A friend lives in Hawaii. Here's his story from today.
"As many of you may know, at 8:07 this morning, the following message popped up on phones across hawaii: EMERGENCY ALERT BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
Since I'm not sure that I would be able to fully grasp the significance of this event if I hadn't lived it, I wanted to share a brief story for those of you who don't live here.
When I received this message, I was immediately struck by disbelief. I quickly called a good friend who is at the top of the military food chain for responding to crises in the Pacific and asked him, "Is this for real?" His response, "I have not heard anything to indicate it is not real." I said, "What should we do?" He said, "If it's real, we have 12 minutes."
Please take a moment and let that sink in.
My wife was working about 20 minutes away. My son and I were sitting in the living room working on an art project. I called my wife, we each said, "I love you." I reassured her I would take care of our son and, if real, we would try to stay at home where she could find us if communication and cars were disabled from a bomb. She told me that she and her students were going into a concrete building.
Next, I emailed my parents because all the phone lines were tied up. I told them I loved them and asked them to reactivate my satellite phone, again, in the event this turned out to be "real."
After that, I asked my son, "If you could do anything at all right now, what would it be?" He told me he wanted to keep working on the art project we started, so we did.
The next 10 minutes were the longest 10 minutes of my life. At the 10th minute, my friend texted to say that he learned it was a false alarm. It took the emergency broadcast system almost 20-30 minutes (after I heard from my friend) to send out a false alarm statement. Unbelievable.
Let me tell you, this event will be seared into those of us who experienced it first hand. While I don't blame Washington for a false alarm in Hawaii, I blame them for setting a tone and climate that made a warning like this seem even possibly believable.
There are good men and women in our military and diplomatic corps who are approaching issues with North Korea in a thoughtful, strategic way. They need to be allowed to do their jobs without a president tweeting boastful messages about nuclear weapons. Enough is enough."