January 13, 2018 was (thankfully) a false alarm of the apocalypse for Hawaiians. But if the push notification comes that a North Korean missile is about to drop, just what the hell is the government’s plan to keep you safe? (You might not want to know...)BY JAN 14, 2018
larence Nishihara remembers the nuclear explosions that illuminated his childhood. Growing up in Hawaii in the 1950s and 1960s, he could see the green flash from thermonuclear tests over the Pacific Ocean. Nighttime blasts were particularly vivid. “For an instant, the whole landscape was bright as day,” Nishihara recalls. A number of hotels even capitalized on the spectacle, arranging rooftop “rainbow bomb parties” where guests could watch the pyrotechnics while sipping sweet cocktails.
For many years, Nishihara’s memories of the cold war felt like a chapter of ancient history, another artifact to set alongside sock hops and I Love Lucy. But now that he’s a state senator on his native island of Oahu, Nishihara’s past seems terrifyingly relevant again. As the “U. S. Dotard” Donald Trump has traded insults with “Rocket Man” Kim Jong Un, promising that American “fire and fury” would check the Hermit Kingdom’s rapid advances in missile technology, Nishihara has used a series of town-hall meetings to help his state’s citizens prepare for a nuclear attack.
Nishihara insists that such a possibility remains remote, but that hasn’t stopped his state from trying to ready itself. In recent months, Hawaii’s state emergency-management agency has added a “Nuclear Threat” tab on its website. The agency has also briefed state legislators and arranged public presentations for concerned citizens. On December 1, wailing air-raid sirens swept across the state’s sand beaches as the Attack Warning Tone was tested for the first time in a quarter century.
Hawaii isn’t the only place making preparations. Across the country, emergency-management officials have been quietly dusting off plans drawn up during the cold war and in the aftermath of September 11 to be ready for what they euphemistically label a “catastrophic nation-state threat,” e.g., a North Korean nuclear missile. “The current threat and instability we’re seeing across the globe—not just on the peninsula—is causing us to revisit our authorities and capabilities,” says Mike Lapinski of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which would help lead the government’s response to a nuclear disaster. “We realized as an agency that we need to pay closer attention and work with our partners to ensure everyone understands what their roles would be.”
There’s something surreal about listening to public officials like Lapinski, Nishihara, and Vern Miyagi, the retired general who runs Hawaii’s emergency-management agency, talk casually about kilotons, airbursts, blast radius, and radioactivity, as though an incoming ballistic missile were just another item on the city-council agenda. “If you’d asked me six months ago, I would have never thought we would be working on this threat,” Miyagi told me recently. But the truth is that the period of relative nuclear calm we witnessed at the dawn of the twenty-first century was more the exception than the rule during the seven decades since J. Robert Oppenheimer’s secret project proved itself in a brilliant flash in the New Mexico desert.
In fact, nuclear exercises were once commonplace in the United States. At the height of the cold war, New York City issued dog tags to its schoolchildren and Chicago recommended that its citizens tattoo their blood type on their torsos. (Never on a limb, though; an arm or leg could too easily be severed in a blast.) Major cities ran annual nuclear drills, known as Operation Alert exercises, and some places went even further. In 1955, Portland, Oregon, practiced Operation Green Light, a full-scale evacuation of the city. The exercise closed a thousand blocks and evacuated one hundred thousand people to twelve Red Cross “reception areas” outside the city.
All of that planning atrophied over the course of the cold war, and in the quarter century since the end of the Soviet Union, much of it has been forgotten. In part, the apathy came from the government’s realization of just how awful large-scale nuclear attacks would be—and how impossible it was to even imagine the logistics needed for a response. (Dwight Eisenhower observed in 1957, “You just can’t have this kind of war. There aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.”) Recent disasters, including Hurricanes Katrina, Harvey, and Maria, have only underscored the challenge of a large-scale disaster response. But the country’s first responders may be better prepared for a nuclear attack than we might expect.
Professional emergency-response managers rely on what they call an “all-hazards” approach, a buzzword that means drawing up flexible contingency plans that can be adapted to the particulars of a given disaster. Barb Graff (no relation), the head of emergency management in Seattle, told me that the city faces at least eighteen different hazards, from tsunamis to pandemics to “international hazards” like terrorism. “We can’t comprehensively address all of them,” she says, so her plans focus on the biggest threat to the Pacific Northwest: a mega-thrust earthquake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Plan for the worst, the theory goes, and then you can adapt that response to lesser catastrophes as needed. As Graff says, “If you’re ready for an earthquake, you’re ready for a lot of different things.”
Nationally, Ventura County, California, just to the north of Los Angeles, leads the country in nuclear preparedness. A decade ago, the county mapped out a 243-page plan for responding to a nuclear attack. It even aired a chilling two-minute public-service announcement that showed a young girl asking her parents how to stay safe. Dr. Robert Levin, the county public-health officer, started the effort in response to the general threat of terrorism, long before North Korea posed any real danger. Levin has approached the issue as a public-health problem. As with Zika or Ebola, he argues, the threat of a nuclear attack makes most people eager for information that will help them protect themselves and their families. His plan lays out roles for everyone from first responders (Step no. 1: Avoid radiation and quell civil disorder) to the weather service (determine wind direction and send to “plume mappers”) to gas-station owners (Step no. 1: “Set pumps to ration gas supplies as planned or as directed by County EOC”). Many states and cities have drawn on Ventura County’s resources in recent months.
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