23 ms·

What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

273 points by mathgenius 9y ago

brndnmtthws 9y ago
I live in New York City and I felt a small degree of panic when the reports showed up on Twitter. However, my initial instinct was "either the system doesn't work, or someone messed up". If someone started firing missiles at the US, the risk that we'd start shooting them back seems high, and I think NYC would be a city that would get pummeled in retaliation. This is probably true for a lot of major coastal cities, especially Seattle, Vancouver, SF/LA, NYC, Washington DC, and Boston. Fun NYC fact: the city is littered with fallout shelters: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1Zm18xuBxp8kSysodfrxm-hYxu_E&hl=en_US&ll=40.807352561683786%2C-73.922393&z=10 https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1Zm18xuBxp8kSysodfr...
- ashleyn 9y ago
  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".
  - Retric 9y ago
    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.
    - macintux 9y ago
      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.
      - Retric 9y ago
        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.
      - ianburrell 9y ago
        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.
    - ianburrell 9y ago
      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.
      - Retric 9y ago
        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-radiation-survival-shelter-2017-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/nuclear-explosion-fallout-rad...
  - gdubs 9y ago
    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.
    - wolfgang42 9y ago
      ashleyn says[0] that it was The Way Things Work[1] by David Macaulay (©1988), which indeed has (on page 177) a drawing of a fallout shelter depicted as a small concrete bunker at the end of a deep stairwell far underground (containing, of all things, a party singing Happy Birthday), along with the following description: > 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. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16145514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16145514 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Things_Work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Things_Work
      - ddxxdd 9y ago
        ::nostalgic tears::
  - JKCalhoun 9y ago
    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.
    - pwg 9y ago
      > 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 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.
    - ashleyn 9y ago
      It was this book: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ca/Way_things_work.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ca/Way_things_wo... Had pretty cool drawings of a wooly mammoth around a bunch of inventions
    - burfog 9y ago
      It's not laughable. The building code in Switzerland specifies that residential construction must contain a shelter that withstands a 12 megaton blast at 700 meters. The country has more shelter than people. Another thing to note is that the multi-megaton weapons aren't in style anymore, due to improved targeting accuracy.
      - ddxxdd 9y ago
        >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.
  - ataturk 9y ago
    "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?"
- herbst 9y ago
  > 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.
  - harryh 9y ago
    Bayesian reasoning. Most positive tests for unlikely events are false positives.
    - nothrabannosir 9y ago
      (Assuming plausible alternatives, being those false positives. Which is true in this case, of course.)
  - true_religion 9y ago
    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?
    - herbst 9y ago
      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. I get it now i guess.
      - influx 9y ago
- danepowell 9y ago
  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.
  - komali2 9y ago
    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.
    - jdavis703 9y ago
      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.
      - Doxin 9y ago
        By the time you feel heat or hear roaring or see smoke your hallway is already on fire. In some buildings that's your only escape route. Please don't give dangerous advice.
        komali2 9y ago
        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.
- blackRust 9y ago
  They seem quite useless: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-new-york-nuclear/new-york-removes-misleading-nuclear-fallout-shelter-signs-idUKKBN1EL0SZ https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-new-york-nuclear/new-york-...
- Clubber 9y ago
  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.
- mejari 9y ago
  North Korea is really the only viable country that we'd be hit by nuclear weapons from, and they have no way of "pummeling" NYC.
  - stirlo 9y ago
    An accidental launch from Russia/China/India/Packistan is more likely than North Korea waking up one day with a death wish IMO
tomalpha 9y ago
I always struggle with news interviews that go along the lines of “So you’re entire family’s been killed. How do you feel?”. I realise it’s easy to lose the impact on people’s lives behind a few words in a headline, and maybe I’m just too much of a cynic. Pleasingly (to me) this article’s focus on feelings has some real meaning: namely the widespread panic that was caused by the false alarm. (Like other folks in the previous HN thread I hope constructive lessons can be learned at all levels from this)
- maxerickson 9y ago
  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.
  - tomalpha 9y ago
    > 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...)
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    I feel exactly the opposite. It's critical that the real impact of death and destruction be effectively conveyed in the media. All too often it's trivialized, sugar-coated, or made to seem like a video game. People need to realize how devastating such violence is, instead of viewing it as a game or a joke, if there is to be any hope of reducing its incidence.
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      I mentioned that I understand that in the second paragraph and expressed that I don't think they do a good job of it. Much of the media treats victims of tragedies like shit. All the time. It's a race to who knows where.
usnigg 9y ago
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.
bvod 9y ago
I find it really annoying that top two articles on HN are completely separate from engineering. Since when have posts from news sources been able to not just make it to the front page, but dominate the front page? Years ago, coming to this site helped me to become an engineer and changed the way I think about problems. But now I don't get that, and instead get plenty of feel-good articles and useless posts that don't contain any real information. I think the articles here should be different from the front page of reddit, but increasingly this viewpoint has become unpopular here.
- 10dpd 9y ago
  You might find it useful to read the HN Guidelines [1] "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - bvod 9y ago
    So any article under the sun is relevant for HN? That's definitely not the case as mods frequently remove posts, and as much as they would like to be, mods are not arbiters of intellectual curiosity.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      The guidelines are vague, but the site was still never intended to be exclusively about engineering - hell, initially it was called Startup News. I find it useful to look at the submissions by the site's creator[1], before he passed over the site's management to others, back in 2014. As you'll see, it actually has very little engineering content, and on the contrary, has many articles from mainstream sources. I'm sure HN has ebbs and flows on the ratio of engineering articles, but it was never supposed to be dedicated to those; maybe you just joined at a moment when the ratio was bigger. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg
