This Is Not a Drill: Hawaii's Text Message Debacle [from Very Special Episodes]

This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed human. This is an I Heart Original. It's early 2018. John Aaron, a morning news anchor for WTOP in Washington, is enjoying one of the best days of his life. He's on his honeymoon in Hawaii. Went to the highest mountain, watched the sunrise, the whole nine, and we were just loving it. We were staying in Maui. We had been to Honolulu before, and Maui just blew it out of the water. We loved it. That's John, some Honolulu shade being thrown here, but OK. Out kayaking, they see something incredible. And then the whale surfaced like a few yards from us and did like a tail splash and everything. And I was like, wow, I'm going to tell everybody about this. What could possibly top this as a big thing that happened on our honeymoon? What indeed. On the morning of January 13, he and his new wife, Natalia, are busy getting ready for the day. It also happens to be Natalia's birthday. But then at exactly 8.07 AM local time, something odd happens. Something that most people would give an almost zero chance of ever happening. We heard our phones buzzing up a storm in the corner and thought that it was maybe a bunch of birthday wishes for my wife. We didn't think anything about it. And then finally, there's a PA system in our room, apparently, who knew, that kind of crackled to life. And presumably, I guess it was the hotel manager, came on the loudspeaker and announced verbatim the warning that had come over our phones. The all caps warning sent to John's phone and read over the public address system in their hotel is chilling in its simplicity. Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii, seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill. It's repeated a second time. Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii, seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill. John and Natalia look at each other. It doesn't feel like a prank or a hoax. We tried to just get ourselves together as quickly as possible. Me being kind of like a person who thinks several steps ahead, I was like, OK, we're going to need water. We're going to need clothes. We're going to need phone chargers. And I'm starting to gather the stuff and my wife goes, let's go. You got to get out of here. So we made our way out of the room. But out of the room and to where? To do what? All across the island, hundreds of thousands of people are scrambling to respond to an announcement that seems surreal. A ballistic nuclear missile is headed straight for them. As far as they know, it's the end of the world. John and Natalia thought they had the rest of their lives to spend together. Right now, the rest of their lives can be counted in minutes. Welcome to Very Special Episodes, an I Heart Original podcast. I'm your host, Dana Schwartz. And this is 10 Minutes to Live. Welcome back to Very Special Episodes. I'm Jason. She's Dana. He's Zaryn. Build up. Today, we're going to go back to 2018 and a very scary text message that people got all over Hawaii. I remember this news story from the time. Same. First off, before we go so dark, do you guys have any Hawaii connections either of you? I traveled there with my husband. It was beautiful. We went to Kauai and had an amazing time. I would love to go back. Yeah, I've had been there so recently. And now over the last three years, I've been like five times. And so it's become like this second home that I just absolutely love. And I'm always trying to talk my wife into moving there. I'm like, how do we move there? I'm like, how do we make this happen? But I think everybody kind of does. I've heard this story, Dana. Maybe you've heard this because you work in television that John Wells before each season will bring his whole writer's room to a retreat in Hawaii. And they'll try to plan out the whole season, but also then just hang out in Hawaii for a week or two. I have not heard this. And I'm like, how do I get a job like that? Get on the pit. Let's go. Well, maybe we can do that with this with Zaryn. You get a house out there. That could be the home base. You guys are invited. We'll go next season and hope we don't get any terrifying text messages to scare us off. The phrase, this is not a drill, is sometimes used as a punchline. You might announce to your kids, it's time for dinner and that this is not a drill. But that sentence carries a lot of weight in Hawaii. It's what Hawaiian civilians and stationed soldiers heard December 7th, 1941, just before the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor. We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin. The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, by air. President Roosevelt has just announced the attack also was made on all naval and military activities on the principal island of Ohio. When they hear it nearly 80 years