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Comment by brndnmtthws | Hacker News Reader

I live in New York City and I felt a small degree of panic when the reports showed up on Twitter. However, my initial instinct was "either the system doesn't work, or someone messed up".

If someone started firing missiles at the US, the risk that we'd start shooting them back seems high, and I think NYC would be a city that would get pummeled in retaliation. This is probably true for a lot of major coastal cities, especially Seattle, Vancouver, SF/LA, NYC, Washington DC, and Boston.

Fun NYC fact: the city is littered with fallout shelters: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1Zm18xuBxp8kSysodfr...

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Growing up I got the impression that a fallout shelter was a purpose-specific room deep underground. So every time I saw the "Fallout Shelter" sign on a building, I figured it was built with one of these "secret underground rooms". Think dedicated, locked stairwell that goes a thousand feet underground; after all, that's how it was pictured in my "Way Things Work" book. When we went to the bank, it was something of an intrigue, where the door to this secret underground cavern really was and what was inside.

As I got to go into more city buildings throughout my life, I noticed many of the rooms designated "fallout shelters" were just some spare room in the basement, complete with ventilation to the outside and really, not much farther than a few steps to the front door.

There may be a lot of "fallout shelters" in NYC but I get the impression that the labeling wasn't very strict and that many of these "shelters" won't really protect you from "fallout".

It takes far less to be an effective fallout shelter than you might think. If you look at lethal ranges on H-Bombs you see incredible destruction, but if you're protected for the first 1hour after a blast you can be surprisingly close to the blast and live.

I’m less concerned about the blast than what it would take to keep me alive and reasonably healthy after. I’d like my fallout shelter to include some food and water.

Some used to: I distinctly remember boxes and boxes of crackers in some underground shelter as a child.

One way of looking at these shelters is what % of radiation can you avoid for a blast X miles away. 90% and 99% are both easy to reach and would save vast numbers of lives as many decay products have half lives under a minute making them temporary, but significant problems. 99.99% gets really expensive because of longer half lives and the need to better filter air etc.

PS: Further, there is a tradeoff as unless it protects you from x% of radiation protection from the blast is basically pointless.

Fallout shelters only need to be used for 12-48 hours. People can survive without food or water for that long. Definitely better to have supplies, but proper shelter is more important for fallout.

Fallout shelters aren't about protecting from the nuclear blast but from the fallout that comes afterwards. The secret to surviving fallout is to put as much distance and stuff as possible to places where fallout collects like the ground. And then stay there for 24-48 hours. Looking for buildings with basements, or the center of multi-story buildings.

The advice I have heard is if not in proper shelter, like house without basement, to shelter in place to survive blast, and then move within the first 15 minutes to better fallout shelter.

I mean blast in terms of timing. You can get a leathal radiation doses in the first seconds well outside the fireball.

Moving from shelter A to B is very high risk. It might work, but you are unlikely to get far and would want someway to avoid breathing dust on the trip. If your in the center of a large office building for example you probably want to stay there for the next hour unless a great shelter is less than five minutes away or the building is on fire etc. http://www.businessinsider.com/nuclear-explosion-fallout-rad...

Off-topic, but if the book you’re referring to was the How It Works encyclopedia set, that was how I also learned about everything. My grandpa gave the set to me, and it included an incredible amount of material - illustrated and fascinating for a wide range of ages (this was long before we had internet). It is how I also learned about nuclear weapons, though I don’t specifically recall fallout shelters.

ashleyn says[0] that it was The Way Things Work[1] by David Macaulay (©1988), which indeed has (on page 177) a drawing of a fallout shelter depicted as a small concrete bunker at the end of a deep stairwell far underground (containing, of all things, a party singing Happy Birthday), along with the following description:

> A future nuclear war would not only reduce cities and towns to ruins. Fallout from the nuclear explosions would spread through the atmosphere, bombarding the land with lethal amounts of radiation. The only means of escape would be to live in deep underground shelters away from the fallout. This imprisonment would have to last until the radiation decreased to an acceptable level, which could take many years. Even then, climatic changes, shortage of food and the threat of disease would make life above ground a grim business.

Incidentally, the book is most memorable for lucid and well-explained diagrams involving woolly mammoths, and I highly recommend it for explanations of anything mechanical. The section on nuclear physics is a bit lackluster, however.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16145514

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Things_Work

::nostalgic tears::

Looked through the index of my early German (English translated, published around the 1960's, I believe) "The Way Things Work" volumes I and II and didn't see fallout shelters.

It occurred to me though — when did they start calling them "fallout" shelters rather than "bomb" shelters?

I'm guessing (after having read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb") that this would be about when the hydrogen bomb came along.

It was sobering to read how dramatically more powerful the fusion bomb was compared to the first fission bombs. Suddenly the idea of going into a basement shelter to "survive" the blast became laughable. If you were far enough from the blast though your only comfort could come from a shelter from the fallout.

> It occurred to me though — when did they start calling them "fallout" shelters rather than "bomb" shelters?

