wave it out your window.
In other words, preparing for nuclear war instead of preventing a nuclear war is how you win small battles, like where to put an embassy or whether foreign countries will respect your patents.
The idea is to get away from an area where particles can collect (like the ground). They seem to be saying that you wouldn’t want to choose a floor with a balcony, for instance.
I thought Nate Silver had a good take this week, which was basically that Nuclear Weapons have not been around long enough for us to draw statistical conclusions.
He continued that even if the odds were small, like a 1% chance a year, it would very much be worth being prepared for.
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.
> I don't struggle with those interviews at all, they are outrageous and shameful.
Sorry, I was being unclear in the context of an international audience: "I struggle with" translates from my-version-of-UK-English to my-US-coworker's-English as more or less exactly this :-)
(I'm told my tendency to say "sorry" continuously also gently mistranslates like this too...)
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.
GP post is talking about actually asking this question of people whose families have been wiped out, not rhetorical questions posed in the comfort of an office.
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
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.
Call me a cynic, but I'm willing to believe that there was a 'ballistic missile alert' button in the wrong place. Sometimes bad placements are only clear after the fact. I walked into a building once and the lights were out. I walked along the wall and pulled the first switch I found - which turned out the be the fire alarm.
The question is why, and there are far too many rabbit holes to go down for this one. For now I'll just settle for "bad people stirring things up for terrible reasons".
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It's a useful reserve for potable water. If you have nuclear fallout coming down, it's not a given that you can trust the tap water to be clean, if it runs at all.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
America's track record in South-America is pretty poor. For a long time it was a proxy battle ground for the Cold War.
And Trump just cut most of the relief funding, so a lot of social welfare programs are being cut short.
Making countries rich is part of geopolitical strategy (for instance, West-Germany vs. East-Germany). For every country that the US "made rich" is a country where life expectancy went way down due to US involvement.
I'd like to add, I never said there were no positives. My point is, shithole is a word. And if the use of a word is going to draw this kind of fire then the actions (that create shitholes) create 10x the amount of attention. But that doesn't happen. And obviously that is wrong.
While I agree that Trump is not the stable genius he thinks he is, the drone war existed before. We are speaking of a nobel peace prize winner who seemingly did not have either the ability to recognize the hell he helped create or the b----s to stand against his military advisors to stop it. You can blame Trump for a lot but even when there were smarter people in power, it wasn't much better. I want to believe that Chealsey Manning can change something but do not really believe in it.
Correct. Trump says "shithole" and the MSM lathers the public into a frenzy. Yet, the previous administration(s) actively created shitholes - which btw taxes dollar also go to fixing - and the response to that has been crickets from the MSM and the proles.
Trump can be a fool. But there is quite a bit of truth to his perception of the MSM, and how that impacts public opinion. Fake News isn't just about facts. Fake News is also about what the MSM highlights v what it does not. Not everything that gets report is news. Unless of course it fits a narrative, drives advertising dollar and/or masks the need to report on something more important.
I do not think that the media is really the problem, its just somehow the topic does not get all the traction it needs to succeed politically. 'Collateral murder' was all over the media but still nothing happened. The NSA affair was all over the media and nothing happened. Maybe at this point politics does not really care anymore as long as its not to their own political benefit.
Isn't the sentiment expressed by that word essentially "country with a lot of problems"? Is it much worse than saying "ours is the best country in the world"? Both are pretty insulting.
The sentiment expressed by the word is essentially "country with a lot of problems", yes. But the sentiment expressed by the statement as a whole is "We don't want people from those countries, we don't want to help them, we don't want them to access the American Dream. Despite our part in screwing up the world, we're not interesting in putting forth effort to help the people who have gotten screwed".
And the "we" in that statement is Trump, who speaks for the nation as its president.
There is a plausible alternative motivation of wanting to protect the American Dream (for those already here in the country) rather than an evil desire to deny it to others.
Of course reasonable people can disagree on the degree of the threat posed by immigration. But you have to admit that if every person on earth moved to America overnight, life as we know it would be changed for the worse forever. Therefore it is reasonable to question where on the scale from 0% to 100% of the world population should be welcomed with open arms at the border. And it's not a huge leap to go from that question to the idea that not every single applicant for admittance poses the same threat (if any) as another -- so some discrimination between them is not only logical, but just.
If you accept the above conclusion, then it's quite possible for that word he used to be a reasonable idea expressed in an uncharitable manner.
I don't quite understand your argument here. You posit that a reasonable position on immigration for America is that we should not have one hundred percent open borders, welcome all comers. And furthermore, since a reasonable position is that we should not welcome all comers, whoever they may be, we obviously need some way to establish who in particular is welcome, and who in particular is not.
I agree with you as far as that goes.
