Not common knowledge, though, in part because nuclear hazards have been painted in an exaggerated light by Hollywood (basically, no point in trying to survive, because everybody is going to die and what's going to be left is a 1,000-year lethal nuclear wasteland), and in part because we stopped worrying after the end of the Cold War.
Despite the goofy title, this is a remarkably good book from the 1960s, citing some actual science, that helps grasp the actual dangers and the survivability of nuclear attacks or accidents:
I live in a 5 story apartment with two basement floors, exactly as shown in the image. The bottom floor actually has a bomb shelter, in the area rated "200".
I've often wondered, what does "protection" mean if the building has collapsed around us, so we're now 20 feet below ground, with a pile of rubble on top, and no way to get out?
I don't think you should direct your ire towards Hollywood, at least not in any significant way. I don't think it was until "The Day After" (1983) that any movie showed anything like a realistic depiction of the aftermath of a nuclear war, and even that was deliberately downplayed.
It surely wasn't a Hollywood depiction which caused Dorothy Day and others in 1955 to protest the "Operation Alert" drill, saying:
> We will not obey this order to pretend, to evacuate, to hide. In view of the certain knowledge the administration of this country has that there is no defense in atomic warfare, we know this drill to be a military act in a cold war to instill fear, to prepare the collective mind for war. We refuse to cooperate.
Finally, the NWSS book you cited says "American official policy, or at any rate the implementation of that policy, is based on the assumption that civil defense is useless." Again, I don't think that policy was influenced by Hollywood.
(BTW, it's funny that Teller says "With the use of American automobiles an evacuation could be faster and more effective than is possible in Russia." - I guess he never saw a city trying to evacuate from a hurricane. Or the plans to evaluate NYC should there be a major disaster at Indian Point.)
Instead, NWSS and The Heritage Foundation (and an essay I read by Freeman Dyson) all say the US policy of MAD was a much bigger influence.
(I'm not going to get into a discussion of the validity of MAD. I only want to point out that I disagree with the idea that Hollywood depiction had much of a role.)
I'm not trying to establish the origin of this narrative; but most people on HN were almost certainly exposed it through pop cultural portrayals of the nuclear apocalypse.
In some cases, these were inaccurate simply because it resulted in a better movie or a novel; but in many other cases, they were probably informed by anti-war or anti-proliferation sentiments. I don't think this deserves any special ire, TBH; it's just our reality. I loved Dr. Strangelove, but it sure affected public perception in a particular way.
Just like, I imagine, most HN readers were exposed to what happened with Apollo XIII or at Dunkirk through the eponymous movies.
But I think there should be a stronger criterion than that before saying that the lack of common knowledge of the effectiveness of DIY civil defense shelters is in part due to how nuclear hazards have been portrayed by Hollywood.
It could be because they aren't effective against the type of nuclear exchange expected during the Cold War.
Most US policy makers, including Eisenhower, were convinced that there was no good civil defense against an all-out nuclear war. This lead to MAD, and the policy of MAD demands that a country not be able to protect its citizens. This was the US policy for most of the Cold War. Which means those Hollywood films reflect US policy.
A problem is, MAD requires an effective nuclear response force, with the expectation that most citizens will die. How do you convince the citizens to fund MAD? One way is to convince them that shelters are effective, even if the high-level planners know that it isn't. This was possible early on because of the secrecy about the nuclear bomb project.
The problem is, civil defense, unlike just about all other aspects of the Cold War, requires convincing the public of its effectiveness. And the government attempts were not convincing. This helped promote anti-proliferation efforts.
Which is why I don't accept your implication that because something is "informed by ... anti-proliferation sentiments" it means that we should ignore it. Those sentiments may have a reasonable basis.
Others believed in NUTS, with the possibility of a limited nuclear exchange, which is survivable for a large country like the US. NUTS played a bigger role during the Kennedy and Reagan administrations, which is why there was more government promotion of civil defense shelters then.
I'm almost certain that Teller would be in the NUTS camp. He certainly had Reagan's ear when he oversold SDI. Even if not, there were plenty of people who were, and those are the sorts of people who would (perhaps optimistically, perhaps reasonably) push that people have a nuclear bomb shelter. Teller's support of civil defense shelters was informed by his full-nuclear-response sentiments, which also "affected public perception in a particular way."
That said, the Cold War context, the idea of having a nationwide civil defense was that, after the few weeks are over and the all-clear signal given, we would help clean up and be able to return to a life that was little different than what we had before.
The reality is that, sure, perhaps a shelter could help millions more people survive the war, but come out to what sort of reality?
And it's not just Hollywood. Even before Dr. Strangelove, there were some widely read fiction books on the topic. The ones I've know are "On the Beach" (1957), "Alas, Babylon" (1959), and "Fail-Safe" (1962). (And a shout-out to "Malevil" (1972), which was the first 'modern' (post-Verne) French science fiction story I read.)
Again, the question isn't if they affected public perception "in a particular way", but rather if they lead to a more complete understanding of the topic.
And I don't think Hollywood's portrayal was much different than what was already well-known at the high policy levels, which is why I don't think it's right to single them out.
That is classic cold war stuff. Before you even get to the foreward by Edward Teller you get a preface stressing (among other things) that low doses of radiation are "healthful."
small doses of radioactivity are hormetic, healthful because they stimulate the immune system. This
was proven in laboratories as far back as the 1920's. With the advent of the A-bomb almost all the
hormetic research stopped. And only in the last decade has it resumed on a serious scale.
I wonder who they experimented on and whether that stuff is written up somewhere. Ionizing radiation is okay in my book, how about yours? is not exactly a common theme in modern medicine.
The mocking isn't unjustifiable though. I mean the turtle/duck and cover is quite pointless, at least in the case of a nuclear strike (unless you're maybe on the far edge of it, in which case a ditch might save you..and that's big might).
In the documentary "Iraq: The Untold Story", the creator shows civilian air raid shelters in Baghdad. They were four stories down, with the upper floors all reinforced concrete. Yet there were powerless against US bunker busting bombs, and the hundreds of civilians in the shelters that were hit all died.
If you are hit directly, you're fucked no matter what. But the fireball has relatively small radius compared to the other zones.
Ducking underneath something solid is to protect you if the building collapses, which is likely to occur in the large air-blast radius. This is much like ducking under a desk in an earthquake.
Cover will save you if you're within the larger thermal radiation radius. Even clothing can be enough to protect you from burns, so any cover you can get is good.
Cover is extremely important if you're outside the immediate fireball zone (where you're just going to be vaporized). You shouldn't infer from the fact that bunker busting bombs successfully bust bunkers that attempting to survive a nuclear explosion at some distance from you is pointless.
The mocking is utterly unjustifiable. Duck and cover would have saved millions of lives if MAD had come to its conclusion. The inability of a building to resist bunker busting bombs is completely unrelated.
It could. If you’re in the inferno, no. If you’re outside the thermal flux, protected from ionising radiation by simple structure (i.e. away from windows) and within the pressure flux, duck and cover works. If you’re in cases one and two, you die, quickly or painfully. Since you don’t know ex ante where the bomb will burst, duck and cover makes sense.
It's going to make a huge difference is the blast is far enough away for you to not be in the "obliterate everything" zone, but still close enough to be dangerous.
The duck and cover thing I thik it was more to escape from things like glass and debris throw away by a explosion. Of course, if you were close of the explosion wold make litle sense,but the after shock can hurt lots of people.
Probably because they don't know where to take cover.
Depending on how much time I have, if I had to take cover, I'd either load up supplies in the car and head to the 3rd underground floor of my office parking garage (but away from the vent stacks in 2 corners of the garage), or if I have less time, I'll jump the fence at the apartment complex next door and hide out in their one floor underground garage.
I live in a wood-framed house, so it's going to provide less protection than an underground garage, though still better than running around the streets.
Business insider says 37 minutes from North Korea to Honolulu. I imagine it’s only a few seconds difference between the various Hawaiian islands. However, you don’t really know how quickly the alert goes out. Do you estimate you’ll have more than 10 minutes notice?
In Ala Moana lots of people were looking out their windows but most people seemed to think it was just a mistake, and were waiting for more confirmation, from what I saw.
That's pretty much how people reacted w/ the SpaceX rocket here in LA. Lots of videos of "What is that?" Jokes about NK, etc. People are more skeptical than we give them credit for.
It's probably why in school we went through fire drills, tornado drills, etc. So you at least had some idea what to do and what it would be like.
