A Not-so-False Alarm

No one, who was not in the Hawaiian Islands yesterday morning, January 13th, can begin to imagine what went through the minds of Hawaiians and their visitors alike, when they received an alert that a ballistic missile was headed their way, to seek shelter, and that this was not a drill. The twenty minutes it would take, from launch, for such a missile launched from North Korea to hit Hawaii leaves little time for end-of-life thinking, even though such thoughts are no doubt pervasive into a public mindset that is also struck with the ultimate fear of imminent doom. The fact that such an attack has grown from the “possible” to the “not-quite-so-unlikely” is enough for all of us to be concerned about, thanks to a Korean despot bent on striking fear throughout the world. Given that, the false warning of an imminent missile strike takes on a whole new level of sobriety and awareness which most of us have not considered for almost an entire generation’s life span.

An accidental push of the wrong button in Hawaii’s state-run Emergency Alert System, and the very painful agony of tens of minutes in the time it took to adequately notify the public that the alarm was false and accidental, can only be measured in the heavy heartbeats of thousands who thought that this was how their lives would end- suddenly, randomly, finally.

We can all thank Divine Providence that this was no missile attack, yet such a false alarm should, on retrospection, alarm us all in recognizing the inadequacies of our preparedness to deal with such an attack. In Hawaii, for instance, there are no fallout shelters- not one, so the advisory to seek shelter might only protect one from the blast’s shockwaves, but not the post-detonation’s effects from radioactive fallout. Surely electrical power would be rendered asunder, meaning that water service would cease, along with anything else that might otherwise be of critical use in post-attack recovery.

We don’t like to think about it but the fact is that no city, large or small, nor any town of significant size, has any provision in the way of fallout shelter. For the past fifty years, the concept of mutually assured destruction, M.A.D., rendered the “unthinkable” unlikely enough not to have to worry about such preparations, and other demands on the public purse made the construction and maintenance of fallout shelters impractical. Even the secret critical continuation of government facility, now known as “Project Greek Island,” was decommissioned in 1992 when knowledge of “the bunker,” as it had come to be called, became public in a Washington Post article by Ted Gulp that same year.

Yet, the missiles and bombs capable of nuclear annihilation haven’t gone anywhere- they are just waiting for a mad-man to come along and light the torch of thermonuclear war. With Kim Jong Un on the threshold of intercontinental attack capability, that is to say, against the U.S., his are the poisoned pills made possible by the ditherings of Donald Trump’s predecessors who, fearing for the worst, did nothing to stop the inevitable from eventually occurring. We are now at that threshold, like it or not.

While the hate-filled left in Washington, New York and Hollywood (i.e. Jamie Leigh Curtis) will no doubt find some excuse to blame Donald Trump for yesterday’s false alarm in Hawaii, they do so despite the fact that the alarm was originated by a state-run facility, and not any facility within the federal government. Had the attack been real, these same hate-filled “lefties” would no doubt blame it on Trump, regardless, and while their psychopathic rants do nothing to quell the unease we should all feel about Kim, the fact remains that we all face the very real threat of nuclear weapons in those wrong hands.

As the president is forced to deal with what is taking place on the Korean peninsula, as well as other potential hotspots in Iran and elsewhere, perhaps we all should consider the fact that, despite our unwillingness to consider the “unthinkable,” with regards to nuclear war, we are completely unprepared to deal with such a scenario, as a nation and as a people.

Essentially, a false alarm that should alarm us all.

 

-Drew Nickell, 14 January 2018

© 2018 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.
author of “Bending Your Ear- a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times”
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