Sometime after the nuclear bomb was developed and first used to end the second world war. The "fallout" in "fallout shelter" refers to "nuclear fallout" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout) which would not have been a term that would have existed prior to the creation and first use of a nuclear bomb.

So sometime circa early 1940's to mid 1950's timeframe would be a good guess.

It was this book: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ca/Way_things_wo...

Had pretty cool drawings of a wooly mammoth around a bunch of inventions

It's not laughable.

The building code in Switzerland specifies that residential construction must contain a shelter that withstands a 12 megaton blast at 700 meters. The country has more shelter than people.

Another thing to note is that the multi-megaton weapons aren't in style anymore, due to improved targeting accuracy.

>Another thing to note is that the multi-megaton weapons aren't in style anymore, due to improved targeting accuracy.

I think it was due to the opposite, actually. The development of Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs) made many small nuclear warheads more valuable than fewer large nuclear warheads.

If an ICBM is a shotgun, then kiloton-level MIRVs are like birdshot, which is seen as more valuable than megaton-level buckshot.

Completely right. The major military uses of nuclear weapons are as sources of powerful shockwaves which are devastating to drag-sensitive targets, and as firestarters. In both cases, you can optimize for these effects over a given area by using 100kt-1mt warheads, and airbursts with overlapping blast radii.

The problem is that as yield rises, the losses to the upper atmosphere are proportionally greater, as is fallout. Multiple targeting with smaller warheads solves that as well, which critically allows for more efficient burning of nuclear fuel.

Finally, the larger the fireball, the more likely you’ll have it touching the the ground leading to losses, and kicking up more debris which will mix with fission products and unburned fuel. Of course that’s also one way to use a standard nuclear weapon in a manner more consistent with an enhanced radiation weapon, real “salting the earth” stuff. That is generally comsidered to be bad form, even among nuclear powers.

"Growing up" those shelters were considered around smaller, kiloton and low-megaton sized weaponry. The whole civil defense project fell apart after the 1950s once 100 Megaton hydrogen bombs become the norm. There's no sheltering from a city killer inside of a city, hence the reason the US quit pretending there was.

I still like Switzerland's idea of civil defense, but then nobody is going to attack the place where all the world's criminals keep their wealth anyways, so even there it's a complete sham.

I only get two posts on here because HN mods hate me, so I'm going to just add this: You don't have to worry about North Korea. At. All. The threat is already over.

As far as the false alarm in HI goes, maybe ask questions in the direction of "who is it that would like to embarass the current US Administration?"

> However, my initial instinct was "either the system doesn't work, or someone messed up".

Why? What really surprises me the most is that this seems to be a common thought. Did that happen before? Do you simply misstrust your government so deeply that you can not even assume something important like this is done right?

Really if i would get such a message on my phone (not even sure if my country does that) i would definitly expect the worst and act like that.

Bayesian reasoning. Most positive tests for unlikely events are false positives.

(Assuming plausible alternatives, being those false positives. Which is true in this case, of course.)

I felt the same way, but its not because I distrusted the government. The situation didn't feel like one wherein nuclear missiles would start being fired (or any missiles of any kind).

There's got to be some sort of build up before a conflict before it can't catch people in shock (hence the rational of actual surprise-attacks).

If tomorrow you read that Canada had invaded New York City, would you believe it instantly out of trust for your news agencies and government, or think that perhaps someone somewhere screwed up or was making a silly joke?

Personally i dont think a attack to the U.S. would be to much of a surprise. But true there is currently no direct tension in that direction. Also as someone else said, Hawaii really is a unlikely target.

I get it now i guess.

Irony that Hawaii was actually the first target in ww2

For me it's 2 things:

1) it seems incredibly unlikely, and

2) these systems haven't really been tested adequately for me to have much confidence in their utility.

The emergency alert system has been used here in Minnesota for tornadoes, amber alerts, and flash flooding. Sitting in a room and hearing every phone go off or waking up to your own phone making the warning tone is quite alarming.

If I received one about a nuclear missile I'd assume it's legitimate and at least take some minor precautions while trying to verify the alert. It's foolish to assume every unlikely alert is a false alarm.

That said, a single nuclear missile seems incredibly unlikely to me. I'd expect multiple missiles and an associated cyber attack if another nation state was willing to start a nuclear exchange. A single missile is just inviting the wrath of the US and rest of the world for little benefit.

From the screenshots of the message, I don't think you would know if it was one or many missles or whether they were nuclear or not.

Hawaii does not seem like a plausible target for a nuclear missile.

Why not? Until recently it was one of the few places North Korea could reasonably expect to reach.

What would NK have to gain by nuking Hawaii? It would cause the US to retaliate massively, while not doing serious damage to its military capabilities.

No amount of nuclear missles would do much to prevent the US from retaliating with it's nuclear arsenal. The majority of the US nuclear arsenal is floating underwater in always moving, undisclosed places via submarine spread throughout the world's oceans.

You think the US would actually retaliate against a limited nuclear attack in an isolated place with a massive nuclear counterattack? (I can see it in a cold war scenario against the USSR, with tanks moving into Europe and the world order at stake)

I think the US woudln't and, of course, shouldn't. The usual game-theoretical reasonings in this regard are misguided and shortsighted.