That was my initial reaction but if this was one of perhaps many pre-populated messages that wasn't meant to go out, you might well not have "THIS IS ONLY A DRILL" strings in those messages.
From what CNN is saying, it doesn't sound like it was a drill. The gov. of Hawaii said that the emergency management people were going through their normal shift-change procedures and somebody did the equivalent of:
Well, it will be interesting if any researchers look into people's actual behavior within the first few minutes of the notification before the 'false alarm, never mind' message went out to see how effective this was as an emergency alert, even if unplanned.
Doesn't everyone know that the best defense against such an attack is: "duck and cover"? Further, the desks of school children could be used as shelter/cover since everyone knows that these desks are made of the most powerful adamantium/vibranium alloy.
To play devils advocate here, because I agree those old videos were stupid, I think the point was survival in the case of indirect hits. If a building is bombed nearby and you're not close, hiding under whatever is similar to protecting yourself from an earthquake .. that is any debris that could fall from the shock.
That refrigerator would have been very handy here too:
"DŌ-OH WAS ABOUT THREE-FOURTHS OF A MILE FROM THE HYPOCENTER, INSIDE A MITSUBISHI TORPEDO FACTORY. THE MASSIVE...FACTORY COLLAPSED ON TOP OF HER AND THOUSANDS OF OTHERS".
If the building the kids are in suffers structural damage (which, if it's close enough it might) going under the desk is good, even if the desk is made from heavy cardboard paper.
In general any kind of barrier is also going to help protect you against radiation, heat, etc.
Why does everyone assume the bomb is going to fall directly above their heads or in some very small radius? It's a whole bloody island, it could drop anywhere.
That is in fact what you should do during an earthquake, which is the closest equivalent to a nuclear blast in terms of suddenness and potential destructive impact.
So either this was a security breach, a human mistake or a psyops/test on a small isolated American population.
In the first case, we'll probably only be told about it if they actually make an arrest and the system is patched.
The second is an interesting case, we'll come back to.
The final one: it was intentional and used to track what happened on the islands, and to also watch that information propagate back to the mainland. I feel like all of America has forgotten about PRISM/the NSA. With their immense data collection architectures and ties to large tech companies, they could easily filter the keywords and images they want, and get measurements of how quickly this information propagates and how people react.
Even more freaky, they can use language processing to even get numbers about what people might be feeling! I think we've all forgotten about this and it should be a chilling affect.
In the final case, we will, of course, never know. Anyone who suggests it will be called a conspiracy theorist (even though there is evidence the US government has preformed operations like this in the past, e.g. COINTELPRO) and the official line will be either reason 1 or 2 .. possibly with a patsy to arrest if need be. The truth will be declassified in 30~40 years so some people will be able to say "I told you so," but long beyond the time period anyone will actually care.
I'm not seeing the angle for an NSA-type agency - what would they benefit? There are enough events of significance that happen organically - they could track those much more easily. They don't need to create an artificial event.
The pattern is fairly predictable, too. Twitter users will hear of this first, followed by pockets of people with close friends in Hawaii. Then it will make the news sites and TV news.
Events specifically related to an incoming ICBM? Context matters. People will react differently depending on the circumstances, which means there are things to learn there.
The least nefarious reason for a 3 letter agency to do this would be to dry-run a reaction plan to such an event, and take what they learn from reactions & apply what they learn to improve said plan
Then again, it could be a dry-run to measure peoples sentiments toward a war with NK. Less likely, but still possible.
I'll go right ahead and call you a conspiracy theorist. If you think The US intelligence community would go out of their way to stir up a panic like this just because CoIntelPro was a thing 50 years ago, with no other evidence or reasonable motives, you must be a UFO chasing loon.
If there is anything nefarious here (seems like it), this is the work of a foreign state actor probing our infrastructure for exploitable weaknesses and sizing up our response. I'll put my money on Russia, who has already been attacking our elections¹, energy infrastructure², social media, and spearphishing candidates and elected officials³.
They have conducted similar attacks in the past, sending out tweets and text message alerts to hundreds of people for nonexistent emergencies⁴.
You say he's a conspiracy theorist and then jump to Russia gaining access to the emergency alert system? Seriously? Both these scenarios sound equally probably or improbable to me.
Still, implicating other countries so soon seems premature and reactonary to me. Its like corporate news jumping to 'terrorism' immediately after any domestic tragedy. Our threat models need to include more than just nation states. Otherwise, we end up contributing to escalation through untethered fear.
COINTELPRO is a poor comparison. A better example would be Operation Mockingbird (CIA, before the Church Committee & all that that entailed), or Operation Northwoods--to a lesser extent (also before the Church Committee, under JFK).
Its my personally held opinion that Operation Mockingbird never died. I feel that the intelligence arms are the deep state running the show through misinformation campaigns. My personal opinion held in this, the 2nd paragraph, is 100% conjecture. I wouldn't be surprised if it were found to be true, though.
It's a bet that cannot be settled: intelligence documents are only declassified long after the fact, and even then may be full of misdirections and information that requires internal knowledge to interpret.
(It's also in the interest of three-letter agencies and external state actors to raise the suspicion that they have the capability to do something even when they don't.)
>With their immense data collection architectures and ties to large tech companies, they could easily filter the keywords and images they want, and get measurements of how quickly this information propagates and how people react.
Ok, but what would be the point of that?
You would either discover that people are terrified of nuclear war, in which case... you can't do anything useful with that information. Or, you'd discover that people don't respond to the message, in which case... you can't do anything with that information.
Why would anyone who wasn't a particularly stupid villain intentionally do this?
I would be wary of the hydraulic shock (assuming the blast is near the ground), and if one is still alive, radioactive sodium will help:
>Salt in seawater readily absorbs neutrons into both the sodium-23 and chlorine-35 atoms, which change to radioactive isotopes. Sodium-24 has a half life of about 15 hours, while that of chlorine-36 (which has a lower absorption cross-section) is 300,000 years; the sodium is therefore the most dangerous contaminant since it has the shortsest half life.
For most people fall-out is a bigger risk than blast damage or immediate radiation exposure. The immediate effects of a blast range only ~1km (depending on yield), but fall-out occurs over a much wider radius.
For that - take shelter inside, anywhere. Make sure you shut all windows and doors tight, and ideally tape shut vents. Cover openings with a wet towel. Stay put (don't go outside!) and shelter in an interior room for at least one and ideally 3-5 days. Radiation follows an exponential decay curve, so waiting longer significantly reduces the amount of radiation you are exposed to. You have about 45 minutes after the blast (~1 hour after launch) before fall-out starts arriving in significant quantities: enough to take shelter and do basic preparations, but not enough to travel any significant distance.
The biggest physiological danger comes from inhaled alpha-particle emitters, i.e. radioactive dust. Alpha particles have only a few cm range and are easily stopped by wood, paper, or skin, though, so don't breathe the dust. Beta particles are also easily stopped by clothing or a few meters of air. There's not much you can do about gamma rays or X-rays (this is what your hypothetical lead-lined vault is for), but they are physiologically less dangerous than alpha and beta particles.
Civilian governments would have had to get clarity from a military caught off guard. Something as simple as the appropriate official being in a meeting could introduce delays.
If NORAD said “incoming missile strike,” sure. That isn’t what happened.
The civilian notification system sent out a false positive. Saying “false alarm” would require, at that point, asking the military for affirmative confirmation nothing is wrong. That is a lower priority than responding to an active threat.
This is irrational. If you know a false alarm has occurred then you are endangering people by allowing them to believe the existence of an active threat. I feel like I'm stuck in a car with someone driving off a cliff because the GPS said so even though the edge of the cliff is perfectly visible though the windscreen.
No I'm not. Imagine the same mistake happening in New York at 9 in the morning on a workday (remind you of anything?), or during some large public event where there was the potential for a stampede - hardly uncommon. Just because you get away with something without serious consequences once doesn't mean it's not problematic.
> That is a lower priority than responding to an active threat.
No, that is the active threat and anyone in power would know it. A panicked civilian population can do about as much damage as a real bomb and the military knows it. Such a long delay in the all-clear message is incompetent and dangerous.
You keep trotting out this excuse, but the responsibility is on the people conducting the drill to plan for that possibility and you're letting them off the hook.
> the responsibility is on the people conducting the drill
Was this a drill? I understood it to be an unplanned mistake. In either case, I agree. This was a fuck-up. I am simply saying the cause for the delay, once the mistake was made, is understandable.
When news reports quoted the White House saying it was an exercise (which they did) I was naturally inclined to take that at face value. Here is one example.