  - 9y ago
hedora 9y ago
How close did we get to nuking them “back”?
- j05huaNathaniel 9y ago
  This was the state of Hawaii's fault. Not USPACOM. The answer is not even a little bit because the military never saw an actual threat.
- Symmetry 9y ago
  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.
- tome 9y ago
  Since this system had nothing to do with the military, nowhere near.
- exabrial 9y ago
  I seriously doubt we would or should... Too close to China and Russia. China said they would not get the USA's way, if NK initiates. A nuclear explosion near their border would assuredly remove that protection. Finally, there are very few military targets there that a nuke would be more useful than conventional weapons.
v4n4d1s 9y ago
Anyone got data (Heartrate etc.) from Apple Watches / Fitbit / Other Tracking devices?
- McKayDavis 9y ago
  This [1] reddit thread has a fitbit graph. https://www.reddit.com/r/Hawaii/comments/7q6hzg/average_cardio_workout_for_the_state_of_hawaii/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Hawaii/comments/7q6hzg/average_card...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    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.
hoppelhase 9y ago
Any study/articles on how the boundary of starting a nuclear war and being the first one to launch a missile is much lower after that incident?
ultim8k 9y ago
Well, if Trump wasn't there we wouldn't be talking about this "engineering" problem. He is the one that triggered the whole nuclear story.
IIAOPSW 9y ago
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.
- salmonfamine 9y ago
  You should probably get an MP3 of that song, in case YouTube happens to be down at the time of the nuclear blast. That would suck.
  - IIAOPSW 9y ago
    My actual level of preparedness goes up in proportion to geopolitical tension.
    - Parcissons 9y ago
      But this is PiracHeresy! You wouldnt steel a box of food if its the end of the world. Downloading music is stealing. Looters will be shot!
- 0xdada 9y ago
  I don't think it's as bad as you think. Check out this thread: https://twitter.com/lcamtuf/status/952265416289632256 https://twitter.com/lcamtuf/status/952265416289632256. If shit hits the fan and you end up surviving, your help in the aftermath can be crucial.
  - matte_black 9y ago
    What software development skills will be most useful in a post-apocalyptic world?
ggsp 9y ago
Stupid question: why would you fill up your bathtub?
- avtar 9y ago
  Probably to quickly stock up on drinking water.
- matt4077 9y ago
  Having a reserve of potable water.
- Maakuth 9y ago
  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.
- robschia 9y ago
  Because the fallout would poison the water with radioactivity
- stevenleeg 9y ago
  Stocking up on drinking water or having a source of water to flush the toilet with (by manually refilling the tank).
  - asdjasldkjkljd 9y ago
    Drinking water. Don't flush the toilet because you might eventually need the water in the tank too.
    - ddxxdd 9y ago
      I've never understood this. What do you do when you need to defecate?
      - MagnumOpus 9y ago
baursak 9y ago
A good piece of perspective on this -- it's what many civilians feel day in day out in places like Pakistan when killer drones are flying over.
- anotheryou 9y ago
  Until it becomes the sad norm and you just get on with your life I guess.
  - anotheryou 9y ago
    (Just for clarification, this doesn't make it any better or less traumatizing. It is probably much more traumatizing, people just have to cope with it, because you can't live in constant fear forever.)
    - akkat 9y ago
      I have friend who in Jerusalem Israel during the second intifada. Terrorists were blowing themselves up on busses killing or maiming nearly everyone on the bus. Yet the locals continued to take busses because they needed to get to school or work and stopping normal life until after the terrorism stopped was out of the question. Not everyone can simply go on a vacation until everything fixes itself.
      - stordoff 9y ago
        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.
  - nbsd4lyfe 9y ago
    Below the surface there's an abnormally high rate of PTSD and a small percentage of people who fail to function.
- ahmadss 9y ago
ageofwant 9y ago
It's reasonable to assume that a adversary can and will use overreaction against perceived threads as a strategic 'unconventional weapon'. Unconventional defence would include educating a modern populace on critical thinking, thread model evaluation and even things like stoicism. https://youtu.be/ciStnd9Y2ak?t=14m5s https://youtu.be/ciStnd9Y2ak?t=14m5s is relevant, in which the fear of the thing killed 1500, while the thing in reality is benign.
joewee 9y ago
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.
spraak 9y ago
Pedantic pet peeve: spelling it as Hawaii instead of Hawai'i
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language
- nkurz 9y ago
  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.
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    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.
  - spraak 9y ago
    Both the symbol/mark and the sound exist natively in English text and speech, so it bothers me in the same way someone might be bothered by mixing up their/they're or your/you're.
    - __david__ 9y ago
      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.
chiefalchemist 9y ago
I think it's safe to assume the 100,000+ Iraqi civilians killed in the conflict in Iraq received no such warning. It's shameful how completely unaware most Americans are of the terror their MIC imposes on others. Ironically, this incident in HI will feed the collective fears and the wrath of the MIC will extend further still. The opportunity to question the status quo will be lost.
- sschueller 9y ago
  Or the continued drone war that is inflicting a continuous terror on many civilians. Now considerd standard operating procedure and no longer mentioned in the media. Imagine living your life not knowing if the coffee place you are visiting is in a drones cross hairs. Then image what kind of hate you would feel towards the country inflicting this terror on you. This is not how you solve extremism and bring peace. This is how you make it worse.
  - chiefalchemist 9y ago
    Yup. The USA has actively created plenty of shitholes - in places where the faces are not pure European white - and that gets zero public reaction. The current POTUS uses the word shithole to describe a group of countries and he's X, Y and Z. Yeah, Trump is a moron. But the hypocrisy of the press and the public is a moral violation.
    - CocaKoala 9y ago
      You're aware that a lot of people are upset about the sentiment expressed and not the word used to express it, correct?
      - chiefalchemist 9y ago
        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.
ourmandave 9y ago
Nearly forty minutes passed before a second message went out: “There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii. ...“It was a mistake made during a standard procedure at the changeover of a shift, and an employee pushed the wrong button.” I've seen some shitty Admin Panels, but somebody "pushed the wrong button" and an end-of-your-world false alarm was going off for 40 minutes?! WTF?
- herbst 9y ago
  Exactly my thoughts. Errors happen, Developers are lazy and interfaces suck. However this is definitly not a excuse, multiple things have to be completely wrong that it even could get this far.
  - beamatronic 9y ago
    I've built a lot of alerts. The "This is not a drill" text should not have even been entered until the system was fully tested and operational.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- Clubber 9y ago
  >I've seen some shitty Admin Panels, but somebody "pushed the wrong button" and an end-of-your-world false alarm was going off for 40 minutes?! WTF? Ya, it's the same panel that is installed in the White House. :) Now that's a comforting thought.
  - spikels 9y ago
    This is clearly on the State of Hawaii not the US government.
- mfukar 9y ago