But then you go further to say that it's possible that Trump was trying to express the position you just described, albeit in an uncharitable and rude way, and that's where you lose me.
It's possible that you could theorize a hypothetical person who expresses that sentiment in that manner, but is that hypothetical person Donald Trump, with all the context of his previous comments and decisions? Because we're not talking about a hypothetical here, we're talking about actual sentiments expressed by an actual person, with a history racial insensitivity (to put it lightly) and heavy-handed bans that have no legal basis (again, to put it lightly).
It's not meaningful to come up with hypotheticals unless you attribute that hypothetical to Trump, and attributing this one to him means that it needs to be squared with his previous actions and positions. In my opinion, it seems fantastically unlikely that he was trying to express your position; if you believe differently, I'd be interested in your reasoning.
Think we agree on all the important points then. At least so far.
For the record I'm no fan or defender of Trump. But whatever we think of his obvious character flaws, he's really nothing without supporters.
What I have been trying to do is understand the people who do support him and articulate the best possible interpretation of events that I can make for how someone can support him.
That's not to pretend he doesn't have some racist supporters, he does.. but I think they are a very (very) small percentage of people who hold their nose at him personality and yet give him their support.
What I hear from the Left, over and over, is charges of racism and attributing the worst possible motives to most his supporters -- a strawman argument which they can then knock down with moral indignation.
So back to our discussion.
I don't think it pays to continually be outraged at Trumps never ending provocations. What I think needs to happen is to have an honest discussion -- where people on the left have to say "Trump is an idiot, but we understand that there are problems with unfettered immigration, and we respect the people who are worried about protecting America. We recognize them as patriots, not racists. We understand that many people support Trump not because they are attracted to his personality, but because we have not been willing to properly balance our desire to help people of the world with our need to protect our fellow citizens (regardless of political stripe)".
I am no expert on what the proper level of immigration should be, or how to vet appropriate applicants. But until we take responsibility for our blind spots, and at least be willing to acknowledge the other side as legitimate, we're going to keep talking past one another.
If we keep going the way we're going, Trump is going to get elected again. The entire culture is currently focused on the wrong thing -- and that isn't Trump's fault, it's ours.
> I don't think it pays to continually be outraged at Trumps never ending provocations.
I don't think that everything Trump does deserves the ire it inspires, but I think there's a cost to just accepting outrageous things without being outraged. What's happening is not normal, and I don't want it to become normal. If people stop getting outraged for valid reasons, and I believe that this is a valid reason to be upset, then this behavior becomes accepted and that's not something I want.
There's a way to have a conversation about immigration. That conversation does not start with the President saying "Why do we want people from these shithole nations, we want more people from great countries like Norway", and I think it's reasonable to hold the President to the standard of starting the conversation in the appropriate way. Doing that is literally his job, and just because he and some of his supporters think it's funny to "LOL triggered yet libs?" doesn't make it appropriate, doesn't make it right, and doesn't make it just.
Well you'll just be preaching to the choir with people who already agree with you. Changing the narrative, truly reaching across the isle has a better chance of effecting real change.
You're aware that the alleged sentiment of a word pales in comparison to actual actions that need no bias interpretation in order to be upsetting to anyone with a moral compass, correct?
Put another way: Stick and stones and MIC drones are breaking non-white bones and you're worried about the alleged sentimate of a word? Turn off the MSM and get a new less rose coloured filter.
Perhaps you need to get back to my original comment and then drill down. The "sentiment" is obvious. I see no reason to repeat what was already stating the obvious.
In short: Actions speak louder than words. And if "shithole" is going to raise a ruckus, then where is the ruckus for the shitholes our actions are creating? Why is there silence for death and outrage for a word? How is that not hypocritical? The fact that you're wanting to push back only reaffirms my point. That is: We. Are. Lost. And at the mercy of a compass-less MSM.
Oh they know, but either rationalize it or say 'it's too big for me to fix' and go about their day. It takes a certain sort of perversity to actually dedicate your puny efforts to interfering with the machine.
Here's how we can settle this. Stop 20 random people on the street. Ask them: How many civilians were killed in Iraq? Or ask: Who controls and executes the USA drone attacks?
I'll give you $100 for every right answer if you give me $20 for every wrong. I'm confident you'll owe me in the end. Sad, but true.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
While I think everyone understands that "pressed the wrong button, woops" is, at best, a gross oversimplification, I think assuming that it was directly connected to Trump or that he has the ability to "order" the state EAS system to issue some alert unilaterally is ridiculous.
This comment also overlooks that a hack of EAS may've been perpetrated by an enemy group to test the American response. That is semi-plausible.
Personally, I also think the disgruntled employee is the most likely scenario. It was someone's last day, or they had just decided they wanted it to be their last day, and they typed this up and hit send.