Furthermore, allow me to quote from the NY Times story on which we are commenting:
Officials said the alert was the result of human error and not the work of hackers or a foreign government. The mistake occurred during a shift-change drill that takes place three times a day at the emergency command post, according to Richard Rapoza, a spokesman for the agency. (emphasis added)
Now you're accusing me of lying. Previously you thought my disagreement with your dismissal of the issue was shitty and you accused me of being irrational. You are in no position to complain about civility.
You posted specific and false information. You have not amended those posts.
You then accused me of “trotting out an excuse.” I noted the incivility of that statement and, as you repeated false and specific facts, highlighted your lie.
Let me go one layer deeper. You are upset a civil notification system malfunctioned, by saying false things. That is reasonable. But in reacting to that, you said false things.
These are unfortunate mistakes. Learning should result.
Not true. I said it was a drill, you repeatedly averred it wasn't, called me a liar, and I provided 2 sources tos support my claim. In this post you've accused me of lying 5 times, but never get around to stating what these supposed falsehoods are.
You are doubling down on discredited reports. You repeated something false. In doubling down, you are lying. This was not a drill, it was a mistake [1]. Your focus on your ego over the facts doesn’t change that.
Officials said the alert was the result of human error and not the work of hackers or a foreign government. The mistake occurred during a shift-change drill that takes place three times a day at the emergency command post, according to Richard Rapoza, a spokesman for the agency.https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/13/us/hawaii-missile.html
The facts support me, not you. I have highlighted the sentence in which the words 'mistake' and 'drill' appear since you seem unable to read it on your own.
HEre is another quote from the same article:
Vern T. Miyagi, the administrator of the agency, said that during the drill, an employee — whom he did not identify — mistakenly pushed a button on a computer screen to send out the alert, rather than one marked to test it. He said the employee answered “yes” when asked by the system if he was sure he wanted to send the message.
I see no indication of the NYT report having been discredited or the NYT making any effort to retract or correct it, and your story from a different publication in no way contradicts it - if anything, it supports my basic point about the irresponsibility of the long delay in notifying the public of the error.
I would've called my parents and then try to find cover. As pessimistic as I am sometimes, there's just enough paranoia on this issue to make me take it seriously.
If possible move upwind, as far away from any military or industrial targets as possible. Otherwise, shelter underground or in a concrete/stone building. Put on the best dust/gas mask you can find. Put on heavy or waterproof clothing and try and cover as much skin as possible.
I work in nuclear security so this is kinda my thing. If you're in the fireball zone you're pretty much toast, other than that it's mostly about avoiding the blast pressure wave (as well as secondary effects like buildings collapsing on you) and exposure to airborne fallout, which is most dangerous in the first 24-48 hours. After that it becomes much safer to move around.
Sure. Nuclear security is a broad area and it can mean a whole lot of things, but mostly it means more to do with non-proliferation and defense against and response to nuclear threats on a technical level and less the mechanics of training people what to do in the event of a detonation. It'd usually fall into the spectrum of nuclear engineering, though it can be pretty multi-disciplinary (e.g., my educational background is in nuclear engineering, applied math and CS).
In my case I'm in research; specifically I develop algorithms for locating radioactive sources using sensor networks distributed through a city. My educational background focused heavily on non-proliferation and nuclear forensics. One of the things we studied in my graduate career was how to optimally sample fallout in the immediate aftermath of a detonation based on predicted dispersal in order to get the best quality samples (for forensics work) while minimizing the risk to first responders. Spent a decent chunk of time learning about all the sorts of dangers you expect from a nuclear detonation.
I would seek shelter in a subway station. It’s not perfect in terms of protection, because the ventilation system would pump in radioactivity as long as there’s still power. But it would allow me to get to any place 20km away from city center without going above ground once.
A lot of comments making fun of the "duck and cover" advice, but consider this: Many people suffered serious injury from the Chelyabinsk meteor when they went to a window to see the spectacle, not realizing the shock wave would follow a few seconds later and shatter the windows into their faces.
If they had gotten away from the windows and ducked and covered, they would have been fine.
I’m in Hawaii and received it this morning. First thought: there is probably no shelter close by anyway, and if they would send a missile they would probably target Honolulu (I’m in Kauai).
I know this isn't a comforting thought, but: Missiles from the most likely source (North Korea) are not thought to have very good accuracy. They may be as likely to hit Kauai or the big island (or the ocean nearby) as Honolulu.
I hope this event wasn't too stressful for you and your family.
That's trickier than you'd think. You either have to send the warheads one well after the other, or you have to set them up so they detonate at precisely the same time, so as to avoid the first warhead to detonate destroying all the others. (This is why, at one time, missile silos were placed relatively close together. The enemy could presumably get one of them in a preemptive strike, but not all of them.)
At Korea's level of technology, for example, you'd probably just pick a secondary target in some other place entirely.
The lack of sirens going off in Honolulu this morning tipped me off that it wasn't a real alert, but it took way too long (officially) to find out it was a mistake. Twitter was the first line of defense in getting information (within 10 minutes of the alert): https://twitter.com/wfh1901/status/952242062304227328
This should not happen, yet time after time we see that critical American infrastructure and systems are run worse than a pre-revenue bay area chat startup. American infrastructure needs to invest and hire/pay for the same quality that bay area startups do. Let four people go that are inept and less qualified and pay a single solid person market salary.
Besides the fear and chaos potentially caused to people in Hawaii there are financial implications if the stock market were open.
20 minutes after everyone has already figured out that they've been hit by a missile, you'd get an alert: "We are currently investigating reports of increased explosion rates."
The government needs to employ lots of people. This necessarily means they will employ some low-quality people. It's such a difficult problem to produce high-quality work with low-quality employees that most tech companies of scale have optimized their hiring process to pass as few low-quality workers as possible at the cost of turning down many potentially good ones. It'd be nice to see some effort to make working with high quality-variance employees successful, but I think the reason we haven't seen much of a convincing, scalable answer yet is simply because it's a really hard problem.
>most tech companies of scale have optimized their hiring process to pass as few low-quality workers as possible
And look at the results! Those companies never have outages or push out defective code into production or allow security vulnerabilities through speculative execution say.
Throw more money at it, the bay area solution. Right. It's just the lazy inept workers you say! Pay someone twice as much and surely they will be more competent!
In my mind the focus should be on the process for sending such an alert and how it could of gotten through by accident.
I'd say take a look at Reed Hastings model at Netflix. Capitalism works. Netflix treat's their company like a professional sports team. Pay for the best available talent you can. Fire fast if you don't perform.
Government projects work with contractors, either directly or through contracting agency. They pay well and have good projects. I'd venture to say that government have equal or better people than what you find in startups.
I will go out on a limb and say someone hacked the system and decided to prank an entire state.
Fun fact, in my small hometown you could and possibly still activate the tornado warning system using DTMF and a transmitter on some frequency in the 149mhz range.
To clarify, I never actually attempted it but I had a uniden radio scanner in my teens and noticed the pattern for the 12:00 test.
It makes sense to have drills right now, India (tests with war against China and Pakistan), China (Telling their soldiers to be prepared to die for China), Russia(tests against Nato), and North Korea (getting ready for war with the US) are all having military tests for basically what will quickly become another world war.
We are really at a big crossroads as a large amount of people are rejecting globalization in many different countries. And with such major powers willing to fight hard for resources like Ukraine, South China Sea, Oil Eu pipelines, and not even mentioning the increasing gulf between various countries on core ideologies and creeds.
I'd argue it makes sense to have test drills simply because the system exists: much like backups need testing, so do emergency systems. I'm not sure that the current state of the world should influence whether or not the systems are tested.
tests and training shold be done ever as possible. But in times like now, that war seens more iminent than ever it would make sense intensifing this tests.
The article seems to have been updated recently to include more information about this "drill":
- Officials said the alert was the result of human error and not the work of hackers or a foreign government. The mistake occurred during a shift-change drill that takes place three times a day at the emergency command post, according to Richard Rapoza, a spokesman for the agency.
- In Washington, Lindsay Walters, a deputy press secretary, said that President Trump had been informed of the events. “The president has been briefed on the state of Hawaii’s emergency management exercise,” she said. “This was purely a state exercise.”
So it took 38 minutes to send out a new message informing this was a false alert. How is that possible if this was simply a human error during a "shift change"?
You'd think the people who "pressed the wrong button" would be able to press the same button again?
> You'd think the people who "pressed the wrong button" would be able to press the same button again?
Absolutely not. Once you say “fire” you need official confirmation to say “no fire”.