  What sort of procedure do you imagine is in place for a 'false-alarm' type of situation like this?
sneak 9y ago
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”?
- asdjasldkjkljd 9y ago
  You'd have corroborating evidence from multiple other countries that are also looking for missile launches. Though, it wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea for an enemy to take credit for it in an attempt to further destabilize our relationship with our government.
- holman 9y ago
  The likelihood of this being the case seems so close to nil. For one, the coverup required would involve thousands of military and non-military personnel. But secondly, if we really did destroy an incoming warhead, well, that would constitute an attack — the attack — and I can’t fathom the US military not counter-attacking. So no, I don’t think you have to worry about that. Just a fat fingering, no more.
  - sneak 9y ago
    > For one, the coverup required would involve thousands of military and non-military personnel. Over a million people have a TS clearance. As for not fathoming the military counterattacking—that is an excellent motive for keeping such an event secret.
- RoyTyrell 9y ago
  What if this site is actually just a government tool to monitor "woke" people, and you're one of the handful of users that isn't a bot or a shill...
- abecedarius 9y ago
  Who else would likely see the missile besides U.S. military? That's an interesting idea, even if at first blush very unlikely.
politelemon 9y ago
> and an employee pushed the wrong button I would assume that was how it was explained to the governor, and that the actual system is software based (right?) - there couldn't possibly be an actual physical 'ballistic missile alert' button right next to the 'shift change' button. In which case, the triggering of this alert is probably a bit more complex. However, this is treated as a sensitive system so there likely will not be an actual post-mortem on the incident
- MicroBerto 9y ago
  They are clearly lying, that much is certain. 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".
- newfoundglory 9y ago
  Not a public one, but I expect there will be an internal one.
- intrasight 9y ago
  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.
- dbbk 9y ago
  According to the Washington Post, it was a dropdown with two options next to each other - "Test missile alert" and "Missile alert". It's really that bad. https://twitter.com/ericuman/status/952719318688718850 https://twitter.com/ericuman/status/952719318688718850
  - jmcqk6 9y ago
    It's shocking it doesn't happen more often then.
rawnlq 9y ago
AskReddit is really good for these kind of questions. There's a large thread going on right now: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7q6gys/reddit_members_in_hawaii_what_initially_went/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7q6gys/reddit_me...
gdubs 9y ago
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.
- TimonKnigge 9y ago
  > surround yourself with as much building as you can (the middle floor of a high rise, or a basement three stories deep, etc.) Why would the middle floor of a high rise be better than its ground floor?
  - gdubs 9y ago
    Here’s one source: https://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/20130726-1622-20490-8811/nuclearfactsheet_final.txt https://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/20130726-1622-20490-... 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.
- macintux 9y ago
  I think many people consider nuclear war an end of the world event. Working hard to survive just to be left adrift in the ashes of civilization with likely long-term health effects seems counterproductive to some of us.
  - rectangletangle 9y ago
    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.
SQL2219 9y ago
3 words: Software alert fatigue.
rdlecler1 9y ago
I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw PTSD.
- dude01 9y ago
  In fact, I would say that it was the goal of this event -- inducing PTSD on a small part of the U.S. (the state of Hawaii).
nkurz 9y ago
I saw a high-effort self-post on Reddit that gave a good framework for evaluating what might have happened. I thought it was good enough that I've recopied it here in full hoping that author appreciates reaching a larger audience and that discussion here might be better than that on Reddit. Repeating, I'm not the author of what's written below. --- A couple of possibilities for what REALLY went down in Hawaii yesterday I used to work on the Minutemen 3 ICBMs for a high profile company. Can't share too many details for obvious reasons. But I think the "mistake" of an employee accidentally pressed the mass alert button is very unlikely. In fact, I can think of a lot of things way more likely. Here's my two cents, in no particular order: The threat was real, the missile was shot down As others on this subreddit have already pointed out, the amount of time it takes an ICBM to travel from Southeast Asia to Hawaii is approximately 20-30 min ( ~10 min to hit ICBM max speed of 7 km/s, ~7200 km, (7200/7)/(60) = ~17 min for total travel time of ~27 min, not accounting for earth's rotation in that time period). The amount of time it took for the false alarm to be sent out was 38 min. Now, the way the US's ABM system works is that they basically launch a giant chunk of metal at the ICBM and hit it really hard. The ABMs have no ordinance or anything, they just destroy the incoming missile through shear impact. However, even though our ABM system is the best in the world, it's still only successful around 50% of the time. So when the incoming threat was discovered, it would still be protocol to alert the intended target of the threat in the event that the ABM systems fail (and whatever other defenses we have that I don't know about). I think it's at least feasible that the threat was real, and the threat was dealt with successfully (and thankfully). The question that tears this theory apart is: why would the US not tell us they shot down an enemy ICBM? The most likely answer I can come up with is that Trump doesn't want war. Maybe he just talks a big game. Or perhaps it's not financially beneficial to start a war when there were no causalities. Whatever it is, it's not that we don't know who launched the missile. When those things take off we pretty much immediately know where it's going and where it came from. So if there was a real threat, the US Gov is for whatever reason not sharing this information with the public. Maybe they don't want to cause panic. I don't know. The EAS was hacked to provoke reaction from Trump The EAS has been hacked before, it's possible that it was hacked again. The person or persons who hacked the system either did so for shits and giggles, which is extremely fucked up considering how many people could have died if we had retaliated, or they did so to intentionally cause a retaliation from Trump in order to make him look bad. See, ICBMs function on something called Mutually Assured Destruction. If someone like Russia launches their full force of ICBMs at us, we have that half hour to retaliate. In a situation like that, both countries lose. Using ICBMs against another country with ICBM's is essentially committing suicide. If we had launched missiles towards Southeast Asia, they would then have a chance to retaliate against us. I have hard time believing that any hacker would do this, but then, there are some truly crazy people out there. This could also explain why it took so long for them to send out the second alert, because the system was hacked or down and they needed to regain control or reset it. Also, if one of the employees didn't send the message, they may not have even known about it for several minutes after. The EAS was commandeered by a disgruntled employee This is the scenario I find most likely. Trump tends to piss an enormous amount of people off. Perhaps one of the workers manning that operation decided to try and make Trump look bad by sending out a false alert. It certainly is a bit embarrassing to send an entire state into full panic mode on accident. This