Copyright © 2018
By Ralph F. Couey
It was a calm, quiet morning, a cool breeze drifting through the windows and in a tree just outside a dove was calling. I had just finished dressing and was ruminating over the possibilities for breakfast when that instantly identifiable tone issued from my cell phone. I didn't react immediately, assuming it was a high surf warning for the forecasted 50-foot waves pounding the north and west shores of O'ahu. Eventually, I picked it up and there in front of me was this message:
"BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT
INBOUND TO HAWAII.
SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER.
THIS IS NOT A DRILL."
As wakeup calls go, it was certainly an eye-opener.
I grew up during the worst part of the Cold War and am old enough to clearly remember regular 'Duck and Cover" drills in school, so the idea of a pending nuclear attack is not unfamiliar to me. But even with the recent nerves over North Korea, this seemed to come clean out of the blue, very out of place on such a calm and peaceful morning. For about 30 seconds I was frozen in place, then the analyst part of my brain woke up and began to function.
Outside the window, all was still quiet. I should have been hearing warning sirens spooling up and the sounds of HPD cars racing to critical traffic control points. There should have been the sound of fire trucks and ambulances racing to clear the primary target area. I should have been hearing the roar of jet engines as the fighters of the Hawaii Air National Guard and U.S. Air Force were scrambled from Hickam and Honolulu International Airport. I should also have been hearing the strident sound of ship's whistles from Pearl Harbor signaling emergency recall to their crews. Something was wrong. If the alert was genuine, there should have been a lot more going on.
I moseyed into the living room, turned on the television and clicked through the local stations. Instead of a news desk and grim-faced anchors, I saw NCAA basketball and two infomercials. Business as usual. Continuing to surf, I came across another channel where a vivid red crawler was splashed across the top of the screen accompanied by a kinda creepy computer-generated voice repeating the warning I had seen on my phone. I thought about that for a moment and decided that this was part of the automatic response accompanying the text push. In other words, no human had yet acknowledged the warning. I put the remote down and went out to the front porch. All I saw and heard was...normality. Just another Saturday morning in Honolulu.
Less than five minutes had passed by this point, but I had already assessed, based on all the available information, that someone at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HiEMA) had somehow clicked the wrong thing on their computer, a boo-boo of massively critical proportions. Roughly 40 minutes later, the media was reporting that this was in fact what had happened. At shift change, a watchstander had initiated a test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) and selected the wrong option. By the time the error was known and reported, panic had ensued throughout the islands.
UPDATE 1/30/2018: The Federal Communications Commission issued their preliminary report this morning. On the Saturday morning in question, the off-going night supervisor decided to run a no-notice drill for the on-coming day shift by playing a recording simulating an emergency communication from Pacific Command reporting an inbound ballistic missile. The message began with the words "Exercise, Exercise, Exercise," but ending with the words, "This is not a drill." The Warning Officer did not hear the words "Exercise, Exercise, Exercise," but did hear "This is not a drill." He reacted according to directive and policy and sent the alert. PACOM, hearing the alert from HEMA rechecked their sensors and immediately reported that there was in fact, no alert, and no danger. But there was no mechanism in place to immediately recall a mistaken alert. While I was in the Navy, we ran battle drills constantly. But knowing the firepower carried within our ship's hull, we always padded the alert messages with the words "EXERCISE! EXERCISE! EXERCISE" both at the beginning of the message and at the end of the message. Never, and I do mean never, did we ever place the words "THIS IS NOT A DRILL" anywhere in those messages. The consequences of a fatal misunderstanding were just too dangerous.
A video surfaced online of parents lowering their children into storm drains. On Interstate H-3 between Honolulu and Kaneohe, drivers abandoned their cars and raced on foot into nearby tunnels. A state assembly rep huddled with his children in their bathtub, praying fervently. People took shelter in their garages, crying and praying. A soccer field was cleared in seconds as terrified parents fled with their kids. At University of Hawai'i - Manoa, students fled their dorms and ran aimlessly for any kind of shelter. Some went to placarded fallout shelters only to find the doors locked up tight. On Waikiki, tourists ran from the beaches back to their hotels. Guests were herded into underground storage areas. In restaurants, people were huddling in storage areas and walk-in refrigerators. On the roads and highways, drivers ignored traffic laws and raced at speeds up to 100 mph trying to reach family and shelter. The cell networks on O'ahu were instantly overloaded as frantic people tried to call, text, and facebook loved ones to say their final goodbyes. Almost everywhere, people were crying in terror. The end, they had decided, was nigh.
Eventually the word got around that it was a false alarm. People's reactions since have been almost universal in their anger. The HiEMA director did not mince words, taking full responsibility for the incredible error. There were calls for investigations and firings. Democrat politicians took to the airwaves turning the incident into political fodder, blaming President Trump for the whole fiasco, hoping to obfuscate the fact that the rise of North Korea to the status of a nuclear power in the first place happened on the watches of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Changes have already been made, for example, now to run that EAS test requires the assent of two people. Other changes are on the way.
In the aftermath of this terrifying incident lies the stark reality that Hawai'i is manifestly unprepared for the real thing. Not that, in my opinion, any preparation would be sufficient.