That means certification from the military. The official needed being in a meeting or tending to something of greater importance could easily introduce delays.
In any case, I presume the system’s designers didn’t build in an “oops, fat finger” notification. Getting that ready could have easily taken 30 minutes. This happened on a week-end. The coders could have very well been at home.
>In any case, I presume the system’s designers didn’t build in an “oops, fat finger” notification.
Yeah, but imagine getting a legit alert, and then someone fat-fingering the "fat finger" notification. Or someone installing malware that sends that notification for all military related threats.
I would assume the system supports arbitrary messages. During a real emergency, I doubt they would want to need to get coders in order to send an unexpected message.
> I'm struggling to think what meeting or item would have an importance higher than "incoming ballistic nuclear missiles"
That’s not what happened. No military system detected a threat. “Incoming ballistic projectile” would be a high priority. “Civilian request for official confirmation everything is fine” is not.
If you're engaged in a drill that's a completely predictable failure mode which you should have a standby plan for.
This happened on a week-end. The coders could have very well been at home.
Again, why would you perform a drill involving mass emergency mobilization and not manage that risk? What if this had happened during a morning commute or in some part of the country where people are more easily panicked?
With great power comes great responsibility, remember?
I find that explanation hard to take at face value. There's a button specifically labeled 'ballistic missile emergency'? Is there a different button for every possible emergency, like a tsunami button, a hijacked plane button, an earthquake button, a volcano button?
The text of the warning was “EMERGENCY ALERT BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” That seems really specific.
Also, the news story we're commenting on describes it as a drill that is conducted every shift change, so yes I think it's a drill because that's how they describe it.
Officials said the alert was the result of human error and not the work of hackers or a foreign government. The mistake occurred during a shift-change drill that takes place three times a day at the emergency command post, according to Richard Rapoza, a spokesman for the agency.
Yes, it is a pre-written message that can be selected from a drop-down list. He was off by one, the "no drill" message was adjacent to the "test" message.
The long delay is what lightly tickles my suspicion that maybe this wasn't a mistake. It's a little too much of a coincidence that this particular alert happens in Hawaii at a time of escalating tensions with North Korea.
I mean it's probably just a simple mistake, but it's also the kind of thing you would do if you wanted to stoke fears about a nuclear strike.
How many people do you need to persuade to a particular point of view to actually put something like this into effect? If it were staged it would be interest of the state to hush it up rather than admit to a power struggle in the control room.
The State of Hawaii is spending time and money suing the feds over several things right now. The politicians in charge would probably love to blame this on someone else. The control room is probably staffed by underpaid state employees who aren't paid enough to take part in a government coverup for no good reason.
Most likely, but it seems like a single disgruntled individual who disapproved of the state's policy could effect such an outcome. We've seen numerous examples of security-related fuckups over the years that were swept under the rug despite the economic incentives to blow the whistle, so I'm no inclined to completely dismiss the possibility.
Actually, underpaid workers are ripe for recruitment by “evildoers”. Not that I think that is what happened, just sharing how the spy trade really works.
If I were going to erode public trust in emergency broadcast systems in order to increase the amount of damage I would do by launching an actual missile, this is how I would do it. A series of false alarms.
A similar, if obviously much smaller and less disastrous example, happens at my apartment about 4 times a week: the fire alarms for entire floors of my apartment building are easily triggered by people smoking in the breeze ways or burning their dinner. The result is that I routinely ignore fire alarms because the likelihood of a real fire is has been demonstrated to be exceedingly small.
Looking at the screenshot of the alert [0], it appears to be using the alert system adopted in 2006 in response to the Warning, Alert, and Response Network (WARN) Act[1]. How is this system for a missile attack different, and in what way is it being revisited for the first time in a generation? Text messages are just now 1 generation old (SMS first implemented 1992[2]; generation is about 25.5 years[3].)And of course the alert system itself is only 11 years old.
Well they tested the nuclear/missle attack warning sirens in Hawain cities for the first time in a very long time last month. Just because the sirens were installed during the cold war doesnt make the new attention and urgency being given to them is any less new. Same with the underlying infrastructure behind cell phone alerts being old while the systems on top are being newly revised and tested.
Clearly there is a whole bunch of new attention being paid towards this.
And rightfully so given the provocations from NK and the general decline in maintenance/quality of the US nuclear and ICBM weapon systems.
I'm surprised the sirens aren't tested more frequently.
In Denmark we have a national system of sirens. They are tested once a year at a specific date and time. In the cold war era they used to test them every Wednesday at noon, but it has been scaled down since then :-)
The US has no national siren system; there are just state and local ones. I've heard siren tests every once in a while living in San Francisco, but there's zero public education about their meaning or appropriate responses.
(This false alarm was a push alert sent to cell phones. What about people who don't have a cell phone on them when the alert comes? ... good luck)
In Tokyo they test the public emergency speaker system every day.
At 5pm they play a 30-second traditional Japanese lullaby. If you ask people, they say it means it's time for children to go home - though as far as I can tell it has nothing to do with actual school schedules. I'm not sure everyone realizes it's actually a warning system.
A ballistic missile heading for Hawaii would be nuclear, the amount of additional loss of life that would incur from “damaging the public’s trust” in the early warning system would be pretty much negligible if the missile hits any major population center.
This is basically not an issue for nuclear missiles for something more like to the situation in southern Israel with conventional unguided munitions blindly shot at their general direction it might work but if a nuke could get you it would do it regardless if you duck and cover or not.
Also, the area within by that large radius is going to be much bigger than from non-nuclear threats, so the number of people who could have reduced injuries via preparation might be much greater.
> but if a nuke could get you it would do it regardless if you duck and cover or not.
This is just not true. The area in which the nuke will get everyone regardless is less than a tenth of the area where taking precautions would save you.
This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. People widely laugh at "duck and cover" as if it was some huge joke. Even at the height of the cold war when the nuke stocks were at their largest, only a small portion of the population would be screwed regardless of what they did. While the majority of the population would be at a distance from the closest explosion where ducking and covering would save them.
Another thing that constantly astonishes me is how the immediate direct damage caused by any kind of intentional explosion is consistently overestimated by public at large. I largely blame action movies where C4 block of the size typically used for initiating industrial explosives in bore holes is often shown as leveling complete buildings.
Or war movies, where a round from a tank gun or small artillery piece completely wrecks a house. I have a handful of decommissioned 76mm tank destroyer rounds, probsbly from an M18 Hellcat - comparable to most WW2 tank guns. It's about the size of a one-liter soda bottle, and a significant portion of that is aerodynamic casing, propellant, and fuse.
It's interesting, too, to read historical accounts of sieges in the Napoleonic and earlier eras; it would take days or weeks of pounding by breaching batteries of heavy cannon to reduce masonry walls to effect a breach and allow an assault over the pile of broken rubble remaining, in a bloody, hand-to-hand melee. And often there would be so much time between firings that the defenders could rebuild new defenses in depth behind the breach. Unless a powder magazine was struck, massive damage was relatively rare.
People forget that in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where no one ducked and covered, there were long-term survivors 200-300m from ground zero simply by virtue of where they were located when the bomb went off. A protective posture is at least somewhat effective much closer to ground zero than I think people realize, especially if you have a bit of warning.
> People widely laugh at "duck and cover" as if it was some huge joke. ... While the majority of the population would be at a distance from the closest explosion where ducking and covering would save them.
Having grown up during the cold war, I'd say that people thought "duck and cover" was ridiculous not because of some misunderstanding about its usefulness in protecting one from blast, though that misunderstanding might have existed. The reason everyone thought it was ridiculous was that everyone realized that surviving and having to deal with a completely smashed infrastructure and radioactive fallout was an extremely terrible, shitty outcome that you were not going to save yourself from by hiding under a desk or something.
Israeli here. We get false rocket alerts every once in a while. Usually it's a bug or a badly calibrated radar picking up something else, sometimes a human error.
I think a series of false alarms would have the effect you describe. However, based on some of the reactions I'm seeing online, I wonder if a one-off false alarm will cause a lot of people to figure out what they should be doing if the alarm were to go off again for real.
If you want to go down this particular rabbit hole, then let me say that I think it's more likely this was "us" than "them". Now the whole country is talking and thinking about the effects of a real ballistic missile launch. We got a glimpse at the chaos and mass panic that would ensue.
Tomorrow there will be more people in favor of putting a swift and aggressive end to NK's nuclear ambitions than there were yesterday.
