Havoc Unleashed in Hawaii
For months, President Trump has expressed aggression towards Kim Jong-Un’s nuclear threats, even bragging about how America’s nukes “are bigger and more powerful.” Some have dismissed this dialogue as superficial due to the serious amount of discretion both parties would need for any preemptive conflict. However, others have truly speculated the repercussions of nuclear conflict and our preparedness in the face of such an event. If the recent false alarm in Hawaii indicates anything, it’s that we are truly not prepared.
After a routine shift change at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency on Saturday, January 14, at 8:07 a m, an employee initiated a ballistic missile warning that reached the nearly 1.5 million people on the islands.
After all of the dust settled and public officials issued proper apologies, everybody realized that the public was not prepared for an actual nuclear attack.
The government initially postulated that this was an accident, but recent investigations after the employee’s firing have alluded to the fact that the employee actually thought that there was a real missile threat. In the ensuing frenzy, it took 13 minutes for the first widely known public official to notify the public (she posted a tweet to her 147,000 followers) that the alert was a false alarm and another 25 minutes for the message to go out through Hawaii’s emergency contact systems. For those 38 minutes, thousands panicked, fearing that they had only minutes to say goodbye to their loved ones and seek shelter before they were vaporized by North Korean nuclear missiles.
After seeing a message that read, “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL,” on their phones, people began screaming, crying and running in the streets. Over 5,000 people called 911 in desperation, but less than half of those calls were actually received. Phone lines jammed and the Internet slowed down in what was a true demonstration of what would happen if there was actually the possibility of a nuclear attack on Hawaii. After all of the dust settled and public officials issued proper apologies, everybody realized that the public was not prepared for an actual nuclear attack.
The last time that the nuclear alert systems were used in the U.S. was at the end of the Cold War in the late ‘80s. This means that unless you’re old enough to remember the “duck and cover” drills in middle school, you have no idea what to do in the case of a nuclear attack. In Hawaii, the command to “SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER” was largely ignored and surveillance cameras caught thousands of people leaving buildings and running through streets, a disorganized reaction to a seemingly critical nuclear alert.
A nuclear attack from North Korea, our most likely threat, would be delivered from an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). These missiles, essentially rockets, follow three stages to reach their target: lift-off, orbit through space, and re-entry through the atmosphere to the target. That gives the US nuclear defense system three options to disarm the weapon.
In the lift-off phase, we could destroy the launch pad or hit the missile while it is in the air. However, North Korea’s launchpads are mobile and hard to track; the missiles accelerate too quickly for our defense missile systems to intercept them. While in space, the ICBMs aren’t vulnerable to Reagan’s Star Wars defense system; the building of laser-shooting satellites proved to be too expensive to keep in place. Currently, we can use kill-vehicles that target and collide with the rocket.
However, the ICBMs use countermeasures like decoy warheads, and in the event of a legitimate nuclear attack, North Korea would send multiple rockets that would overwhelm the defenses. That leaves the re-entry phase, where the ICBM reaches a speed of about five miles per second. Basically, we wouldn’t be able to stop the nuke.
To give some form of reassurance, there’s always the archaic policy of mutually-assured destruction (MAD) that surfaced in the Cold War, especially with the Cuban Missile Crisis. If they nuke us, we nuke them, and we’re all dead. That’s supposed to be good, right? Compared to other countries that North Korea has threatened, the American government has done shockingly little. Even Guam, whose population is barely more than that of Manchester, New Hampshire, recently distributed a two-page instruction guide to surviving a nuclear attack. According to experts, it’s excellently informative: the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University said, "The fact sheet looks pretty good. I think we need more of that sort of thing in the U.S. generally."
With our current international climate and the increasing risk from North Korea, the country leaders need to determine a way to effectively educate the public for the possibility of nuclear war. We should not, however, return to the paranoia and chaos that encapsulated the late 1900s feud with the Soviet Union. We must keep in mind that North Korea might have 60 nuclear warheads, and this is all based entirely on speculation, and at its height in 1990, the Soviet Union had 40,000.
The incident in Hawaii uncovered another issue in the American nuclear warning system: the technology is old and faulty. It shouldn’t be possible for one person to accidentally notify an entire state of incoming doom with one misclick.
The current alert system the United States is called the Emergency Alert System. It was built as a collaboration between the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Weather Service. It allows them, and the president, to communicate with the whole American public in 10 minutes. Versions of this system are in place in most states and are routinely used to send alerts for hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes, flash floods and various other disasters.
However, they are also hackable. In February of 2013, many citizens of Michigan and Montana were issued alerts saying that zombies had risen and were hunting for food. Now imagine the chaos that would ensue if the millions in Los Angeles were wrongly notified that they had 15 minutes to live.
If you find yourself even within half a mile of the blast site, you would be unfortunately in mortal danger. In light of the range and scope of North Korea’s potential ICBMs, it is important that we upgrade the notification systems to ensure as many American lives can be saved. The incident in Hawaii is a sign that we need to improve our emergency alert system. As the nuclear threat of North Korea continues to grow, let’s hope that we do.