The following article by Philip Bump was posted on the Washington Post website January 14, 2018:
Hawaii residents received emergency alerts warning of a “ballistic missile threat” in the early morning of Jan. 13. It was a false alarm. (Victoria Walker, Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)
On a normal day, there aren’t many people heading to Google to figure out how to survive a nuclear strike. But Saturday was not a normal day.
Shortly after 2:30 p.m. Eastern, searches for “how to survive nuclear” peaked in the U.S., from being almost nonexistent to being almost twice as common as “how to make pasta.” The increase was centered in Hawaii, where about 90 minutes earlier, a warning had gone out over the state’s emergency alert system: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL”. Continue reading “The false alarm in Hawaii revealed an abdication of leadership by Trump”