An interesting Reddit comment described a chaotic traffic situation for 20 minutes (people running lights, wrong-side-of-the-road driving, extreme speed, etc.). Human nature in these moments is very “Tragedy of the Commons” apparently.
It's good to see people react. There are lots of stories of people dying in disasters because they didn't take it seriously. E.g. sirens blaring for a tornado alert, and people are just continue mowing their lawns. Or people continue eating their meal when the building is on fire, who ended up dying.
Tornado alley lifer here... they're a different story. They process slowly (10mph-30mph), the vast majority of them in the USA will move SW to NE, they usually have a very narrow damage track (100yards), and are usually very visible on weather radar as bright wind sheer.
My point being, if you can see a tornado coming, you'll have ample time to take shelter in a basement [or if you're in an unpopulated area, you can get out of the way]. Why people get killed by tornados "still" is usually insufficient shelter (homes without basements or safe rooms), quick touchdowns, them occurring at odd hours when people are sleeping, or the occasional goliath tornado with a massive damage track that's moving quickly, in the wrong direction.
I've heard dozens of tornado sirens and watched people ignore them in the 10+ years I've lived in Minnesota.
I've also experienced being caught in the middle of a tornado outbreak (30 in 90 minutes, a couple were over mile wide) while driving across southern Minnesota. We sheltered at a Walmart and were quite alarmed that no locals seemed to take it seriously, even when the roof partially lifted off and cars started getting tossed around in the parking lot.
IIRC the State recently switched to more localized warnings (not county wide) due to people ignoring the sirens.
I'm also pretty sure that "you can see tornadoes coming" is poor advice, especially since they often come at night or with significant rainfall.
And lots of those stories are from Hawaii! Many many people have died their due to tsunamis, etc. They take their warnings seriously (in the past they didnt have them for things like tsunamis)
Just recently I spoke to my friends that literally are living in LaLa land. They are making fun of me prepping and saving dry food, water, stacking up on legal guns and munition. I took upon challenge last xmas to meetup with them and they brought my prepardness as one of laughing subjects. It really saddens me when they believe that when gloves of society are off, we all gonna be happy singing kumbaya and respecting rules that has been put in greatest part by bodies of virtual government. They laugh when I tell them the history proved the nicest kind of people turn into murders and cannibals when its their turn to die of starving.. or eat someone and survive. This example of maddnes on Hawain streets proves me I am right in my theory :(
Perhaps they don't think the gloves of society will come off - that is, that no catastrophic event will occur which will affect their life/area, so that life will continue as normal for the foreseeable future. In that case, no preparations would be necessary.
Being prepared for an emergency isn’t a bad thing. Being a “prepper” is fucking conspiracy level bullshit. They shouldnt even be your friend. Nobody should be your friend, you’re a fucking moron.
Why do you think your preparation will be enough? If things do go that bad then it'll be very few people that will survive because of just how much of our mechanised infrastructure is needed to feed us.
Now your friends know where to go to steal ammo and other supplies when the revolution comes.
This sounds sarcastic but I don't mean it that way. True prepping is leaving (and maintaining!!) caches for adequate time in various locations (you don't know where you'll be when things go sideways, nor what routes will be available).
How long are you preparing for? Days? Months? Years?
Thinking prepping is silly is not synonymous with believing "when gloves of society are off, we all gonna be happy singing kumbaya and respecting rules."
I think prepping is ridiculous, but it's precisely because I know the nature of humanity. (Among a bunch of other reasons.)
It's also ridiculous to think this particular incident has anything to do with, well, anything...
Right! I think extreme prepping (the mild sort where you just prepare for a normal disaster is merely prudent) is dumb precisely because I know that people won’t be all friendly and nice after a collapse. Your stash just makes you a target for the meanest guys still around.
>I think prepping is ridiculous, but it's precisely because I know the nature of humanity. (Among a bunch of other reasons.)
Could you share this insight? The US gov't recommends that you do some amount of emergency preparedness ("prepping"): https://www.ready.gov/build-a-kit
Having 72 hours of shelter/water/food, a first aid kit, and some other bits and pieces is not how prepping is colloquially used.
Given a disaster with a 1% yearly chance, and a lifespan of 80 years, lifetime odds of encountering that disaster are close to 50%. Given a disaster with a 0% or a 0.000001% chance, lifetime odds are still pretty close to zero. Disaster preparedness worries about the 1%, prepping worries about what many people including me would consider the 0.000001%, which is why having a pack of water bottles and a first aid kit in a cupboard seems like common sense, but prepping for the fall of civilisation seems ridiculous.
You really think the probability of such a disaster is 0.000001% per year? The cold war wasn't that long ago and came very close to the brink a number of times. If we were just lucky, and there is an expected rate of 1 nuclear war every 73 years, that already gets us over your 1% threshold. And nuclear war is far from the only risk. Nuclear weapons are already 70 year old tech, we are always progressing towards scarier technologies. I think your estimate is off by a factor of a million.
I agree that the odds of "society" dissolving are very small. However, the penalty for encountering a blizzard without preparation -- maybe not having enough food to eat full meals for, say, a week -- is FAR lower than then penalty for encountering armageddon without preparation. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if the fall of civilization is 1,000 times less likely, and the consequences are 1,000 times worse, the calculus gets a little more complex.
After the Spanish flu, multiple near-missed accidental nuclear launches as well as political crises during the Cold War, September 11, SARS scare, Ebola scare, weather events like Katrina or the Ottawa ice storm, as well as your bog-standard surprise wars from history, it seems obvious to me that the chance of a mass-destruction event requiring over 3 days of supplies far exceeds 0.000001% chance per year.
if you want to come up on top after civilizational collapse you'd better join a gang or have a cabin in an extremely remote and secluded location, otherwise sorry but your stash will be seized by aforementioned gangs regardless of your prepping and shooting skills
gangs have an hierarchy, experience with violence and disregard of ethics. if you and your "brothers in arms" are veterans you have pretty good odds otherwise not so much.
No. But I am saying without government policing ENOUGH people go for looting other homes and eventually turn to their animal instincts. And my whole thread was about how majority of population chose not to believe that. They believe that nice neighbor living next door will rather starve to death or eat its own feet, rather than turn into cannibal and butcher someone else.
It's actually an interesting point. How many of these preppers have received military training, and when shit hits the fan, do they have plans to organize, communicate with each other, and defend themselves?
Here in Idaho at least, a lot & yes. No scary militia type stuff, just folks getting together and sharing knowledge. Still a lot of wild wide open spaces in this country. If you're into winter sports come visit McCall, beautiful mountain lake town, excellent restaurants, and always fresh powder to shred on Brundage Mtn. Just as great to visit in the Summer, way more crowded but it's a good size lake, plenty of room for everybody
The fact that they are laughing at you does not mean that you are not actually living in lala land. The whole 'prepper/suvivalism' movement took a big hit after Sandy Hook. To date survivalists have caused more deaths than their preparations have saved.
If you reason that survivalists have caused some many death because Lanza was survivalist, then lets continue with your thought process:
- Lanza was white - hence to date white people have caused more deaths than their preparations have saved.
- Lanza was male - hence to date men have caused more deaths than their preparations have saved.
- Lanza was a minor - hence to date minors have caused more deaths than their preparations have saved.
If the lady had not been a prepper then she would not have brought a whole bunch of guns into a house with a kid that was clearly having problems. And instead of preparing for the problems that she never had she might have spent more time on the problems that she - and he - clearly did have.
Being white, male or a minor has nothing to do with it.
So to clarify, does this describe the gist of your original sentiment? "She was a prepper. She prepped for nuclear war. Her son had problems. She did not prep her son for day-to-day life problems, and her son used her weapons to kill people. Therefore, being a prepper has killed people."
I actually wonder why this warning can be send in the first place. As this unwanted "test" has shown, people have absolutely no idea what to/where to go in that situation. Instead there was a lot of panic. If there is the possibility that you will send out such a message it would be a good idea to give some advice on what to do.
This system is NOT designed to help you or tell you what to do. Its mostly designed to take off liability from the government... so that when the dust settles down, you don't go en masses to sue the government for NOT warning you. Besides, places like Amazon and your local library are filled with sections on preparedness. Waiting for Government megaphone to tell you what to do with clear instruction while intercontinental ballistic missile is approaching in few minutes, is already too late.
Ok, I hope that the people who got scared shitless by this emergency start doing something against nuclear weapons. It's ludicrous: We can all die any day and ICAN, the people who helped to pass the ban on nuclear weapons and got Nobel prize for it are raising money at a rate of $50 a day.