later, John and Natalia don't know where they're going. There's no playbook for this. No, in case of nuclear war pamphlet in the hotel room drawer. They head out of the room and into the hallway, where other hotel guests are milling about in a state of confusion. So we got no instructions whatsoever other than to seek shelter. We went out into the hallway and it was not a crazy scene, but an uncomfortable scene. There were people walking around. Some people were walking quickly. Some people were walking slowly. Some people were crying. The scene is eerie. Some people seem resigned. Others confused. John and Natalia still don't know where to go. But they know the upper level of a hotel isn't the best place to be. We went down a stairwell and there was a couple huddled in the bottom corner of the stairwell, kind of clutching each other and it seemed like they were sobbing. I asked some people. I said, hey, where are you going? And the answers were, I don't know. John is in news gathering mode, asking questions, searching for answers. He tries dialing 911, but predictably the lines are jammed. But Natalia can make a call. My wife was on the phone with her mom when the alert came in and she was talking to her as we were walking down and I said, you know, you got to get off the phone. We got to focus. And she like said goodbye to her mom thinking like, I wonder if that's the last time I'm going to say goodbye to her. By itself, the alert would be worrisome in any era, panic inducing actually. But consider the context of the time. In early 2018, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had been conducting nuclear weapons testing as part of ongoing tensions between his country and the nuclear equipped United States. He even said, quote, the United States should know that the button for nuclear weapons is on my table. Not exactly a soothing thought. But 2018 will also mark another milestone. North Korea will have nuclear missiles that can reach American soil. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is warning the United States that his country's nuclear force is now a reality, not just a threat. If North Korea were to ever launch a strike, its relatively close proximity to Hawaii makes the islands a prime target. So the alert doesn't come out of nowhere. There's been a nuclear anxiety, one reminiscent of the Cold War. John knows this, as do most people in Hawaii, which makes the tension that much thicker. Still in survival mode, John figures the safest option is to find space where there might be some kind of insulation from a nuclear blast. However hopeless that might sound, he heads for the hotel's lower level. If something bad is truly happening, I want to be in as low of a position as possible. I want to have sturdy walls around me. I want to be sealed off from the exterior. So I kept going down until we found a janitorial closet, like an access hallway thing. John pounds on the door, not sure who might open it. Someone opened. We got inside and we closed the door. No one else asked to come in. And it was us and a few other people who had already found that place. And it had coax, it had water, it had a sink, it had a drain. And I thought, well, this is my home for two weeks. Two weeks was long considered the rule of thumb for how long survivors would need to wait out the worst radiation fallout. Inside a tiny room barely bigger than a walk-in closet, the guests all exchange nervous glances. No one can really make sense of what's happening, including a small child. My wife's a doctor. She's been in high pressure situations too. So we were both very, I think, measured in the whole thing. She actually comforted one of the people in our little shelter. It was a younger girl and she was very shaken up. My wife said, like, it's OK. It's my birthday. That gets me because she kind of brought this poor girl back down to earth when nothing else was making her feel better. On Kauai, part-time resident Holly Dubay is packing up. She's getting ready to return to Texas with her boyfriend when their cell phones buzz. They see the alert. Her first thought is that she needs to have some way for her and her boyfriend to be identified. So I said, let's put our fanny packs on and put our IDs in there in case our torsos are found and they'll know we didn't make it. That's Holly. And I remembered there was one room on this resort where we were staying. There was one room that had four walls, no windows, and a pretty solid door. And I said, let's go to that room. And that was the best idea that we came up with. So with my pajamas and in my silly fanny pack, you know, with my ID in it and same with my boyfriend, we started running through the resort. As they head for the room, Holly makes a call to her two sons. One doesn't pick up. The other does. I said to him, Alex, there's a bomb headed for Hawaii right now. And he thought I was kidding, although I don't