is going to be a national incident for several days still. The monitoring system used to look for incoming threats malfunctioned This happens more often than you would think. The early alert systems are very sensitive. They're a lot better than they used to be, but they've detected false missiles before. I've heard of them being triggered by sunlight reflecting off large pieces of metal. They're sensitive for a reason, I mean better safe than sorry, right? Somehow, yesterday, the conditions were just right to trigger a false alarm. Instead of sharing with everyone how fallible the system really is, the Gov decided to blame it on a careless employee. It would cause a lot less panic. The "false alert" was staged In an attempt to distract the MSM from some policy he is currently pursuing, Trump ordered the "fake" threat. Now the news cycles will be dominated day and night by this "mistake" allowing him to pursue his true intentions. Or, alternatively, he wanted to demonstrate to the people that the U.S has an early warning system, although I don't think this is likely as the amount of panic that the alert would have caused (car crashes, heart attacks, etc) would not have been worth it. The mistake was exactly that; a mistake Honestly, I have a hard time believing that any operator could accidentally send out a message like that. These guys are trained for months before they are put at that station, and it seems to me like sending out a state wide alert takes more than just one press of a button. Also, the operator would have immediately noticed that the alert went out, and they would have been able to correct it much faster (not the 38 min that is did). Whatever really happened yesterday, I don't think it was just an errant press of a button. But no matter what the actual cause was, this event was still a tragedy. Why? If there ever is a real threat and people get this message, they are now less likely to believe it, and that means they are less likely to seek shelter or prepare in anyway. Remember guys, don't let this turn into a "the Gov cried wolf" story. If you ever get a notification like this, your first thought should be finding shelter, then questioning. Good night everyone. https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/7qax47/a_couple_of_possibilities_for_what_really_went/ https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/7qax47/a_couple...
McKayDavis 9y ago
I live on O'ahu and was holding my phone when the emergency alert came in at 8:07am. I yelled "Oh my God!" and ran to show my wife the message. I've run through this scenario a few times in my head before and I knew every minute was critical -- so I went into action mode immediately. I told my two kids to get dressed now because we were leaving in exactly 1 minute. The reason we were leaving is our house is single-wall wood construction with no sealed windows and no HVAC, which is pretty much the least ideal shelter possible in a nuclear fallout scenario. The four of us were in the car on the road at ~8:09 and inside the local LDS (Mormon) Church 0.9 miles away at 8:12am. The church building is the nearest concrete structure with sealed windows and interior rooms that I knew I could gain access to. Unfortunately it doesn't have a basement, but very few structures in Hawaii do. Thankfully, the doors were already open as there was a family inside doing some cleaning. We were the first to arrive and at least a dozen other families showed in the next 10 minutes. We all hunkered in the gym, some crying, some praying, most just in shock. The first glimmer of hope came when I read the first report of the it being a false alarm on Twitter at around 8:23am. The whole incident was absolutely terrifying and I'm very upset that it even happened. But, we learned some valuable lessons and I'm satisfied with how my family responded to the incident. Overall, my plan was good and was executed about as flawlessly as possible. I realize we need to add a "bug-out bag" of essential items (e.g. medications, cell phone charger, hand-crank radio) that we can grab as we head out. It most definitely helped that I had considered this scenario before and knew exactly what steps I would take. The one good takeaway is that this event has sparked many similar conversations state-wide (and beyond) of what to do in these situations. Here's hoping these plans never have to be executed again...
- dmarlow 9y ago
  What will you do if you can't get into your church building?
  - throwawayyy9 9y ago
    Pray.
  - McKayDavis 9y ago
EldonMcGuinness 9y ago
Thanks for this, when I heard about the announcement my mind just went blank and I'm nowhere near Hawaii!
qbaqbaqba 9y ago
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.
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bahmboo 9y ago
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
exabrial 9y ago
Everyone is talking about nukes... I doubt nk has a compact nuclear warhead that can fit on a ballistic missile. Maybe in another 5-10 years, but not right now. They most likely have chemical and biological weapons, as confirmed by the nk soldier that defected and had anthrax antibodies in his blood.
- mejari 9y ago
  We already know they have compact nuclear warheads https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/north-korea-now-making-missile-ready-nuclear-weapons-us-analysts-say/2017/08/08/e14b882a-7b6b-11e7-9d08-b79f191668ed_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/north...
  - exabrial 9y ago
    Well that sucks. Guess I'm behind in the news. Wow, that's a lot of nukes... 60??
peter303 9y ago
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.
Myrmornis 9y ago
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.
jernfrost 9y ago
Must be a terrible thing, if anything good can come out of this I hope it alerts people to the horrors of nuclear war. I am puzzled by why we speak so much about global warming but almost nobody talks about nuclear war. Global warming is not remotely as dangerous as nuclear war. Sure it will make crops fails some places, cause water shortage for some millions, force people to move off the coast etc. But it will not kill billions of people. Nuclear war could do that. As long as the US and Russia stockpile huge quantities of nuclear weapons the whole world is in jeopardy. The number of times nuclear war has almost gotten triggered due to mistakes like this one in Hawaii is scary to think of. How many human errors or hardware/software failures need to happen before one day, an actual launch of nuclear missiles happen by default? These weapons are far too dangerous to stockpile in such huge quantities. There should be a push to reduce the stockpile to something like 20-30 missiles. It isn't hard to imagine a president in the style of Donald Trump, acting irrational and making a rash and stupid mistake which puts the world on fire.
- namelost 9y ago
  If nuclear war is that close to happening, then we are already too far gone to address it. Who is going to be the one to convince Trump to decommission some of America's nuclear weapons?
  - burfog 9y ago
    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.
m3kw9 9y ago
I’m waiting for the Colbert interview with the man of the moment
xcodevn 9y ago
Now let's think about the feeling of people in other countries when be attacked by US missiles.
Mikeb85 9y ago
People actually fell for this? First of all, it's doubtful North Korea could launch an ICBM that is capable of hitting it's target. Second, even if it could, I doubt the US doesn't have an anti-missile system capable of interception. And finally, if it was Russia that launched it, you'd be fucked anyway. All this shows is how susceptible Americans are to fake news.
- KnightOfWords 9y ago
  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.
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rpmcmurphy 9y ago
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.
WillReplyfFood 9y ago
Technical Support will come riding through the apocalyptic wasteland on a technical, robbing those who for years refused to read the manuals.

