Hawaiians got a serious scare Saturday morning when the state emergency alert system sent out, by mistake, a false warning of an impending missile attack, telling citizens ominously “This is not a drill.”
By all accounts, the alert sent much of the population into “complete panic.” People ran for shelter; ducked and covered as best they could in their homes; shielded their children and pets; texted farewells to loved ones; tried to reach family and friends to warn them.
For 38 minutes, terrified islanders thought they were about to be hit by a nuclear warhead. The authorities were said to know within five minutes that the alert had been sent in error. But for some as yet unknown reason, it took 38 minutes to send out a correction from the emergency alert system.
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Afterward, the finger-pointing began. Hawaiian Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, congresswoman for the state’s 2nd District, admitted the state’s own alert system was at fault, but denounced President Trump for his policy on North Korea.
“What makes me angry,” Tulsi Gabbard told CNN’s State of the Union, “is that, yes, this false alarm went out and we have to fix that in Hawaii but really we’ve got to get to the underlying issue here, of why are the people of Hawaii and the US facing a nuclear threat coming from North Korea?
“And what is this president doing, urgently, to eliminate that threat?” …
“This was unacceptable that it happened but it really highlights the stark reality that the people of Hawaii are facing.”
Gabbard, a military veteran and member of the House armed services and foreign affairs committees, added: “I’ve been calling on President Trump to negotiate directly with North Korea, to sit across the table from Kim Jong-un, work out the differences so that we can build a pathway towards denuclearisation, to remove this threat.”
Hollywood personalities weighed in. Actress Jamie Lee Curtis tweeted angrily, “This Hawaii missle [sic] scare is on YOU Mr. Trump. … Shame on your hate filled self. YOU DID THIS!”
This Hawaii missle scare is on YOU Mr. Trump. The real FEAR that mothers & fathers & children felt is on YOU. It is on YOUR ARROGANCE. HUBRIS. NARCISSISM. RAGE. EGO. IMMATURITY and your UNSTABLE IDIOCY. Shame on your hate filled self. YOU DID THIS!
— Jamie Lee Curtis (@jamieleecurtis) January 13, 2018
Comic actor Jim Carrey took less of a nanny-ish tone, preferring the epic pretentiousness route.
https://twitter.com/JimCarrey/status/952284494257508352
Huge respect, all kidding aside, to anyone who has an image of a model atomic mushroom cloud handy in case the need arises.
As every self-respecting news outlet has been careful to report, Trump was on the golf course at the time the alert was sent. Since it was shortly after 1:00 PM on the East Coast, on a Saturday, and the Hawaiian alert not only came from the state emergency system but wasn’t even a real drill, much less a real alert, it’s hard to see how this matters. But the information has been included in every report.
A former Obama defense official, Patrick Granfield, was actually happy to hear that.
Thank God the President was playing golf. pic.twitter.com/K7wPtsevGO
— Patrick Granfield (@pgranfield) January 13, 2018
Presumably this means we’re lucky Trump didn’t have his own finger near an interesting button. This does seem strange coming from a one-time defense official, who would surely know that the nuclear “football” follows the president wherever he goes, including the golf course.
We can all sympathize with the concern for Hawaiians who lived through a half hour of terror on Saturday. For many of them, it will probably be a while before they can feel normal again. They’ve had a legitimate, awful fright.
That’s what makes it a little confusing to remember Susan Rice, formerly Barack Obama’s national security advisor, saying the U.S. could “tolerate” having a nuclear North Korea. President Trump needed to stop his “reckless rhetoric.” A nuclear-armed Kim regime wouldn’t be our worst option.
It seems like it was only five months ago that she was explaining it:
Former national security adviser Susan Rice is arguing that the United States can “tolerate” North Korea’s nuclear weapons, if necessary, adding that President Trump must put an end to “reckless rhetoric.”
In an op-ed for The New York Times published Thursday, the former Obama administration official said pragmatism is needed to handle North Korea’s aggression. …
“History shows that we can, if we must, tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea — the same way we tolerated the far greater threat of thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons during the Cold War.”
Rice joined other Democrats in slamming the president for comments in which he said North Korea will face “fire, fury and frankly power” if it continues to threaten the United States. The former national security advisor called Trump’s remarks “unprecedented” and “dangerous.”
Come to think of it, it was only five months ago. There’s no other way to slice this: Susan Rice says we can tolerate the possibility that this missile-alert problem for Hawaii will continue, without any end in sight.
Whatever it may (or may not) suggest about Trump, Rice’s point does suggest a reason why the Obama administration, like the Bush 43 and Clinton administrations before it, left the world successively closer to a nuclear-armed North Korea with each passing year.
