Here is the aftermath from the mass panic caused on Hawaii from a fake North Korea missile attack notice sent to everyone’s smartphones:
The false emergency alert apparently happened because “the wrong button was pushed,” Hawaii House Speaker Scott Saiki said in a statement.
“This system we have been told to rely upon failed and failed miserably today,” Saiki said. “I am deeply troubled by this misstep that could have had dire consequences.”
He added, “Apparently, the wrong button was pushed and it took over 30 minutes for a correction to be announced. Parents and children panicked during those 30 minutes.”
The emergency alert was sent to people’s mobile phones in Hawaii starting at about 8:07 a.m. local time with the startling words all in caps, “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.”
Shortly after, a spokesman for the U.S. Pacific Command, Dave Benham, told ABC News in a statement that no ballistic missile threat to Hawaii was detected.
“Earlier message was sent in error. State of Hawaii will send out a correction message as soon as possible,” Benham said. (…….)
Gov. David Ige said at a press conference Saturday afternoon that the error happened during a routine procedure that occurs as workers are changing shifts.
“An error was made in emergency management which allowed this false alarm to be sent,” Ige said. “It was a procedure that occurs at the change of shift, enabling [us] to make sure that the system is working, and an employee pushed the wrong button.” [Good Morning America]
You can read more at the link, but you would think sending out an alert like this would not be as simple as clicking a mouse button to prevent a mistake like this from happening. Additionally the fact that it took so long to send a correction message shows whoever was coming on and off shift were not even aware of the error they made while everyone else in Hawaii was in a mass panic:
“We grabbed all the food and water we had, the kids grabbed their stuffed animals and we headed to the lobby,” Mulder said. “Kids crying everywhere, no one knew what was happening. We made our way to an internal bathroom and huddled there with some other people. It was probably 30 minutes between the alert and when we knew it was a false alarm.”
One video making the rounds on social media showed children being lowered into a storm drain for safety. [Fortune]
It is not good with the emergency management team for the State of Hawaii doesn’t even know there is an emergency going on to fix their error until 38 minutes after the fact. And if anyone was wondering, it did not take very long for Democrats to blame President Trump for this:
Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, one of the first to confirm that the missile alert was false, later said on CNN that Trump was “taking too long” to deal with tensions surrounding North Korea, which contributed to dialing up the panic from Saturday’s incident.
“You’d be angry just like I am,” said Gabbard, a Democrat and a member of the House Armed Services Committee. [Fortune]
Probably the worst thing about this is now people are not going to trust the warnings they receive from the State of Hawaii anymore because of this incompetence.
This satellite image, provided by U.S. research monitoring website 38 North on Jan. 11, 2018, shows the nuclear test site in the Punggyeri region in North Korea on Dec. 28, 2017. The website claimed North Korea has carried out significant tunneling on the west side of its main nuclear test site, saying these activities underscore Pyongyang’s continued efforts to maintain the site’s potential for future nuclear testing. (Yonhap)
North Korea’s propaganda outlet called for the total suspension of joint military drills between South Korea and the United States on Friday, in response to the allies’ decision to delay them until after the PyeongChang Winter Olympics.
The North’s website Uriminzokkiri said that dialogue and a “war rehearsal” cannot go together, calling the exercises the source of catastrophe for the Korean Peninsula.
“They should totally stop the military drills, not just delay them,” it said in a commentary. [Korea Herald]
You can read more at the link, but this all goes back to North Korea’s strategy of separating the ROK from the US. Ending the ROK-US military drills using nuclear coercion is one of the ways they are trying to do this.
After the completion of the Olympics, if the delayed Key Resolve exercise is not cancelled, the Kim regime can then use it as an excuse to start another provocation cycle. That is why I fully expect there will be another launch in the spring timeframe. What else that won’t be surprising is that all the usual suspects in the western media will be out blaming President Trump for the return of the provocation cycle.
An academic from Russia, Alexander Vorontsovtraveled to North Korea and what he has come back with looks like yet another information operation to drive a wedge between the United States and South Korea:
In my conversations in Pyongyang, senior North Korean Foreign Ministry officials did not conceal their surprise that Seoul failed to see the huge gap in threat perceptions between American and South Korean societies. The North Koreans see growing signs, reflecting President Donald Trump’s “America First” principle, that the United States is prepared to accept the terrible loss of lives that would result from a large-scale military conflict with North Korea. In contrast, South Korean public opinion continues to believe that president Trump would never start a war in Korea—and that the tension, crisis-like atmosphere, and belligerent rhetoric are all posturing.