273 points by mathgenius 9y ago

I live in New York City and I felt a small degree of panic when the reports showed up on Twitter. However, my initial instinct was "either the system doesn't work, or someone messed up". If someone started firing missiles at the US, the risk that we'd start shooting them back seems high, and I think NYC would be a city that would get pummeled in retaliation. This is probably true for a lot of major coastal cities, especially Seattle, Vancouver, SF/LA, NYC, Washington DC, and Boston. Fun NYC fact: the city is littered with fallout shelters: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1Zm18xuBxp8kSysodfrxm-hYxu_E&hl=en_US&ll=40.807352561683786%2C-73.922393&z=10 https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1Zm18xuBxp8kSysodfr...

ashleyn 9y ago
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".
- Retric 9y ago
  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.
  - macintux 9y ago
    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.
    - Retric 9y ago
      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.
    - ianburrell 9y ago
      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.
  - ianburrell 9y ago
    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.
    - Retric 9y ago
      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-radiation-survival-shelter-2017-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/nuclear-explosion-fallout-rad...
- gdubs 9y ago
  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.
  - wolfgang42 9y ago
    ashleyn says[0] that it was The Way Things Work[1] by David Macaulay (©1988), which indeed has (on page 177) a drawing of a fallout shelter depicted as a small concrete bunker at the end of a deep stairwell far underground (containing, of all things, a party singing Happy Birthday), along with the following description: > 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. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16145514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16145514 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Things_Work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Things_Work
    - ddxxdd 9y ago
      ::nostalgic tears::
- JKCalhoun 9y ago
  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.
  - pwg 9y ago
    > 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 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.
  - ashleyn 9y ago
    It was this book: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ca/Way_things_work.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ca/Way_things_wo... Had pretty cool drawings of a wooly mammoth around a bunch of inventions
  - burfog 9y ago
    It's not laughable. The building code in Switzerland specifies that residential construction must contain a shelter that withstands a 12 megaton blast at 700 meters. The country has more shelter than people. Another thing to note is that the multi-megaton weapons aren't in style anymore, due to improved targeting accuracy.
    - ddxxdd 9y ago
      >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.
- ataturk 9y ago
  "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?"
herbst 9y ago
> 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.
- harryh 9y ago
  Bayesian reasoning. Most positive tests for unlikely events are false positives.
  - nothrabannosir 9y ago
    (Assuming plausible alternatives, being those false positives. Which is true in this case, of course.)
- true_religion 9y ago
  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?
  - herbst 9y ago
    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. I get it now i guess.
    - influx 9y ago
danepowell 9y ago
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.
- komali2 9y ago
  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.
  - jdavis703 9y ago
    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.
    - Doxin 9y ago
      By the time you feel heat or hear roaring or see smoke your hallway is already on fire. In some buildings that's your only escape route. Please don't give dangerous advice.
      - komali2 9y ago
        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.
blackRust 9y ago
They seem quite useless: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-new-york-nuclear/new-york-removes-misleading-nuclear-fallout-shelter-signs-idUKKBN1EL0SZ https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-new-york-nuclear/new-york-...
Clubber 9y ago
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.
mejari 9y ago
North Korea is really the only viable country that we'd be hit by nuclear weapons from, and they have no way of "pummeling" NYC.
- stirlo 9y ago
  An accidental launch from Russia/China/India/Packistan is more likely than North Korea waking up one day with a death wish IMO

tomalpha 9y ago

I always struggle with news interviews that go along the lines of “So you’re entire family’s been killed. How do you feel?”. I realise it’s easy to lose the impact on people’s lives behind a few words in a headline, and maybe I’m just too much of a cynic. Pleasingly (to me) this article’s focus on feelings has some real meaning: namely the widespread panic that was caused by the false alarm. (Like other folks in the previous HN thread I hope constructive lessons can be learned at all levels from this)

maxerickson 9y ago
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.
- tomalpha 9y ago
  > 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...)
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  I feel exactly the opposite. It's critical that the real impact of death and destruction be effectively conveyed in the media. All too often it's trivialized, sugar-coated, or made to seem like a video game. People need to realize how devastating such violence is, instead of viewing it as a game or a joke, if there is to be any hope of reducing its incidence.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    I mentioned that I understand that in the second paragraph and expressed that I don't think they do a good job of it. Much of the media treats victims of tragedies like shit. All the time. It's a race to who knows where.

usnigg 9y ago

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.

bvod 9y ago

I find it really annoying that top two articles on HN are completely separate from engineering. Since when have posts from news sources been able to not just make it to the front page, but dominate the front page? Years ago, coming to this site helped me to become an engineer and changed the way I think about problems. But now I don't get that, and instead get plenty of feel-good articles and useless posts that don't contain any real information. I think the articles here should be different from the front page of reddit, but increasingly this viewpoint has become unpopular here.