It makes sense that "it was just an accident" is the explanation that restores the most faith in the system, because they can then say "We've updated the system so that accidents like that can't happen again, we now have two buttons in different rooms that have to be pressed simultaneously". Whereas intentional hijacking of the system is much harder to prevent.
If NK had launched something, multiple countries would have detected the launch, acted against the launch, and let everyone else know about the launch.
If NK had launched something, it would have been picked up by NORAD or similar, and the order to alert everyone would have flowed downwards from there, which means that all the alert systems on Hawaii would have gone off, and we would have seen a substantial military response. This didn't happen, only a single system broadcast the alarm.
> The EAS was hacked to provoke reaction from Trump [..] onsidering how many people could have died if we had retaliated
The EAS is not a launch detection system. Hawaii State EMA is not a launch detection agency. In the case of actual launch, actual launch detection agencies would know first, and then tell Hawaii State EMA to trigger all the alarms. The information doesn't normally flow the other way around.
As the information that an alarm was going off in Hawaii, everyone above in the normal notification chain would question it and ask why the fuck the alarm was going off, since they would know they didn't order it.
If you think the US would start nuclear retaliation without confirmation of actual launch, you're an idiot.
> The EAS was commandeered by a disgruntled employee
Possible. It's directly contradicted by the official statement, though.
> The monitoring system used to look for incoming threats malfunctioned
If actual launch detection systems had picked up a launch, then you would have information flowing out of NORAD, ordering all emergency alert systems to go off, sirens, EAS, tv, radio, the works. You would also have a military response, and you would have procedures for informing political leadership, including the president. None of this happened. A single alarm system in Hawaii went off.
> In an attempt to distract the MSM from some policy he is currently pursuing, Trump ordered the "fake" threat.
How the fuck would the federal president be able to order a state civilian agency to execute and cover up such an idiotic plan, without it leaking, and without anyone questioning?
> The mistake was exactly that; a mistake
And this is the only sane guess in this wall of idiocy.
The number of people who are posting, tweeting, etc looooong convoluted theories & explanations, and yet can't seem to figure out that this was a civilian warning system & nothing more, is amazing.
What happened in Oahu was essentially that a guy ran out in the street shouting "the sky is falling!". His button let him use some push notifications to everyone's phones & TVs, but little more.
Since we are in conspiracy territory, it could also be a staged "false alert", but not to distract from Trump policy, but to confront Trump with the reality of nuclear warfare.
He was on Twitter a few days back talking about whose nuclear button is bigger. If Trump is triggerhappy and willing to sacrifice millions to salvage his ego, then maybe some footage of children huddled up, crying and thinking the world is about to end, will instill a sense of reverence for life.
Under Obama in 2010, we had Obama defunding part of the nuclear missile program, and in the same week, entire nuclear grids went offline due to an unexplained bug. This also send a clear signal to the commander in chief.
> The Air Force swears there was no panic. But for three-quarters of an hour Saturday morning, launch control officers at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming couldn't reliably communicate or monitor the status of 50 Minuteman III nuclear missiles. Gulp.
> The incident comes at a particularly tricky time for the Obama administration, which is struggling to get the Senate to ratify a nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. In conservative political circles, there's a distrust of the nuclear cuts – and a demand that they be matched with investments in atomic weapon upgrades. Saturday's shutdown will undoubtedly bolster that view.
I imagine it was very convincing, imagine yourself and everyone you know receive the same message. I don't know what the TV and radio coverage was saying at the time, but plenty of people were sceptical.
If NK launched a strike at Hawaii your chances of survival would be high, so taking cover and stockpiling potable water would make a lot of sense. NK's warheads are relatively small, they have a limited number and the reliability and accuracy of their weapons are unproven.
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.
English may have no patience for diacritical marks (lack of them on keyboards doesn't help), but they're still a good idea when using words from other languages with pronunciations an English speaker wouldn't know intuitively.
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.
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.
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'.
I tried shaving this yak to out-pedant you on the assumption it was a transliteration of a non-Latin language, then found that Hawai'i's written language is (apparently) recent relative to the age of the language. Also, it has a history.
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.
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.
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”?
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.
Yeah, I don’t think there was a missile. Or, at least, there probably wasn’t. This messaging and timeline is just strangely congruent to what I would expect if there were.
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.
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."
"Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."
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.
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.
Whilst I understand it's possible that you may have contributed more to HN under a different username, your complaint would be taken vastly more seriously if it came from an account that had a solid history of posting quality articles and comments of the kind of which you've said you'd like to see more.
This community is only as good as people make it through their article submissions and comments, and it's up to all of us to do our part.
And as others have pointed out, the flag link is there for stuff you don't think belongs here.
Edit: if you're an engineer and you disagree, then you're the kind of engineer who's more likely to accidentally convince millions of people they are about to die and you are exactly who should be reading this kind of article.
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...