ICAN got nuclear weapons banned? I.e. they got a bunch of non-nuclear states to sign an agreement about nuclear weapons? Maybe they’d be getting more funding if they weren’t so damn worthless.
I am sure that I will also get buried here, but if someone intentionally pressed that 'button' then I believe they are the actual emergency response leader and should be put in charge of the effort statewide.
A drill is supposed to tell you how close or far away you are from being prepared. A surprise drill is going to be much more effective. The threat is so great, if there haven't been serious drills in a long time then they were overdue.
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[ 0.58 ms ] story [ 356 ms ] threadEveryone cheered when the “False alarm” SMS came through across the phones.
Secure your networks people - this electronic psyops stuff is real.
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb371/
Is it cover when you’re inside but 30 floors up in a high rise?
http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/58cc34b9112f7043268...
Not common knowledge, though, in part because nuclear hazards have been painted in an exaggerated light by Hollywood (basically, no point in trying to survive, because everybody is going to die and what's going to be left is a 1,000-year lethal nuclear wasteland), and in part because we stopped worrying after the end of the Cold War.
Despite the goofy title, this is a remarkably good book from the 1960s, citing some actual science, that helps grasp the actual dangers and the survivability of nuclear attacks or accidents:
http://www.madisoncountyema.com/nwss.pdf
PS. For folks interested in less apocalyptic emergency preparedness tasks, I maintain a handy guide:
http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/prep/
http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/
For something a bit less depressing.
I've often wondered, what does "protection" mean if the building has collapsed around us, so we're now 20 feet below ground, with a pile of rubble on top, and no way to get out?
I don't think you should direct your ire towards Hollywood, at least not in any significant way. I don't think it was until "The Day After" (1983) that any movie showed anything like a realistic depiction of the aftermath of a nuclear war, and even that was deliberately downplayed.
It surely wasn't a Hollywood depiction which caused Dorothy Day and others in 1955 to protest the "Operation Alert" drill, saying:
> We will not obey this order to pretend, to evacuate, to hide. In view of the certain knowledge the administration of this country has that there is no defense in atomic warfare, we know this drill to be a military act in a cold war to instill fear, to prepare the collective mind for war. We refuse to cooperate.
This "The Heritage Foundation" report from 1984 titled "The New Case for Civil Defense" also doesn't mention anything about Hollywood depictions. https://www.heritage.org/defense/report/the-new-case-civil-d...
Finally, the NWSS book you cited says "American official policy, or at any rate the implementation of that policy, is based on the assumption that civil defense is useless." Again, I don't think that policy was influenced by Hollywood.
(BTW, it's funny that Teller says "With the use of American automobiles an evacuation could be faster and more effective than is possible in Russia." - I guess he never saw a city trying to evacuate from a hurricane. Or the plans to evaluate NYC should there be a major disaster at Indian Point.)
Instead, NWSS and The Heritage Foundation (and an essay I read by Freeman Dyson) all say the US policy of MAD was a much bigger influence.
(I'm not going to get into a discussion of the validity of MAD. I only want to point out that I disagree with the idea that Hollywood depiction had much of a role.)
In some cases, these were inaccurate simply because it resulted in a better movie or a novel; but in many other cases, they were probably informed by anti-war or anti-proliferation sentiments. I don't think this deserves any special ire, TBH; it's just our reality. I loved Dr. Strangelove, but it sure affected public perception in a particular way.
But I think there should be a stronger criterion than that before saying that the lack of common knowledge of the effectiveness of DIY civil defense shelters is in part due to how nuclear hazards have been portrayed by Hollywood.
It could be because they aren't effective against the type of nuclear exchange expected during the Cold War.
Most US policy makers, including Eisenhower, were convinced that there was no good civil defense against an all-out nuclear war. This lead to MAD, and the policy of MAD demands that a country not be able to protect its citizens. This was the US policy for most of the Cold War. Which means those Hollywood films reflect US policy.
A problem is, MAD requires an effective nuclear response force, with the expectation that most citizens will die. How do you convince the citizens to fund MAD? One way is to convince them that shelters are effective, even if the high-level planners know that it isn't. This was possible early on because of the secrecy about the nuclear bomb project.
The problem is, civil defense, unlike just about all other aspects of the Cold War, requires convincing the public of its effectiveness. And the government attempts were not convincing. This helped promote anti-proliferation efforts.
Which is why I don't accept your implication that because something is "informed by ... anti-proliferation sentiments" it means that we should ignore it. Those sentiments may have a reasonable basis.
Others believed in NUTS, with the possibility of a limited nuclear exchange, which is survivable for a large country like the US. NUTS played a bigger role during the Kennedy and Reagan administrations, which is why there was more government promotion of civil defense shelters then.
I'm almost certain that Teller would be in the NUTS camp. He certainly had Reagan's ear when he oversold SDI. Even if not, there were plenty of people who were, and those are the sorts of people who would (perhaps optimistically, perhaps reasonably) push that people have a nuclear bomb shelter. Teller's support of civil defense shelters was informed by his full-nuclear-response sentiments, which also "affected public perception in a particular way."
That said, the Cold War context, the idea of having a nationwide civil defense was that, after the few weeks are over and the all-clear signal given, we would help clean up and be able to return to a life that was little different than what we had before.
The reality is that, sure, perhaps a shelter could help millions more people survive the war, but come out to what sort of reality?
And it's not just Hollywood. Even before Dr. Strangelove, there were some widely read fiction books on the topic. The ones I've know are "On the Beach" (1957), "Alas, Babylon" (1959), and "Fail-Safe" (1962). (And a shout-out to "Malevil" (1972), which was the first 'modern' (post-Verne) French science fiction story I read.)
Again, the question isn't if they affected public perception "in a particular way", but rather if they lead to a more complete understanding of the topic.
And I don't think Hollywood's portrayal was much different than what was already well-known at the high policy levels, which is why I don't think it's right to single them out.
That is classic cold war stuff. Before you even get to the foreward by Edward Teller you get a preface stressing (among other things) that low doses of radiation are "healthful."
small doses of radioactivity are hormetic, healthful because they stimulate the immune system. This was proven in laboratories as far back as the 1920's. With the advent of the A-bomb almost all the hormetic research stopped. And only in the last decade has it resumed on a serious scale.
I wonder who they experimented on and whether that stuff is written up somewhere. Ionizing radiation is okay in my book, how about yours? is not exactly a common theme in modern medicine.
In the documentary "Iraq: The Untold Story", the creator shows civilian air raid shelters in Baghdad. They were four stories down, with the upper floors all reinforced concrete. Yet there were powerless against US bunker busting bombs, and the hundreds of civilians in the shelters that were hit all died.
http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
If you are hit directly, you're fucked no matter what. But the fireball has relatively small radius compared to the other zones.
Ducking underneath something solid is to protect you if the building collapses, which is likely to occur in the large air-blast radius. This is much like ducking under a desk in an earthquake.
Cover will save you if you're within the larger thermal radiation radius. Even clothing can be enough to protect you from burns, so any cover you can get is good.
Don't underestimate the protection cover can offer!.
Depending on how much time I have, if I had to take cover, I'd either load up supplies in the car and head to the 3rd underground floor of my office parking garage (but away from the vent stacks in 2 corners of the garage), or if I have less time, I'll jump the fence at the apartment complex next door and hide out in their one floor underground garage.
I live in a wood-framed house, so it's going to provide less protection than an underground garage, though still better than running around the streets.
Even more disturbing was the instructions of the initial warning which was to "hide in a safe place".
Terrifying.
[0] https://imgur.com/a/0QkgY
It's probably why in school we went through fire drills, tornado drills, etc. So you at least had some idea what to do and what it would be like.
'rm -rf $HOME/ foo' vs 'rm -rf $HOME/foo'
That refrigerator would have been very handy here too:
"DŌ-OH WAS ABOUT THREE-FOURTHS OF A MILE FROM THE HYPOCENTER, INSIDE A MITSUBISHI TORPEDO FACTORY. THE MASSIVE...FACTORY COLLAPSED ON TOP OF HER AND THOUSANDS OF OTHERS".
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/150809-atomic-bo...
Why does everyone assume the bomb is going to fall directly above their heads or in some very small radius? It's a whole bloody island, it could drop anywhere.
In the first case, we'll probably only be told about it if they actually make an arrest and the system is patched.
The second is an interesting case, we'll come back to.