10dpd 9y ago
You might find it useful to read the HN Guidelines [1] "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- bvod 9y ago
  So any article under the sun is relevant for HN? That's definitely not the case as mods frequently remove posts, and as much as they would like to be, mods are not arbiters of intellectual curiosity.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    The guidelines are vague, but the site was still never intended to be exclusively about engineering - hell, initially it was called Startup News. I find it useful to look at the submissions by the site's creator[1], before he passed over the site's management to others, back in 2014. As you'll see, it actually has very little engineering content, and on the contrary, has many articles from mainstream sources. I'm sure HN has ebbs and flows on the ratio of engineering articles, but it was never supposed to be dedicated to those; maybe you just joined at a moment when the ratio was bigger. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=pg
- 9y ago

hedora 9y ago

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

j05huaNathaniel 9y ago
This was the state of Hawaii's fault. Not USPACOM. The answer is not even a little bit because the military never saw an actual threat.
Symmetry 9y ago
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.
tome 9y ago
Since this system had nothing to do with the military, nowhere near.
exabrial 9y ago
I seriously doubt we would or should... Too close to China and Russia. China said they would not get the USA's way, if NK initiates. A nuclear explosion near their border would assuredly remove that protection. Finally, there are very few military targets there that a nuke would be more useful than conventional weapons.

v4n4d1s 9y ago

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

McKayDavis 9y ago
This [1] reddit thread has a fitbit graph. https://www.reddit.com/r/Hawaii/comments/7q6hzg/average_cardio_workout_for_the_state_of_hawaii/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Hawaii/comments/7q6hzg/average_card...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  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.

hoppelhase 9y ago

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

ultim8k 9y ago

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

IIAOPSW 9y ago

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.

salmonfamine 9y ago
You should probably get an MP3 of that song, in case YouTube happens to be down at the time of the nuclear blast. That would suck.
- IIAOPSW 9y ago
  My actual level of preparedness goes up in proportion to geopolitical tension.
  - Parcissons 9y ago
    But this is PiracHeresy! You wouldnt steel a box of food if its the end of the world. Downloading music is stealing. Looters will be shot!
0xdada 9y ago
I don't think it's as bad as you think. Check out this thread: https://twitter.com/lcamtuf/status/952265416289632256 https://twitter.com/lcamtuf/status/952265416289632256. If shit hits the fan and you end up surviving, your help in the aftermath can be crucial.
- matte_black 9y ago
  What software development skills will be most useful in a post-apocalyptic world?

ggsp 9y ago

Stupid question: why would you fill up your bathtub?

avtar 9y ago
Probably to quickly stock up on drinking water.
matt4077 9y ago
Having a reserve of potable water.
Maakuth 9y ago
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.
robschia 9y ago
Because the fallout would poison the water with radioactivity
stevenleeg 9y ago
Stocking up on drinking water or having a source of water to flush the toilet with (by manually refilling the tank).
- asdjasldkjkljd 9y ago
  Drinking water. Don't flush the toilet because you might eventually need the water in the tank too.
  - ddxxdd 9y ago
    I've never understood this. What do you do when you need to defecate?
    - MagnumOpus 9y ago

baursak 9y ago

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

anotheryou 9y ago
Until it becomes the sad norm and you just get on with your life I guess.
- anotheryou 9y ago
  (Just for clarification, this doesn't make it any better or less traumatizing. It is probably much more traumatizing, people just have to cope with it, because you can't live in constant fear forever.)
  - akkat 9y ago
    I have friend who in Jerusalem Israel during the second intifada. Terrorists were blowing themselves up on busses killing or maiming nearly everyone on the bus. Yet the locals continued to take busses because they needed to get to school or work and stopping normal life until after the terrorism stopped was out of the question. Not everyone can simply go on a vacation until everything fixes itself.
    - stordoff 9y ago
      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.
- nbsd4lyfe 9y ago
  Below the surface there's an abnormally high rate of PTSD and a small percentage of people who fail to function.
ahmadss 9y ago

ageofwant 9y ago

It's reasonable to assume that a adversary can and will use overreaction against perceived threads as a strategic 'unconventional weapon'. Unconventional defence would include educating a modern populace on critical thinking, thread model evaluation and even things like stoicism. https://youtu.be/ciStnd9Y2ak?t=14m5s https://youtu.be/ciStnd9Y2ak?t=14m5s is relevant, in which the fear of the thing killed 1500, while the thing in reality is benign.

joewee 9y ago

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.

spraak 9y ago

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

rainbowmverse 9y ago
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_language
nkurz 9y ago
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.
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  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.
- spraak 9y ago
  Both the symbol/mark and the sound exist natively in English text and speech, so it bothers me in the same way someone might be bothered by mixing up their/they're or your/you're.
  - __david__ 9y ago
    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.

chiefalchemist 9y ago

I think it's safe to assume the 100,000+ Iraqi civilians killed in the conflict in Iraq received no such warning. It's shameful how completely unaware most Americans are of the terror their MIC imposes on others. Ironically, this incident in HI will feed the collective fears and the wrath of the MIC will extend further still. The opportunity to question the status quo will be lost.

sschueller 9y ago
Or the continued drone war that is inflicting a continuous terror on many civilians. Now considerd standard operating procedure and no longer mentioned in the media. Imagine living your life not knowing if the coffee place you are visiting is in a drones cross hairs. Then image what kind of hate you would feel towards the country inflicting this terror on you. This is not how you solve extremism and bring peace. This is how you make it worse.
- chiefalchemist 9y ago
  Yup. The USA has actively created plenty of shitholes - in places where the faces are not pure European white - and that gets zero public reaction. The current POTUS uses the word shithole to describe a group of countries and he's X, Y and Z. Yeah, Trump is a moron. But the hypocrisy of the press and the public is a moral violation.
  - CocaKoala 9y ago
    You're aware that a lot of people are upset about the sentiment expressed and not the word used to express it, correct?
    - chiefalchemist 9y ago
      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.

ourmandave 9y ago

Nearly forty minutes passed before a second message went out: “There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii. ...“It was a mistake made during a standard procedure at the changeover of a shift, and an employee pushed the wrong button.” I've seen some shitty Admin Panels, but somebody "pushed the wrong button" and an end-of-your-world false alarm was going off for 40 minutes?! WTF?

herbst 9y ago
Exactly my thoughts. Errors happen, Developers are lazy and interfaces suck. However this is definitly not a excuse, multiple things have to be completely wrong that it even could get this far.
- beamatronic 9y ago
  I've built a lot of alerts. The "This is not a drill" text should not have even been entered until the system was fully tested and operational.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
Clubber 9y ago
>I've seen some shitty Admin Panels, but somebody "pushed the wrong button" and an end-of-your-world false alarm was going off for 40 minutes?! WTF? Ya, it's the same panel that is installed in the White House. :) Now that's a comforting thought.
- spikels 9y ago
  This is clearly on the State of Hawaii not the US government.
mfukar 9y ago
What sort of procedure do you imagine is in place for a 'false-alarm' type of situation like this?

