Hawaii Is Preparing a New Nuclear Contingency Plan Because of North Korea
FOIA documents show the Hawaii Department of Defense is about to revamp its emergency plans for a nuclear missile attack.
Growing up in Hawaii, the only disaster I was taught to prepare for was a catastrophic tsunami. If you asked me what to do, say, during a nuclear missile attack, I'd be utterly useless.It wasn't necessarily my fault, though. Decades had elapsed since residents worried about "the bomb." Hawaii's most recent community shelter plan, a set of instructions for surviving nuclear fallout, dates to 1985, when Cold War paranoia was still palpable. But as unproven fears of a North Korean nuclear strike grow louder, so too has the need for public reassurance.
For this reason, Hawaii is massively overhauling its archaic nuclear contingency plans—an effort one state official described to me as "formidable and critical to the survival of our 1.4 million residents and visitors in the unlikely event of a nuclear detonation."
I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Hawaii Department of Defense last month for its nuclear evacuation plans and preparedness guidelines. The agency told me that no current materials exist, and that extremely outdated plans had been rescinded. Hawaii stopped planning for an attack in the 1980s, due to the low risk of an attack, although it did simulate a half-kiloton nuclear explosion near Oahu's Honolulu Harbor in 2006.
Instead, I was provided with a Plan of Action and Milestones (PoAM) for a new ballistic missile defense initiative, two lists of talking points about the initiative, a Department of Defense disaster briefing, and a description of how the agency is actively responding to the North Korea threat.
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https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/hawaii-prepares-new-nuclear-contingency-plan-north-korea