Hawaii reinstates Cold-War era nuclear attack warning signal amid North Korea tension

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Washington (AFP) - North Korea has made new advances in its intercontinental ballistic missile program but has not yet demonstrated all the capabilities needed to hit America with such a weapon, a top US general said Tuesday.
While Pyongyang has shown it can put the United States in range and point a rocket to the country, General Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said it has not yet proven that its fusing and targeting technologies can survive the stresses of ballistic missile flight.

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/n-korea-n...152813350.html

Hawaii's false missile alert sent by worker believing attack on U.S. was imminent

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.17892cc80c67

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HEMA administrator Vern Miyagi resigned on Tuesday to take responsibility for the January 13 incident, Logan said, and the emergency warning officer who sent out the alert of an imminent ballistic missile attack was fired on Friday.
A state investigative report released on Tuesday said that the fired employee had been a "source of concern" for 10 years because of his "poor performance."
"He is unable to comprehend the situation at hand and has confused real life events and drills on at least two separate occasions," the report said.

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The overnight-shift supervisor informed the day-shift supervisor of the plan but the day-shift supervisor understood the drill was for the overnight workers ending their shift not for his arriving staff.
"As a result, the day shift supervisor was not in the proper location to supervise the day shift warning officers when the ballistic missile defense drill was initiated," the FCC report said.
It said the overnight-shift supervisor called the day-shift warning officers at 8:05 am pretending to be from US Pacific Command.
A recorded message was played over the phone which began and ended with the words "exercise, exercise, exercise."
The message, however, also included the phrase "This is not a drill" used for an actual live ballistic missile alert, the report said.
Three day-shift warning officers listened to the recording on speakerphone and one of them "believed that the missile threat was real" and issued a live alert at 8:07 am after hearing the sentence "This is not a drill," it said.
The officer declined to be interviewed by the FCC but said in a written statement to HEMA that he did not hear the phrase "exercise, exercise, exercise."
"Other warning officers who heard the recording in the watch center report that they knew that the erroneous incoming message did not indicate a real missile threat, but was supposed to indicate the beginning of an exercise," the report said.
"Because we've not been able to interview the day shift warning officer who transmitted the false alert, we're not in a position to fully evaluate the credibility of their assertion that they believed there was an actual missile threat and intentionally sent the live alert (as opposed to believing that it was a drill and accidentally sending out the live alert)," it added.
The FCC was also critical of HEMA's failure to develop "standard procedures" to cancel a false alert and said "the error was worsened by the delay in authoritatively correcting the misinformation."
In the future, the FCC said, supervisors will receive advance notice of all drills and two warning officers will validate alerts instead of one.

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http://m.france24.com/en/20180131-ha...korea?ref=tw_i

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The man who sent the false ballistic missile alert in Hawaii said he isn't to blame for the mishap, and despite causing mass panic would not have done anything differently.
Speaking to NBC News, the former employee of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HI-EMA) instead blamed a systemic failure for the false alert on Jan. 13 that sent thousands of terrified residents scrambling for cover.
"I'm really not to blame in this," the man, whose identity was masked, said on camera. "It was a system failure. And I did what I was trained to do."

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https://www.buzzfeed.com/blakemontgo...efends-actions

https://i.imgflip.com/1idb4j.jpg


See also http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...390#post210390

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Last month’s bogus ballistic missile warning in Hawaii and, now, this week’s tsunami snafu have highlighted trouble spots and prompted calls for change in the nation’s increasingly complex system for alerting Americans about dangerous weather, active shooters, kidnapped children, plant explosions and other emergencies.
Both incidents have prompted calls for reform, including better training for emergency workers in charge of sending alerts.

More than 1,000 federal, state and local government agencies have the ability to issue emergency alerts through an array of federally managed communications networks. It is a patchwork system that usually works as intended but can wreak havoc when it doesn’t.

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https://apnews.com/7f35ad7f72e44d369...l-alert-system