North Korean diplomats expressed surprise that a substantial part of the South Korean elite have missed many indications, reflected in polling data,[1] that a majority of Americans now believe that the US cannot allow North Korea to acquire a missile capable of delivering a nuclear weapon to the US mainland and that Pyongyang would order such a strike as soon as it had this capability. North Korean diplomats stressed that this is a misperception. As one opined, “it would be suicidal to attack the USA first and especially with nuclear weapons. We understand that it would be the last day of our country.” These officials were truly baffled that a majority of the South Korean population does not seem to have grasped the reality that the Trump administration, despite the risks, is inching ever closer to a preventive strike on North Korea. Pyongyang, they maintained, is under no such illusions.
North Korean experts reiterated that they are striving to reach some kind “nuclear parity” with the US, but not in order to use it in an unprovoked first strike against the American mainland. [The National Interest]
None of these attacks led to a retaliatory strike because of their conventional capabilities were an effective deterrent. So clearly there is more to why they want to develop nuclear weapons so aggressively. The theory that makes the most sense is that the true intention of their nuclear program is to separate the US from South Korea and then seek a confederation on North Korean terms.
ROK Drop favorite B.R. Myers has been one of the strong advocates of the viewpoint that the overall goal of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is to force the withdrawal of US troops and create a confederation of the Korean peninsula under North Korean terms. This viewpoint has apparently led to a lot of criticism by people who think the nuclear weapons are just to keep the US from trying to militarily remove the Kim Regime and that the North Koreans are not stupid enough to think they can actually unify the peninsula on their terms:
Oddly enough, the most furious people are on the softline or apologetic part of the Pyongyang-watching spectrum. They never get this worked up when North Korea is called a gangster state, a drug-running operation or a giant gulag. Nor do they express such fervent opposition to (say) imperialist proposals for the US and China to get together and decide the fate and political character of the peninsula on their own.
No, it seems that the craziest, most reprehensible thing one can possibly say about North Korea is that it wants to unify the peninsula with as little bloodshed as possible. And apparently the worst thing one can say about the South Koreans — “INSANE” “psychobabble” even – is that the North might have reason to believe they wouldn’t fight to the death against such an effort. (Needless to say, I never said South Koreans are ready to “give away” their republic, as “T.K.” is no doubt well aware.)
I repeat: it is self-styled progressives and liberals who find these ideas so scandalous. True, I have often clashed at conferences with South Korean conservatives who bristle at my emphasis on the North’s nationalism. Being nationalists themselves, albeit of a more moderate sort, they think it makes the regime look too respectable, dignified, legitimate. I am told to chalk up the unification drive to a communizing urge — “it sounds scarier that way,” I was helpfully advised — or to the regime’s evil desire to cause as much suffering as possible. But the other side of the spectrum now seems far more upset.
Particularly striking is the general tendency to identify the idea as my personal thing. “T.K.” has not yet questioned the sanity of South Korea’s Minister of Unification, though he too is alarmed by increasing signals that Pyongyang wants to use its nukes to take over the peninsula. And many quite moderate analysts in South Korea have been saying much the same stuff since the 1990s. But for the Westerners now raging on Twitter, this is my trademarked idea. (As it becomes harder and harder to refute, the tendency will no doubt go in the opposite direction.) [B.R. Myers]
You can read much more at the link, but B.R. Myers is not the only person who has been advocating this viewpoint. It makes me wonder if the criticism he is receiving is caused more by the fact that his viewpoint is gaining traction with people inside the Trump administration?
