Live data from Hacker News

What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

newyorker.com

301–310 of 381 posts

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#301
post #25

A good piece of perspective on this -- it's what many civilians feel day in day out in places like Pakistan when killer drones are flying over.

Let's be honest - most people don't want to hear that the people living in drone target areas of Pakistan, Yemen, etc feel this way, else we'd be seeing many more stories about the psychological trauma faced by these folks.

Found this 2012 article about a joint NYU / Stanford study regarding terror civilians face from drones.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/sep/25/study-...

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#302
post #300
post #64

It’s interesting how people (anecdotally) don’t seem to have any plan for a nuclear attack, as opposed to, say, an earthquake or a fire. I think there’s a stigma around even considering the possibility. However, it makes sense to at least talk with your family about what you would all do. According to what I’ve read on the gov sites, it’s very survivable for a lot of people if you take key steps: surround yourself wi…

Fires and earthquakes are orders of magnitude more probable than nuclear attacks.

I thought Nate Silver had a good take this week, which was basically that Nuclear Weapons have not been around long enough for us to draw statistical conclusions.

He continued that even if the odds were small, like a 1% chance a year, it would very much be worth being prepared for.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#303
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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 sob…

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.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#304
post #32
post #17

I'm currently living in Japan. So obviously I have a plan for nuclear war. First, I'm going to press send on the doomsday draft which is sitting in my e-mail. Second, I'm going to go to youtube and play "We all go together" by Tom Leher. Third, I got a bottle sitting in my desk that I'm going to pop open. Presumably I'll be in the office at the time so one final round with the coworkers. The people in this article se…

I don't think it's as bad as you think. Check out this thread: https://twitter.com/lcamtuf/status/952265416289632256 . If shit hits the fan and you end up surviving, your help in the aftermath can be crucial.

And if you end up not surviving, your help in the afterlife will be welcome.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was that decided?

the law banned it. note though all Christian religions claim to believe in a book, the Bible, that has people who practiced polygamy blessed by God. It's pretty hypocritical for any one who believes in the Bible to be against polygamy when the God that book is about blessed the practice.

Where in the Bible is this polygamy blessed by God?

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that?

I suppose living in southern Idaho for nine years makes me qualified to answer this :) Many Mormons are very into prepping (preparing for emergencies.) For example, when I lived in Idaho Falls, many of the Mormons I knew had thick concrete shelters in their basements, massive amounts of dried food prepared, huge jugs of water stored, and regularly did drills with other members of there community. Additionally, Mormon…

I saw this in a local documentary about the USA (De Verenigde Staten van Eva). They called these people "preppers". I had never heard of that before. Don't remember if Mormon was mentioned.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#307

> and an employee pushed the wrong button I would assume that was how it was explained to the governor, and that the actual system is software based (right?) - there couldn't possibly be an actual physical 'ballistic missile alert' button right next to the 'shift change' button. In which case, the triggering of this alert is probably a bit more complex. However, this is treated as a sensitive system so there likely w…

Call me a cynic, but I'm willing to believe that there was a 'ballistic missile alert' button in the wrong place. Sometimes bad placements are only clear after the fact. I walked into a building once and the lights were out. I walked along the wall and pulled the first switch I found - which turned out the be the fire alarm.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#308

Must be a terrible thing, if anything good can come out of this I hope it alerts people to the horrors of nuclear war. I am puzzled by why we speak so much about global warming but almost nobody talks about nuclear war. Global warming is not remotely as dangerous as nuclear war. Sure it will make crops fails some places, cause water shortage for some millions, force people to move off the coast etc. But it will not k…

If nuclear war is that close to happening, then we are already too far gone to address it. Who is going to be the one to convince Trump to decommission some of America's nuclear weapons?

Putin has more nuclear weapons. Shouldn't he decommission his first? He has already risked kicking off WWIII several times. He took a chunk of Ukraine, broke two chunks off of Georgia, make a bunch of border incursions into NATO/EU countries up north, and is currently supporting a civil war in Ukraine.

The situation is pretty crazy. Russia is far from the world's biggest economy, yet it is the nation with the greatest nuclear capability. There is clearly a desire to hold the rest of the world hostage, strongly equating fear with respect.

Note that Ukraine once had nuclear weapons. They gave them up, being assured that Russia would not threaten territorial integrity and that the USA would help ensure this. We see what those promises were worth. Giving up the nuclear capability was obviously a mistake. There is no way that Putin would have annexed Crimea under the threat of nuclear retaliation.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#309

Nearly forty minutes passed before a second message went out: “There is no missile threat or danger to the State of Hawaii. ...“It was a mistake made during a standard procedure at the changeover of a shift, and an employee pushed the wrong button.” I've seen some shitty Admin Panels, but somebody "pushed the wrong button" and an end-of-your-world false alarm was going off for 40 minutes?! WTF?

It remaining like that for 40 minutes is a bad sign, but it being easy to issue a warning seems reasonable (the counter-story is "No warning of the genuine threat was issued, due to the process for doing so being too involved/difficult").

That suggests an interesting question: if you issue a false alarm should you retract as soon as you can or can it be better to wait a while?

I could see retracting quickly leading to even more confusion as you then have a mix of people who have received (and believed the retraction) trying to resume normal activity and people who still thinking they have to get to a safer place right away. I could see this leading to some escalating tension and even violence.

It might be better to wait until a good majority of people have reached their shelters and stopped moving before you issue the retraction.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#310
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget that the water heater has 50 gallons in it.

not in Japan. Japanese water heaters are on demand heaters. I love them becahse unlike US style tank based heaters Japanese on demand heaters never run out of hot water.

Ok but maybe it’s worth having a two stage system? In the event of the apocalypse..

Also a high school will have massive water heaters and a chiller..

Post reply on HN