Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

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I think this whole thing could be seen as a blessing in disguise, but I don't hear anyone talking about it. We seem totally unprepared for this kind of event. The message said take shelter, so why were people running around screaming and crying in the streets?

People were throwing their kids into storm drains. Clever, but what happens to them after that?

Where do we go? How long do we have to stay there? Who is going to pass out the iodine pills? Where's the clean water? What will we eat? Who will come get us when it's all over?

It seems like we gave a damn about this many years ago during the Cold War. There were drills in schools, public service messages, people bought bomb shelters, there was the Civil Defense. Once in awhile I see one of those public bomb shelter placards on a building and wonder if there really still is one or if it is just some old artifact someone forgot to take down.

We laugh at all this stuff like ironic hipsters and now we see the results.

No one stopped caring. What we stopped doing was pretending the civilian population could be protected against nuclear holocaust.

The bomb that obliterated Hiroshima was a toy next to a thermonuclear bomb, which is 1000 times as powerful. If one lands on Oahu, there won't be anyone to pass out iodine pills in Hawaii, or anyone to pass them out to.

Hawaii is just stupid to spend a nickel on an early warning system. The only reason it exists is that too many people don't understand what they're supposedly being warned, or that they are utterly defenseless.

Sometimes, the only protection is prevention. This is one.

Looking at NUKEMAP [1] and playing with Honolulu as a target using the various weapons that are common to nuclear arsenals your claims just sound totally false.

It seems like there would be a great chance of survivability in many areas if one were properly sheltered. This doesn't even take into account that Oahu is a mountain which would shield many inhabitants from the air blast.

I frankly am glad you are not in charge of the early warning system in Hawaii.

[1] http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

And to extend this hypothetical a little: the nuclear arsenal of people attacking the US is not as good as the one in the US.

Odds are anyone dumb enough to throw a nuke at the US is doing so with some really cunning plan in mind hoping for retaliation, and doing so with a nuke that's far from optimal. Russia and China are better served by eating up the US economy (and government!), than balls-to-the-wall war, so it's more likely an country that 'also has nukes' than the players with the real budgets.

For anyone wondering, highest estimate for Korea is 280kt. It would take a chunk out of Honolulu but no where near what people assume.

As someone living in Hawaii, I’m more worried about the aftermath and how people react. More chaos will be caused by them rather than the bomb.

> Hawaii is just stupid to spend a nickel on an early warning system.

The early warning system also includes messages for tsunamis, amber alerts, landslides, and high surf. I can't imagine the inclusion of a PACOM warning required any significant additional spending.

North Korea has H-Bombs now? With accurate missiles?

For whatever reason there came to be a general belief that the drills were pointless or just propaganda. In reality they were very worthwhile and provided meaningful preparedness training. The bomb isn't what always kills people: it's the building falling on top of you that will kill or maim you, and knowing what to do when the building is falling down can drastically improve your chances of survival.

The assumption that most people have is just that nukes just evaporate people like in Terminator 2. That's not the case for most of the danger zone.

This fascinating book on the topic of preparedness is available for free here: http://www.oism.org/nwss/

It includes a lot of detail, diagrams, and explanations about topics like fallout. Unfortunately many students who become politicians tend to be dramatically misinformed about how nuclear weapons work which leads to some systematically incorrect assumptions that have wide-ranging consequences.

Most of what people believe about nuclear weapons and nuclear technology in general is false.

Part of it is that there's a public risk with this sense of 'preparedness'.

If large amounts of people feel comfortable with nuclear war breaking out because they have their bomb shelter stocked in the backyard that poses an existential risk for everyone.

While people may overestimate the vaporization radius of a specific bomb we definitely don't want a larger underestimation of the affect of large scale nuclear conflict.

This was kind of the point of the pugwash conference, to remove nuclear weapons from political escalation more generally. If we're not successful at this and it escalates or becomes political that might be the end of it.

“In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them.”

https://pugwash.org/1955/07/09/statement-manifesto/

I think we should be making a lot of effort to prevent this kind of event than to prepare for this kind of event. It was a blessing in disguise indeed because it made people realize that talk is cheap and showmanship really can lead to some horrible outcomes.

Great point. I wonder what Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran think about our reaction, and what ways they see to manipulate it. Most Americans now consider war as "something our all-powerful military does in other places and protects us from worrying about at home." The lack of preparedness you are describing is the result of a mindset that believes any and all attacks will be stopped before reaching the homeland.

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