sneak 9y ago

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”?

asdjasldkjkljd 9y ago
You'd have corroborating evidence from multiple other countries that are also looking for missile launches. Though, it wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea for an enemy to take credit for it in an attempt to further destabilize our relationship with our government.
holman 9y ago
The likelihood of this being the case seems so close to nil. For one, the coverup required would involve thousands of military and non-military personnel. But secondly, if we really did destroy an incoming warhead, well, that would constitute an attack — the attack — and I can’t fathom the US military not counter-attacking. So no, I don’t think you have to worry about that. Just a fat fingering, no more.
- sneak 9y ago
  > For one, the coverup required would involve thousands of military and non-military personnel. Over a million people have a TS clearance. As for not fathoming the military counterattacking—that is an excellent motive for keeping such an event secret.
RoyTyrell 9y ago
What if this site is actually just a government tool to monitor "woke" people, and you're one of the handful of users that isn't a bot or a shill...
abecedarius 9y ago
Who else would likely see the missile besides U.S. military? That's an interesting idea, even if at first blush very unlikely.

politelemon 9y ago

> and an employee pushed the wrong button I would assume that was how it was explained to the governor, and that the actual system is software based (right?) - there couldn't possibly be an actual physical 'ballistic missile alert' button right next to the 'shift change' button. In which case, the triggering of this alert is probably a bit more complex. However, this is treated as a sensitive system so there likely will not be an actual post-mortem on the incident

MicroBerto 9y ago
They are clearly lying, that much is certain. 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".
newfoundglory 9y ago
Not a public one, but I expect there will be an internal one.
intrasight 9y ago
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.
dbbk 9y ago
According to the Washington Post, it was a dropdown with two options next to each other - "Test missile alert" and "Missile alert". It's really that bad. https://twitter.com/ericuman/status/952719318688718850 https://twitter.com/ericuman/status/952719318688718850
- jmcqk6 9y ago
  It's shocking it doesn't happen more often then.

rawnlq 9y ago

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

gdubs 9y ago

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.

TimonKnigge 9y ago
> surround yourself with as much building as you can (the middle floor of a high rise, or a basement three stories deep, etc.) Why would the middle floor of a high rise be better than its ground floor?
- gdubs 9y ago
  Here’s one source: https://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/20130726-1622-20490-8811/nuclearfactsheet_final.txt https://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/20130726-1622-20490-... 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.
macintux 9y ago
I think many people consider nuclear war an end of the world event. Working hard to survive just to be left adrift in the ashes of civilization with likely long-term health effects seems counterproductive to some of us.
- rectangletangle 9y ago
  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.

SQL2219 9y ago

3 words: Software alert fatigue.

rdlecler1 9y ago

I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw PTSD.

dude01 9y ago
In fact, I would say that it was the goal of this event -- inducing PTSD on a small part of the U.S. (the state of Hawaii).

nkurz 9y ago

I saw a high-effort self-post on Reddit that gave a good framework for evaluating what might have happened. I thought it was good enough that I've recopied it here in full hoping that author appreciates reaching a larger audience and that discussion here might be better than that on Reddit. Repeating, I'm not the author of what's written below. --- A couple of possibilities for what REALLY went down in Hawaii yesterday I used to work on the Minutemen 3 ICBMs for a high profile company. Can't share too many details for obvious reasons. But I think the "mistake" of an employee accidentally pressed the mass alert button is very unlikely. In fact, I can think of a lot of things way more likely. Here's my two cents, in no particular order: The threat was real, the missile was shot down As others on this subreddit have already pointed out, the amount of time it takes an ICBM to travel from Southeast Asia to Hawaii is approximately 20-30 min ( ~10 min to hit ICBM max speed of 7 km/s, ~7200 km, (7200/7)/(60) = ~17 min for total travel time of ~27 min, not accounting for earth's rotation in that time period). The amount of time it took for the false alarm to be sent out was 38 min. Now, the way the US's ABM system works is that they basically launch a giant chunk of metal at the ICBM and hit it really hard. The ABMs have no ordinance or anything, they just destroy the incoming missile through shear impact. However, even though our ABM system is the best in the world, it's still only successful around 50% of the time. So when the incoming threat was discovered, it would still be protocol to alert the intended target of the threat in the event that the ABM systems fail (and whatever other defenses we have that I don't know about). I think it's at least feasible that the threat was real, and the threat was dealt with successfully (and thankfully). The question that tears this theory apart is: why would the US not tell us they shot down an enemy ICBM? The most likely answer I can come up with is that Trump doesn't want war. Maybe he just talks a big game. Or perhaps it's not financially beneficial to start a war when there were no causalities. Whatever it is, it's not that we don't know who launched the missile. When those things take off we pretty much immediately know where it's going and where it came from. So if there was a real threat, the US Gov is for whatever reason not sharing this information with the public. Maybe they don't want to cause panic. I don't know. The EAS was hacked to provoke reaction from Trump The EAS has been hacked before, it's possible that it was hacked again. The person or persons who hacked the system either did so for shits and giggles, which is extremely fucked up considering how many people could have died if we had retaliated, or they did so to intentionally cause a retaliation from Trump in order to make him look bad. See, ICBMs function on something called Mutually Assured Destruction. If someone like Russia launches their full force of ICBMs at us, we have that half hour to retaliate. In a situation like that, both countries lose. Using ICBMs against another country with ICBM's is essentially committing suicide. If we had launched missiles towards Southeast Asia, they would then have a chance to retaliate against us. I have hard time believing that any hacker would do this, but then, there are some truly crazy people out there. This could also explain why it took so long for them to send out the second alert, because the system was hacked or down and they needed to regain control or reset it. Also, if one of the employees didn't send the message, they may not have even known about it for several minutes after. The EAS was commandeered by a disgruntled employee This is the scenario I find most likely. Trump tends to piss an enormous amount of people off. Perhaps one of the workers manning that operation decided to try and make Trump look bad by sending out a false alert. It certainly is a bit embarrassing to send an entire state into full panic mode on accident. This is going to be a national incident for several days still. The monitoring system used to look for incoming threats malfunctioned This happens more often than you would think. The early alert systems are very sensitive. They're a lot better than they used to be, but they've detected false missiles before. I've heard of them being triggered by sunlight reflecting off large pieces of metal. They're sensitive for a reason, I mean better safe than sorry, right? Somehow, yesterday, the conditions were just right to trigger a false alarm. Instead of sharing with everyone how fallible the system really is, the Gov decided to blame it on a careless employee. It would cause a lot less panic. The "false alert" was staged In an attempt to distract the MSM from some policy he is currently pursuing, Trump ordered the "fake" threat. Now the news cycles will be dominated day and night by this "mistake" allowing him to pursue his true intentions. Or, alternatively, he wanted to demonstrate to the people that the U.S has an early warning system, although I don't think this is likely as the amount of panic that the alert would have caused (car crashes, heart attacks, etc) would not have been worth it. The mistake was exactly that; a mistake Honestly, I have a hard time believing that any operator could accidentally send out a message like that. These guys are trained for months before they are put at that station, and it seems to me like sending out a state wide alert takes more than just one press of a button. Also, the operator would have immediately noticed that the alert went out, and they would have been able to correct it much faster (not the 38 min that is did). Whatever really happened yesterday, I don't think it was just an errant press of a button. But no matter what the actual cause was, this event was still a tragedy. Why? If there ever is a real threat and people get this message, they are now less likely to believe it, and that means they are less likely to seek shelter or prepare in anyway. Remember guys, don't let this turn into a "the Gov cried wolf" story. If you ever get a notification like this, your first thought should be finding shelter, then questioning. Good night everyone. https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/7qax47/a_couple_of_possibilities_for_what_really_went/ https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/7qax47/a_couple...