Here is what strategist Edward Luttwak has to say about conducting a military strike against North Korea:
Edward Luttwak
One mistaken reason to avoid attacking North Korea is the fear of direct retaliation. The U.S. intelligence community has reportedly claimed that North Korea already has ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads that can reach as far as the United States. But this is almost certainly an exaggeration, or rather an anticipation of a future that could still be averted by prompt action. The first North Korean nuclear device that could potentially be miniaturized into a warhead for a long-range ballistic missile was tested on September 3, 2017, while its first full-scale ICBM was only tested on November 28, 2017. If the North Koreans have managed to complete the full-scale engineering development and initial production of operational ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads in the short time since then — and on their tiny total budget — then their mastery of science and engineering would be entirely unprecedented and utterly phenomenal. It is altogether more likely that they have yet to match warheads and missiles into an operational weapon.
It’s true that North Korea could retaliate for any attack by using its conventional rocket artillery against the South Korean capital of Seoul and its surroundings, where almost 20 million inhabitants live within 35 miles of the armistice line. U.S. military officers have cited the fear of a “sea of fire” to justify inaction. But this vulnerability should not paralyze U.S. policy for one simple reason: It is very largely self-inflicted.
When then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter decided to withdraw all U.S. Army troops from South Korea 40 years ago (ultimately a division was left behind), the defense advisors brought in to help — including myself — urged the Korean government to move its ministries and bureaucrats well away from the country’s northern border and to give strong relocation incentives to private companies. South Korea was also told to mandate proper shelters, as in Zurich for example, where every new building must have its own (under bombardment, casualties increase dramatically if people leave their homes to seek shelter). In recent years, moreover, South Korea has had the option of importing, at moderate cost, Iron Dome batteries, which are produced by both Israel and the United States, that would be capable of intercepting 95 percent of North Korean rockets headed to inhabited structures.
But over these past four decades, South Korean governments have done practically nothing along these lines. The 3,257 officially listed “shelters” in the Seoul area are nothing more than underground shopping malls, subway stations, and hotel parking lots without any stocks of food or water, medical kits or gas masks. As for importing Iron Dome batteries, the South Koreans have preferred to spend their money on developing a bomber aimed at Japan. [Foreign Policy]
You can read more at the link, but he believes that possible retaliation against Seoul should not influence US decision making because it is a problem caused by ROK governmental irresponsibility over the decades.
HOW EXCITED ARE SOUTH KOREANS ABOUT THESE N-S TALKS EH Acc to live search rankings not as excited as about some actress, some actor, a girl group, an actress, a boy band, college acceptance rates, the UAE, an actress, a pickup truck, a drama… tomorrow's weather… pic.twitter.com/yYuYqO7Zq2
The Kim regime has officially agreed to participate in the upcoming Winter Olympics:
This photo, taken by the Joint Press Corps on Jan. 9, 2018, shows South Korea’s chief delegate Cho Myoung-gyon (L) shaking hands with his North Korean counterpart Ri Son-gwon before holdinghigh-level talks between South and North Korea. (Yonhap)
North Korea on Tuesday accepted Seoul’s proposal to hold military talks to reduce tensions and agreed to send a delegation to next month’s Winter Olympics in the South, according to a joint press statement issued after their high-level talks.
In their first formal dialogue in two years at the border village of Panmunjom, they also agreed to reactivate cooperation and exchanges through diverse levels of talks including a high-level meeting, Seoul officials said.
The agreement marked a major breakthrough in the years of frosty ties between the two countries and in last year’s heightened tensions over the North’s nuclear and missile provocations.
North Korea offered to send high-ranking officials, cheerleaders, performing artists, taekwondo demonstration teams and journalists in addition to athletes. The South promised to provide them with necessary conveniences.
They will hold working-level talks to further discuss details of the North’s participation. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but those of us who have watched North Korea for years know they are not participating in the Winter Olympics out of good will. There will undoubtedly be a bill to be paid by the South. One way the South may end up paying is if the North Koreans demand inflated travel costs:
North Korea’s participation in the Pyeongchang Olympics will require agreements over a series of logistics issues, such as how to transport the North Korean delegation to the host city, where to accomodate them and who will ultimately cover the bill. [Newsweek]
Why should the South pay for the Kim regime to attend the Olympics? It should be the responsibility of the Kim regime to pay their own way like all the other countries. If the North Koreans have enough money to lob missiles everywhere and set off nuclear bombs they have enough money to cover travel and lodging for their delegation going to the Winter Olympics.
If the ROK government gives in to covering travel and lodging costs I hope President Trump tweets that he will send the ROK government the US’s travel bill as well.