know. I'm not a kid or typically, you know. He said, Mom, Mom, no, there isn't. Yes, there is, Alex. We just got an official notice from the state of Hawaii that there's a bomb headed for Hawaii right now. I don't think that's true, Mom. Alex, I can't argue with you right now. I'm just calling to tell you that I love you and I love your brother. You've been the most wonderful part of my life. I'm so proud of both of you. And if I don't make it, you'll know what happened. Inside the windowless room, other guests are standing shoulder to shoulder, staring into their phones. Again, extremely surreal. And my boyfriend and I went in there and I was standing there just thinking, is it going to be quick? I hope it is. I hope it doesn't hurt. I hope that it just takes me out immediately. I don't want to have any. I don't want to live if I've been bombed by a nuclear bomb. Other scenes play out across the island At the University of Hawaii, hundreds of students begin running across campus, heading for shelter in a classroom. This morning, just after 8 a.m., people in Hawaii were running for their lives. In a video that will go viral, a man lowers his children down through a manhole cover in the street into the sewer, thinking the safest place for them is underground. Some shoppers in stores begin lying down in aisles. Other stores, like a Walmart, refuse to admit anyone seeking shelter. So does a U-Haul and a convenience store. Police are getting stopped in the street and asked for the location of the nearest shelter. They don't know what to say. At this point, most of them know as much as civilians do. Nothing. In what's likely the strangest place to be, tourists at a Pearl Harbor Remembrance Tour at the USS Arizona Memorial get the alert while watching a video about the 1941 attack. On Honolulu, a man named James Shields gets the alert and starts feeling a tightness in his chest. He falls over on the beach, his girlfriend frantically calling for help. When he arrives at the hospital, he's told he's having a heart attack. It's not just cell phones. People at home watching television or driving with their radios on feel the same surge of panic. If you are outdoors, seek immediate shelter in a building. Remain indoors well away from windows. If you are driving, pull safely to the side of the road and seek shelter in a building while lying on the floor. We'll announce when the threat has ended. The broadcast message ends with the now familiar clarification. This is not a drill. In almost each and every case from John and Holly to people on the beach, their only impulse is to seek cover. Many don't know if they should even bother or what incoming means. An hour, a minute, as time ticks by, and the time is running out. As time ticks by, many do notice one thing. There's no retraction, no follow-up that this was all a mix-up or mistake. There's no reason to believe the apocalypse is being cancelled. Of course, your mind is racing in that situation. Is it real? Is it not real? Is this a hoax? As it turns out, it's none of those things. The State Warning Point of the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, or HAYIMA, is the island's alert and response unit for disasters both natural and man-made. Staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, HAYIMA is charged with keeping people up to date. Now, in the aftermath of Kim Jong-un's saber-rattling nuclear tests, the agency has been ramping up its missile alert drills. They know Hawaii would be a prime target for any attack on the US. In a real nuclear strike, the North American Air Defense Command, or NORAD, would detect incoming missiles. Depending on where they were headed, NORAD would ultimately notify the appropriate watchdog group. For Hawaii, that would be the Pacific Command, which would then alert HAYIMA. They, in turn, would notify the public via the state's emergency alert system, which beams out warnings to television, radio, cell phones, and even highway signs. All of this is accomplished in a software program called Alert Sense, featuring a drop-down menu. It's like the kind you use to select your state when filling out an online form. For a drill, the worker responds by selecting Test. Another worker starts a countdown timer to impact. Some other steps are recorded on a checklist, and then the exercise is over. This drill has been done many times since North Korea's aggressive actions, but the morning of January 13th is a little different. Unlike the others, this one is unscheduled. Second, workers are notified of the drill via telephone, not in person, also unusual. And the office is playing a recording, meaning the voice communicating the fake threat is an unfamiliar one. The person announcing the drill is supposed to say exercise three times, both before and after the command. So it might go something like, exercise, exercise, exercise. A ballistic missile is headed our