McKayDavis 9y ago

I live on O'ahu and was holding my phone when the emergency alert came in at 8:07am. I yelled "Oh my God!" and ran to show my wife the message. I've run through this scenario a few times in my head before and I knew every minute was critical -- so I went into action mode immediately. I told my two kids to get dressed now because we were leaving in exactly 1 minute. The reason we were leaving is our house is single-wall wood construction with no sealed windows and no HVAC, which is pretty much the least ideal shelter possible in a nuclear fallout scenario. The four of us were in the car on the road at ~8:09 and inside the local LDS (Mormon) Church 0.9 miles away at 8:12am. The church building is the nearest concrete structure with sealed windows and interior rooms that I knew I could gain access to. Unfortunately it doesn't have a basement, but very few structures in Hawaii do. Thankfully, the doors were already open as there was a family inside doing some cleaning. We were the first to arrive and at least a dozen other families showed in the next 10 minutes. We all hunkered in the gym, some crying, some praying, most just in shock. The first glimmer of hope came when I read the first report of the it being a false alarm on Twitter at around 8:23am. The whole incident was absolutely terrifying and I'm very upset that it even happened. But, we learned some valuable lessons and I'm satisfied with how my family responded to the incident. Overall, my plan was good and was executed about as flawlessly as possible. I realize we need to add a "bug-out bag" of essential items (e.g. medications, cell phone charger, hand-crank radio) that we can grab as we head out. It most definitely helped that I had considered this scenario before and knew exactly what steps I would take. The one good takeaway is that this event has sparked many similar conversations state-wide (and beyond) of what to do in these situations. Here's hoping these plans never have to be executed again...

dmarlow 9y ago
What will you do if you can't get into your church building?
- throwawayyy9 9y ago
  Pray.
- McKayDavis 9y ago

EldonMcGuinness 9y ago

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

qbaqbaqba 9y ago

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.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

bahmboo 9y ago

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

exabrial 9y ago

Everyone is talking about nukes... I doubt nk has a compact nuclear warhead that can fit on a ballistic missile. Maybe in another 5-10 years, but not right now. They most likely have chemical and biological weapons, as confirmed by the nk soldier that defected and had anthrax antibodies in his blood.

mejari 9y ago
We already know they have compact nuclear warheads https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/north-korea-now-making-missile-ready-nuclear-weapons-us-analysts-say/2017/08/08/e14b882a-7b6b-11e7-9d08-b79f191668ed_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/north...
- exabrial 9y ago
  Well that sucks. Guess I'm behind in the news. Wow, that's a lot of nukes... 60??

peter303 9y ago

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.

Myrmornis 9y ago

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.

jernfrost 9y ago

Must be a terrible thing, if anything good can come out of this I hope it alerts people to the horrors of nuclear war. I am puzzled by why we speak so much about global warming but almost nobody talks about nuclear war. Global warming is not remotely as dangerous as nuclear war. Sure it will make crops fails some places, cause water shortage for some millions, force people to move off the coast etc. But it will not kill billions of people. Nuclear war could do that. As long as the US and Russia stockpile huge quantities of nuclear weapons the whole world is in jeopardy. The number of times nuclear war has almost gotten triggered due to mistakes like this one in Hawaii is scary to think of. How many human errors or hardware/software failures need to happen before one day, an actual launch of nuclear missiles happen by default? These weapons are far too dangerous to stockpile in such huge quantities. There should be a push to reduce the stockpile to something like 20-30 missiles. It isn't hard to imagine a president in the style of Donald Trump, acting irrational and making a rash and stupid mistake which puts the world on fire.

namelost 9y ago
If nuclear war is that close to happening, then we are already too far gone to address it. Who is going to be the one to convince Trump to decommission some of America's nuclear weapons?
- burfog 9y ago
  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.

m3kw9 9y ago

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

xcodevn 9y ago

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

Mikeb85 9y ago

People actually fell for this? First of all, it's doubtful North Korea could launch an ICBM that is capable of hitting it's target. Second, even if it could, I doubt the US doesn't have an anti-missile system capable of interception. And finally, if it was Russia that launched it, you'd be fucked anyway. All this shows is how susceptible Americans are to fake news.

KnightOfWords 9y ago
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.

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rpmcmurphy 9y ago

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.

WillReplyfFood 9y ago

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