I don't think a normal, sanely led US would do that either. More likely the president and joint chiefs would sit in a room and discuss "a proportional response". Turning most of North Korea uninhabitable for generations does not meet that standard.

On the other hand, I can see President MAGA saying "turn the entire peninsula into one large crater," a series of Generals trying to talk him out of it and getting fired. An apocalyptic Saturday Night Massacre until he found the just-promoted-ex-Colonel who would issue the order for him.

Not sure why this has been downvoted. It may have been lyrically written but the point is sound. The guy with his finger on your button is a fucking madman.

I'd be interested for you to expand on your last sentence, because it seems to me that we would have no choice but to respond massively. Once Kim demonstrated a willingness to launch an offensive attack killing or endangering civilians, we'd have to assume he would do it again, and would therefore have to do our best at destroying all his launchers, and make every effort to kill him. He knows that, of course, which is why he's not going to do anything so stupid.

I think the most extreme and remotely plausible thing NK could want to do (but that would already mean taking an incredible risk) is to direct a nuclear missile to explode somewhere on the ocean, far from any populated place but close enough to the west cost of the US to send a clear warning about their capabilities to reach a major US city if provoked. NK is never going to actually attack the US first, it would simply mean squandering all the effort made so far in building a credible deterrence. Deterrence is not deterrent anymore when you force the enemy to respond.

I can't think of a scenario where a US counterattack isn't more damaging to NK than whatever damage NK would manage to inflict on the US by nuking Hawaii.

Tragically "the US" now means "Donald Trump" specifically regarding their propensity/ability to retaliate to a nuclear strike. Yeah, I think he'd do it. He's a maniac.

No, because the DPRK can't even do reentry right, let alone actually fit a nuke on a missile, for all of those huge swaths of people assuming it meant a nuclear attack. Regardless, it is uncontroversial that aiming at a target like Hawaii and actually hitting it is at this time beyond the technical means of the DPRK.

I wasn't in Hawaii, but I also imagine that I would assume that an alert like this is a false alarm. I've just lived through too many scenarios like this, albeit not on the same scale (think false fire alarms.)

Upon reflection, however, this seems like the definition of survivor bias.

I remember an occasion when I lived with a partner - the fire alarm had gone off and I immediately got out of bed and started putting my pants and shoes on. She asked why, I said "so we can go outside. What are you doing? Let's go."

She said she didn't understand the point - if it was a REAL fire, wouldn't they just come get us or tell us?

I don't know how prominent this thought process is, or why so many people don't take things like fire alarms seriously. Selection bias, perhaps you're right. Every fire alarm most people has ever heard was a drill.

This has happened twice at work now, even my manager was teasing me for telling people they should leave. Eventually I left on my own.

I think it makes sense to be prepared to evacuate by doing things like getting dressed or packing your bags. But you don't have to leave every time the alarm goes off. If you don't smell smoke, hear a rushing/roaring sound or feel heat coming from somewhere it probably is a false alarm.

By the time you feel heat or hear roaring or see smoke your hallway is already on fire. In some buildings that's your only escape route.

Please don't give dangerous advice.

They might not have known - a good question to ask might be "why did that user think it was ok to recommend a non-urgent action in response to a fire alarm? Why did that user think it's ok to wait for evidence of a fire outside of an alarm?" Somewhere, society is failing to instill a proper respect for emergency indicators.

I wouldn’t expect someone to come get me if there was a fire, but I suspect I would have a fairly low sense of urgency. Fire alarms in my experience have had an incredibly high false positive rate, either due to unannounced drills, pranks, or “correct” operation (e.g. smoke from the stove).

Which is exactly the point of fire drills, to teach people to leave the building calmly.

I was in a club once (in a basement) and the fire alarm went. Music stopped, everybody looked around confused for 30 seconds, no one saw an immediate fire, and then the music started up again twice as loud to drown out the alarm.

A couple things to keep in mind:

1. Your most logical thinking doesn't occur at 8am on a weekend when you just woke up.

2. Hawaii has a more ingrained trust of the EAS than most other states. We test our sirens and EAS monthly. Sirens for tsunamis aren't that uncommon, and there are several horror stories in Hawaii of how people have ignored the sirens and warning signs in the past and got killed.

3. It's a lot easier to determine its a false alarm in hindsight. At the time, you have no information other than the alert and the knowledge about the current tensions with North Korea. We all knew there was a chance it was a false alarm and sure hoped it was, but when your life is on the line it doesn't matter.

North Korea is really the only viable country that we'd be hit by nuclear weapons from, and they have no way of "pummeling" NYC.

An accidental launch from Russia/China/India/Packistan is more likely than North Korea waking up one day with a death wish IMO

They seem quite useless: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-new-york-nuclear/new-york-...

Depends on who was shooting them. The North Korean missiles are notoriously inaccurate and if Kim shot one off with a live warhead, there's a decent chance it would detonate within his own border.

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