The final one: it was intentional and used to track what happened on the islands, and to also watch that information propagate back to the mainland. I feel like all of America has forgotten about PRISM/the NSA. With their immense data collection architectures and ties to large tech companies, they could easily filter the keywords and images they want, and get measurements of how quickly this information propagates and how people react.
Even more freaky, they can use language processing to even get numbers about what people might be feeling! I think we've all forgotten about this and it should be a chilling affect.
In the final case, we will, of course, never know. Anyone who suggests it will be called a conspiracy theorist (even though there is evidence the US government has preformed operations like this in the past, e.g. COINTELPRO) and the official line will be either reason 1 or 2 .. possibly with a patsy to arrest if need be. The truth will be declassified in 30~40 years so some people will be able to say "I told you so," but long beyond the time period anyone will actually care.
The pattern is fairly predictable, too. Twitter users will hear of this first, followed by pockets of people with close friends in Hawaii. Then it will make the news sites and TV news.
The least nefarious reason for a 3 letter agency to do this would be to dry-run a reaction plan to such an event, and take what they learn from reactions & apply what they learn to improve said plan
Then again, it could be a dry-run to measure peoples sentiments toward a war with NK. Less likely, but still possible.
If there is anything nefarious here (seems like it), this is the work of a foreign state actor probing our infrastructure for exploitable weaknesses and sizing up our response. I'll put my money on Russia, who has already been attacking our elections¹, energy infrastructure², social media, and spearphishing candidates and elected officials³.
They have conducted similar attacks in the past, sending out tweets and text message alerts to hundreds of people for nonexistent emergencies⁴.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-13/russian-b...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russi...
[3] https://www.secureworks.com/research/threat-group-4127-targe...
[4] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.ht...
That escalated quickly.
Or it was "just a prank, bro!"
So the plausibility of Russia doing it would be based on whether they would bother or not.
It doesn't mean you stop looking for causes or eliminate human error though.
The viability of Russia/NK depends on how the EAS network is set up in Hawaii. If they have internet-facing servers, it's completely possible.
And what are you? A flat-earther?
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/the-v...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake-ne...
I'll go right ahead and call you a conspiracy theorist.
Its my personally held opinion that Operation Mockingbird never died. I feel that the intelligence arms are the deep state running the show through misinformation campaigns. My personal opinion held in this, the 2nd paragraph, is 100% conjecture. I wouldn't be surprised if it were found to be true, though.
(It's also in the interest of three-letter agencies and external state actors to raise the suspicion that they have the capability to do something even when they don't.)
Ok, but what would be the point of that?
You would either discover that people are terrified of nuclear war, in which case... you can't do anything useful with that information. Or, you'd discover that people don't respond to the message, in which case... you can't do anything with that information.
Why would anyone who wasn't a particularly stupid villain intentionally do this?
If that ain't an option, jumping into the ocean doesn't seem like such a terrible idea.
That’s a terrible idea. You’d be directly exposed when at the surface and end up inhaling fall-out.
>Salt in seawater readily absorbs neutrons into both the sodium-23 and chlorine-35 atoms, which change to radioactive isotopes. Sodium-24 has a half life of about 15 hours, while that of chlorine-36 (which has a lower absorption cross-section) is 300,000 years; the sodium is therefore the most dangerous contaminant since it has the shortsest half life.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_explosion
For that - take shelter inside, anywhere. Make sure you shut all windows and doors tight, and ideally tape shut vents. Cover openings with a wet towel. Stay put (don't go outside!) and shelter in an interior room for at least one and ideally 3-5 days. Radiation follows an exponential decay curve, so waiting longer significantly reduces the amount of radiation you are exposed to. You have about 45 minutes after the blast (~1 hour after launch) before fall-out starts arriving in significant quantities: enough to take shelter and do basic preparations, but not enough to travel any significant distance.
The biggest physiological danger comes from inhaled alpha-particle emitters, i.e. radioactive dust. Alpha particles have only a few cm range and are easily stopped by wood, paper, or skin, though, so don't breathe the dust. Beta particles are also easily stopped by clothing or a few meters of air. There's not much you can do about gamma rays or X-rays (this is what your hypothetical lead-lined vault is for), but they are physiologically less dangerous than alpha and beta particles.
The civilian notification system sent out a false positive. Saying “false alarm” would require, at that point, asking the military for affirmative confirmation nothing is wrong. That is a lower priority than responding to an active threat.
Could. It didn’t. This was a mistake. You’re being irrational.
No, that is the active threat and anyone in power would know it. A panicked civilian population can do about as much damage as a real bomb and the military knows it. Such a long delay in the all-clear message is incompetent and dangerous.
Honolulu was vaporised? Keep your perspective.
Responding was a priority. The error was corrected in 13 minutes. It’s just not as high of a priority as an incoming ballistic projectile.
Was this a drill? I understood it to be an unplanned mistake. In either case, I agree. This was a fuck-up. I am simply saying the cause for the delay, once the mistake was made, is understandable.
> You keep trotting out this excuse
This is a shitty thing to say.
I have seen your user name on HN before. I thought simple etiquette might apply to our discussions. I am sorry for presuming your civility.
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/368907-white-hous...
Furthermore, allow me to quote from the NY Times story on which we are commenting:
Officials said the alert was the result of human error and not the work of hackers or a foreign government. The mistake occurred during a shift-change drill that takes place three times a day at the emergency command post, according to Richard Rapoza, a spokesman for the agency. (emphasis added)
Now you're accusing me of lying. Previously you thought my disagreement with your dismissal of the issue was shitty and you accused me of being irrational. You are in no position to complain about civility.
Please retract your false accusation.
You then accused me of “trotting out an excuse.” I noted the incivility of that statement and, as you repeated false and specific facts, highlighted your lie.
Let me go one layer deeper. You are upset a civil notification system malfunctioned, by saying false things. That is reasonable. But in reacting to that, you said false things.
These are unfortunate mistakes. Learning should result.
Retract your false claims.
[1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-hawaii-inb...
The facts support me, not you. I have highlighted the sentence in which the words 'mistake' and 'drill' appear since you seem unable to read it on your own.
HEre is another quote from the same article:
Vern T. Miyagi, the administrator of the agency, said that during the drill, an employee — whom he did not identify — mistakenly pushed a button on a computer screen to send out the alert, rather than one marked to test it. He said the employee answered “yes” when asked by the system if he was sure he wanted to send the message.
I see no indication of the NYT report having been discredited or the NYT making any effort to retract or correct it, and your story from a different publication in no way contradicts it - if anything, it supports my basic point about the irresponsibility of the long delay in notifying the public of the error.
I am not the one lying here.
Surely this wasn't one step gone wrong.
[clear] [send and cause panic in 1.4 million people]
[Send and cause panic] [Details]
I work in nuclear security so this is kinda my thing. If you're in the fireball zone you're pretty much toast, other than that it's mostly about avoiding the blast pressure wave (as well as secondary effects like buildings collapsing on you) and exposure to airborne fallout, which is most dangerous in the first 24-48 hours. After that it becomes much safer to move around.
I'm curious, what does that mean? Designing shelters? Teaching people what to do in nuclear attacks?
In my case I'm in research; specifically I develop algorithms for locating radioactive sources using sensor networks distributed through a city. My educational background focused heavily on non-proliferation and nuclear forensics. One of the things we studied in my graduate career was how to optimally sample fallout in the immediate aftermath of a detonation based on predicted dispersal in order to get the best quality samples (for forensics work) while minimizing the risk to first responders. Spent a decent chunk of time learning about all the sorts of dangers you expect from a nuclear detonation.
Or, you know, a vodka soda.
I would probably head to one of the local train stations and go down like 3,4 levels deep.
If they had gotten away from the windows and ducked and covered, they would have been fine.
I hope this event wasn't too stressful for you and your family.
At Korea's level of technology, for example, you'd probably just pick a secondary target in some other place entirely.
Besides the fear and chaos potentially caused to people in Hawaii there are financial implications if the stock market were open.
Looking through the Github and Slack system status pages for this month so far ... I don't know that's exactly the model to follow.
Status lights will still all be green
And look at the results! Those companies never have outages or push out defective code into production or allow security vulnerabilities through speculative execution say.
I'm being a bit sarcastic but glass houses, etc.
In my mind the focus should be on the process for sending such an alert and how it could of gotten through by accident.
Fun fact, in my small hometown you could and possibly still activate the tornado warning system using DTMF and a transmitter on some frequency in the 149mhz range.
To clarify, I never actually attempted it but I had a uniden radio scanner in my teens and noticed the pattern for the 12:00 test.
"Per White House pool reports, Trump was out on a golf course when the alert was sent."