Nuclear weapons come in a variety of sizes and uses, from small tactical battlefield munitions in the 10 to 20 kiloton (kt) range to megaton-range (mt) city killers, the destructive power of which is beyond most people's comprehension. There are three immediate effects, blast, heat, and initial radiation. After that, irradiated debris falls from the sky, poisoning the land and killing whatever life is left. Most elements will decay within hours to a couple of weeks. But other elements, such as Strontium-90 and Cesium-137 have half-lives of 30 years, which means it would take that long for that radiation to decay to half the immediately lethal level. Any land so blasted and exposed would take a century or longer before it could be safely re-inhabited.
O'ahu is, and has for a long time, been a primary target. It is a major military command and operations center, home to the Pacific Fleet, the Pacific Air Force, and a plethora of secretive facilities, mostly underground, vital to military operations. It is the only major port facility for commercial traffic between the U.S. west coast and Japan. It is also a vital communications center, not only for government and the military, but private enterprise as well. World War II started for the U.S. at Pearl Harbor. It was a primary target of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And in the post-9/11 era, it remains a very attractive target for terrorism.
And it is home to 950,000 people, plus tens of thousands of tourists on any given day.
Even a quick look at a map of the Pacific Basin reveals that the loss of Hawai'i creates a huge problem for everyone who does business in those great waters. Our enemies have always understood this and it is assumed that any weapons targeted on this island would not yield kilotons, but megatons. Why is this important? A small weapon affects a limited area, especially in terrain marked with high and steep mountain ranges. But a 1 mt weapon detonated at 5,000 feet over Pearl Harbor would leave nothing alive on O'ahu. That fact renders any alert useless, unless the intent is to send the populace into a terrified frenzy.
The reality of a nuclear attack on O'ahu is this: if the blast and heat don't get you, the radiation will. There won't be edible food or drinkable water, emergency medical care, or a functioning government. Because the transmitters and broadcast facilities are not hardened against electromagnetic pulse, local radio stations would be unable to broadcast emergency information. Federal disaster aid would be at the least days away, even if they could safely land here. Those left alive would die a slow and painful death from radiation poisoning. I for one would rather be taken by the blast.
Flight time from North Korea is less than 20 minutes, and that is not enough time to get people to shelter, even if they knew where to go. HiEMA's protocols were that people hunker down for at least 14 days. There are, as of today, no shelters stocked with food and water for several hundred people for two weeks. So even if people found there way to a (relatively) safe place, they would die of hunger or dehydration before those two weeks were up.
The thing that amazed me was that even after three years when everyone knew about the nuclear threat from the Hermit Kingdom, nobody knew where to go or what to do. The alert sent people screaming, crying, and panicking into running to...nowhere. It is amazing that nobody was injured or killed. This result could not have been on HiEMA's list of desirable outcomes. The responsibility for that reaction lies solely with the government, including those politicians who spent the days after the false alarm elbowing each other aside in front of the television cameras. If they had been more proactive in telling people what they needed to know in the years prior to this incident, I think things would have played out in a much calmer way. The most important element of that pre-planned knowledge is a full understanding of what twenty minutes means, and what someone can reasonably accomplish in that span of time. I was darkly amused by one visitor interviewed on local television, who told the reporter that upon receiving the alert, he checked out of his hotel and headed for the airport and the first available flight out. In twenty minutes, he couldn't even have made it out of Waikiki.
In Japan, people have been drilling for years for the eventuality of tsunamis. Because of that training and education, when the siren sounds, they know where to go and what to do. If they can take it, I'm of the opinion that we can as well.
I do understand that the government must provide some element of hope. It is a basic human characteristic to want to cling to life, even when all indications are that life is ending. The government just can't announce, "Hey, a missile's on the way. See you on the other side!" But the stark reality proven on Saturday is that nothing worked as planned, and thus Hawai'i is manifestly unprepared for an attack. The leadership is unprepared to manage the situation, and the populace is completely uneducated on what to do and where to go. I'm sure there was a reluctance to teach such things, out of a fear of alarming the citizenry, but such caution is inappropriate, and perhaps cowardly, in a world where a psychopathic Kim Jon Un might unleash an attack for no other reason than because he got up on the wrong side of the bed.
There are things that must be done as soon as practicable. Shelters must be established and stocked with food and water. People must at least make a passing effort to stockpile their own supplies in the event they cannot get to a shelter. And everyone, citizens and leaders alike, needs to have a plan.
As much blame that has been directed at the government, people have to understand that they have an important share in this responsibility. Families must sit down and discuss what they will do if a real alert is received. Children need to know where to go. Parents must know what to do and where to go, and families need to embrace the sobering fact that there may not be time enough to gather before the missile arrives.
A nuclear attack on Hawai'i is no longer a subject for academic study. The threat is palpably real, dangerously so, and the failure to properly prepare the people of Hawai'i will ensure major and certainly unnecessary loss of life.
The world has changed yet again, and Hawai'i must embrace this new reality. Retreating into the delusion of wishing will accomplish nothing but destruction and death. This is a beautiful land, populated by a loving and joyful people, things that are certainly worth preserving. The only way to protect and preserve that land and those people are for their leaders and custodians to make sure that everyone is fully prepared.
Beautiful memories are part of the Hawai'ian experience. But for those who live here, and those who were visiting, they will never forget that Saturday in January, the day that Paradise was almost lost.
