Morning in America: The Nuclear False Alarm That Shook the Country

I am an older person.

The nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union were burgeoning when I was growing up.

Open-water hydrogen bomb test explosions in the Pacific sent many Pacific Islanders packing up to resettle in a less radioactive environment.

Open-air nuclear bomb test explosions in western U.S. states left residues of radiation that killed livestock and deposited ticking time bombs of cancer in the bodies of thousands of soldiers and nearby civilians.

Movies of the destruction of flimsy wooden shacks during those explosions were exhibited at movie theaters and elsewhere, implanting the fear of the Nuclear Age into my young and imaginative head.

Underground nuclear bomb test explosions in western U.S. states shook the ground and left local residents on edge.

Everything was cloaked in secrecy. “Do Not Enter” signs sprouted on desert roads leading to test sites.

I grew up near an Air Force base, and every time international tensions increased I imagined my community being evaporated in a nuclear holocaust. I was certain my city was targeted at ground zero.

I was required to participate in school drills to protect students from nuclear sneak attacks, crouching under my desk or sitting against a hallway wall with my head down and my neck covered. We were supposed to remember to “duck and cover,” as if that could really protect us from a nuclear attack.

Multi-dwelling buildings posted bomb shelter signs in basements directing residents to the safest areas for riding out attacks.

Some homeowners constructed underground bomb shelters in their backyards complete with electrical and air purifying systems, stocked with water and food. Television commercials featured smiling families entering those shelters and reading books together to pass the time. Facemasks were donned to demonstrate how to survive airborne radioactivity.

The world held its breath, mesmerized and badly frightened, when U.S.S.R. Premier Nikita Khrushchev and U.S. President John F. Kennedy locked horns during a 13-day impasse over the planned relocation of Soviet medium-range nuclear missiles to Cuba, just 90 miles from the U.S. mainland. Kennedy instituted a defensive naval blockade amid threats of war that caused a heart-stopping standoff before Khrushchev agreed to abandon Soviet plans.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s 1964 election campaign featured a notorious television ad with a small girl counting daisy petals on a blossom before a “chilling voice-over countdown begins,” ending with a nuclear bomb detonation, a mushroom cloud, and a message warning viewers that “these are the stakes.” LBJ’s opponent Barry Goldwater is never mentioned in the ad, but voters knew that Goldwater had made unsettling comments about atomic warfare, and was considered to be a right-wing zealot with regard to the Soviet Union and communism.

The ad ran only once, in the middle of a showing of the biblical drama “David and Bathsheba,” the week’s feature in “Monday Night at the Movies.” Viewers were extremely upset and flooded NBC with their calls. A recent commentator noted that, “To see a little girl explode into a mushroom cloud really touched people's deepest fears about the nuclear age.”

I remember those fears as if it were yesterday.

START Treaties were routinely negotiated with the U.S.S.R. and then Russia during a period of four decades to significantly reduce—and hopefully, eventually eliminate—offensive nuclear weapons for the two major nuclear powers.

Other nuclear nations including France, Britain, China, Israel, India, and Pakistan acquired and tested their own nuclear arsenals, leading to some saber-rattling moments.

I lived for more than two decades in a community that housed a missile-manufacturing facility with U.S. military contracts, giving me new food for thought (and more anxiety).

I even remember questioning my Russian businessman seatmate on a transatlantic flight some years later, asking him whether he was as fearful as a child in the U.S.S.R. as I had been in the U.S. He nodded and said that he was.

Previous U.S. administrations grappled with nuclear threats from Iran and enlisted other countries to help contain those threats by negotiated agreements, which the current President wishes to abandon.

And now North Korea has advanced its missile testing programs and is preparing highly enriched weapons-grade uranium and plutonium to make bombs capable of being fired across the Pacific to strike the Hawaiian Islands, mainland America, and indeed most of the world.

Our dunderheaded man-child President has continued to send out nasty and exceptionally irresponsible Tweets insulting and boasting to North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, who is rattling our cage and bragging about the progress of his plan to terrorize the U.S.

Two days ago a nuclear warning system in Hawaii failed spectacularly, warning millions of residents and military on the Islands—erroneously—that a nuclear attack from North Korea was under way.

Hawaiian residents and tourists scrambled in panic to find suitable cover and avoid being obliterated in a pulverizing, hideous explosion many times greater than the nuclear attacks inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the U.S. military in 1945, which killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of Japanese—and ended the Second World War.

The Hawaii nuclear alert was the result of employee carelessness. A worker at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency had pushed the wrong button. Simple as that. HEMA promised to revise its procedures and never do this again. HEMA even reassigned the culpable worker to another job.

But a very long 38 minutes elapsed between the issuance of the initial erroneous alert to hundreds of thousands of cell phones and the follow-up all-clear message.

In the aftermath of this defining moment for the people of Hawaii, during the rest of that day and in the several days following, there has been no reassurance or acknowledgment of any kind from our President, who has been playing golf at his Florida resort—as usual.

Not a mention. Not a whisper. Not a recognition of any kind that millions of Americans had been frightened half to death with an erroneous warning that many of them were about to die.

Morning in America.