It makes sense to have drills right now, India (tests with war against China and Pakistan), China (Telling their soldiers to be prepared to die for China), Russia(tests against Nato), and North Korea (getting ready for war with the US) are all having military tests for basically what will quickly become another world war.
We are really at a big crossroads as a large amount of people are rejecting globalization in many different countries. And with such major powers willing to fight hard for resources like Ukraine, South China Sea, Oil Eu pipelines, and not even mentioning the increasing gulf between various countries on core ideologies and creeds.
We really are at a new and dangerous crossroads.
- Officials said the alert was the result of human error and not the work of hackers or a foreign government. The mistake occurred during a shift-change drill that takes place three times a day at the emergency command post, according to Richard Rapoza, a spokesman for the agency.
- In Washington, Lindsay Walters, a deputy press secretary, said that President Trump had been informed of the events. “The president has been briefed on the state of Hawaii’s emergency management exercise,” she said. “This was purely a state exercise.”
You'd think the people who "pressed the wrong button" would be able to press the same button again?
Absolutely not. Once you say “fire” you need official confirmation to say “no fire”.
That means certification from the military. The official needed being in a meeting or tending to something of greater importance could easily introduce delays.
In any case, I presume the system’s designers didn’t build in an “oops, fat finger” notification. Getting that ready could have easily taken 30 minutes. This happened on a week-end. The coders could have very well been at home.
USPACOM had to check and give Hawaii an all clear.
Yeah, but imagine getting a legit alert, and then someone fat-fingering the "fat finger" notification. Or someone installing malware that sends that notification for all military related threats.
I'm struggling to think what meeting or item would have an importance higher than "incoming ballistic nuclear missiles".
That’s not what happened. No military system detected a threat. “Incoming ballistic projectile” would be a high priority. “Civilian request for official confirmation everything is fine” is not.
Whether they had or needed "official confirmation" the Hawaii EMA still tweeted "NO missile threat to Hawaii" ~13 min after the false alert https://twitter.com/Hawaii_EMA/status/952243912415985664
Would be nice if they could stick to the same medium and ensure timely delivery for this type of correction.
This happened on a week-end. The coders could have very well been at home.
Again, why would you perform a drill involving mass emergency mobilization and not manage that risk? What if this had happened during a morning commute or in some part of the country where people are more easily panicked?
With great power comes great responsibility, remember?
Was this a drill? I understood it to be an unplanned mistake.
The text of the warning was “EMERGENCY ALERT BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” That seems really specific.
Also, the news story we're commenting on describes it as a drill that is conducted every shift change, so yes I think it's a drill because that's how they describe it.
Officials said the alert was the result of human error and not the work of hackers or a foreign government. The mistake occurred during a shift-change drill that takes place three times a day at the emergency command post, according to Richard Rapoza, a spokesman for the agency.
I mean it's probably just a simple mistake, but it's also the kind of thing you would do if you wanted to stoke fears about a nuclear strike.
A screw up seems more likely though.
A similar, if obviously much smaller and less disastrous example, happens at my apartment about 4 times a week: the fire alarms for entire floors of my apartment building are easily triggered by people smoking in the breeze ways or burning their dinner. The result is that I routinely ignore fire alarms because the likelihood of a real fire is has been demonstrated to be exceedingly small.
[0]https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/01/14/us/14xp-hawaii-su...
[1]https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/5785...
[2]http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-12-03/after-25-years...
[3]https://isogg.org/wiki/How_long_is_a_generation%3F_Science_p...
Clearly there is a whole bunch of new attention being paid towards this.
And rightfully so given the provocations from NK and the general decline in maintenance/quality of the US nuclear and ICBM weapon systems.
In Denmark we have a national system of sirens. They are tested once a year at a specific date and time. In the cold war era they used to test them every Wednesday at noon, but it has been scaled down since then :-)
(This false alarm was a push alert sent to cell phones. What about people who don't have a cell phone on them when the alert comes? ... good luck)
They are primarily for tornadoes rather than nuclear weapons though.
At 5pm they play a 30-second traditional Japanese lullaby. If you ask people, they say it means it's time for children to go home - though as far as I can tell it has nothing to do with actual school schedules. I'm not sure everyone realizes it's actually a warning system.
This is just not true. The area in which the nuke will get everyone regardless is less than a tenth of the area where taking precautions would save you.
This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. People widely laugh at "duck and cover" as if it was some huge joke. Even at the height of the cold war when the nuke stocks were at their largest, only a small portion of the population would be screwed regardless of what they did. While the majority of the population would be at a distance from the closest explosion where ducking and covering would save them.
It's interesting, too, to read historical accounts of sieges in the Napoleonic and earlier eras; it would take days or weeks of pounding by breaching batteries of heavy cannon to reduce masonry walls to effect a breach and allow an assault over the pile of broken rubble remaining, in a bloody, hand-to-hand melee. And often there would be so much time between firings that the defenders could rebuild new defenses in depth behind the breach. Unless a powder magazine was struck, massive damage was relatively rare.
Having grown up during the cold war, I'd say that people thought "duck and cover" was ridiculous not because of some misunderstanding about its usefulness in protecting one from blast, though that misunderstanding might have existed. The reason everyone thought it was ridiculous was that everyone realized that surviving and having to deal with a completely smashed infrastructure and radioactive fallout was an extremely terrible, shitty outcome that you were not going to save yourself from by hiding under a desk or something.
Evolve a bit, idiot.
Tomorrow there will be more people in favor of putting a swift and aggressive end to NK's nuclear ambitions than there were yesterday.
My point being, if you can see a tornado coming, you'll have ample time to take shelter in a basement [or if you're in an unpopulated area, you can get out of the way]. Why people get killed by tornados "still" is usually insufficient shelter (homes without basements or safe rooms), quick touchdowns, them occurring at odd hours when people are sleeping, or the occasional goliath tornado with a massive damage track that's moving quickly, in the wrong direction.
I've also experienced being caught in the middle of a tornado outbreak (30 in 90 minutes, a couple were over mile wide) while driving across southern Minnesota. We sheltered at a Walmart and were quite alarmed that no locals seemed to take it seriously, even when the roof partially lifted off and cars started getting tossed around in the parking lot.
IIRC the State recently switched to more localized warnings (not county wide) due to people ignoring the sirens.
I'm also pretty sure that "you can see tornadoes coming" is poor advice, especially since they often come at night or with significant rainfall.
This sounds sarcastic but I don't mean it that way. True prepping is leaving (and maintaining!!) caches for adequate time in various locations (you don't know where you'll be when things go sideways, nor what routes will be available).
How long are you preparing for? Days? Months? Years?
I think prepping is ridiculous, but it's precisely because I know the nature of humanity. (Among a bunch of other reasons.)
It's also ridiculous to think this particular incident has anything to do with, well, anything...
Could you share this insight? The US gov't recommends that you do some amount of emergency preparedness ("prepping"): https://www.ready.gov/build-a-kit
Given a disaster with a 1% yearly chance, and a lifespan of 80 years, lifetime odds of encountering that disaster are close to 50%. Given a disaster with a 0% or a 0.000001% chance, lifetime odds are still pretty close to zero. Disaster preparedness worries about the 1%, prepping worries about what many people including me would consider the 0.000001%, which is why having a pack of water bottles and a first aid kit in a cupboard seems like common sense, but prepping for the fall of civilisation seems ridiculous.
One is entirely realistic and logical and one in crazy pants.
Yes, one should be reasonable, but that's not how "prepping" is use colloquially, and words have meaning.
If so, you're the problem, not everybody else.
(I can't seem to find the original source--some internet forum.)
If you reason that survivalists have caused some many death because Lanza was survivalist, then lets continue with your thought process:
- Lanza was white - hence to date white people have caused more deaths than their preparations have saved. - Lanza was male - hence to date men have caused more deaths than their preparations have saved. - Lanza was a minor - hence to date minors have caused more deaths than their preparations have saved.
Did I miss something?
If the lady had not been a prepper then she would not have brought a whole bunch of guns into a house with a kid that was clearly having problems. And instead of preparing for the problems that she never had she might have spent more time on the problems that she - and he - clearly did have.
Being white, male or a minor has nothing to do with it.
Honestly trying to understand your POV.
Hopefully instead of seeking to cast blame or personnel firings, etc., folks will learn what it is they lack in emergency response.
A drill is supposed to tell you how close or far away you are from being prepared. A surprise drill is going to be much more effective. The threat is so great, if there haven't been serious drills in a long time then they were overdue.