way. Exercise, exercise, exercise. This is to make absolutely positively certain everyone understands it is indeed a drill. But one of the workers on shift that morning doesn't hear the word exercise over and over. Maybe the phone connection is bad, or perhaps someone had the person on speakerphone and then picked up a receiver cutting them off. No one is exactly sure. So this employee hovers his mouse cursor over the drop-down menu. There are two options. Click test and you'll satisfy the drill. Click missile alert and you'll notify hundreds of thousands of people that nuclear winter is imminent. Hawaii is the only state with a pre-written alert like this, thanks to its proximity to North Korea. The employee who has not heard the word exercise and is instead fixated on the phrase, this is not a drill, clicks the second. There's just one safeguard. The software asks the employee if they're sure. He clicks, yes. And suddenly cell phones begin to vibrate. People picking them up and eyeing them with confusion followed rapidly by fear. Inside Haima, employee cell phones begin going off too. It's a symphony of catastrophe. Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill. Like the others, Cynthia Lazaroff got her notice of doomsday on a cell phone. So it's kind of an interesting little sidebar here because my phone was actually on silent. But our nephew was visiting and he came running in and held his phone up and he was panting. He had run quite a distance to get to us. He'd been doing, I think, yoga down near the beach and he'd come through and that's how I found out about it. There's a slight delay in Cynthia and her husband, Bruce, getting the alert on their phone, which gives her a fleeting bit of hope. That maybe it was a prank or hoax, but then her screen lights up. Unlike many others, Cynthia is able to put the crisis in more context. She's a documentary filmmaker who has spent decades examining and participating in U.S. and Russia relations pertaining to nuclear weapons. She's keenly aware of the omnipresent threat of the world taking on the threat of nuclear weapons. And she's also been taking a sudden, sharp turn toward a global conflict. In fact, she had just spoken to former Secretary of Defense William Perry. And he said to me that today we're at a greater risk of some sort of a nuclear catastrophe than we were during the Cold War and that most people are blissfully unaware of this danger. That because we don't understand the danger, he said, that we must attempt to repair the hostility between the United States and Russia. So we're allowing ourselves to sleepwalk into another catastrophe. We must wake up. So for me, at that moment with my background and expertise, I realized that I'd been sleepwalking myself since the end of the Cold War. And that was a sort of devastating, personal revelation for me. Being in Kauai, the immediacy of the nuclear threat is like nothing she's ever experienced. It's largely something she's examined in the abstract. But because of her knowledge, she knows how long it might take to get a ballistic missile from North Korea to Honolulu. Friends are calling to ask her exactly that. And I said, well, I'm not sure if it's a submarine. It could be very nothing. I mean, we don't know. I mean, a submarine, it could be very fast in terms of when I spoke to them and how many minutes had already unfolded. And I said, you know, it could take 25 minutes. If it's a launch from North Korea, it could take 25 minutes from the Soviet. It all depended on where it was coming from. But I knew that it was a matter of, you know, within that window of time, it'd been a matter of minutes. But I also lost track of time. And she also knows about radiation. There is precious little she can do about that, but she does grab some clothing to use as protection. So I grabbed a bag, a woven bag, and I started throwing things in it. I threw in my phone, my phone charger, my computer, my computer charger, my purse, my passport. And then I grabbed a shawl to wrap around my face in case of radiation. And then a pair of leggings for the same reason. And then I thought, food and water. She and her husband, Bruce, also a nuclear expert, decide to seek shelter at a friend's property. That's when I began to think, well, the first thing was, well, where do we go? And we decided to meet and shelter on a neighbor's property who has a meditation cave. Because it was the most sealed environment that we knew we could get to quickly. And then it was, well, what do I take with me? And I looked down at my phone and it had 12% charge and I thought, what am I going to do? Cars are speeding upwards of 100 miles an hour. Other cars cross the median. Some are pulled over. Everyone is in a hurry to get somewhere, most not knowing where that somewhere should be. Like many others, Cynthia has family on the menu. Her oldest daughter, family that may not have any idea what's happening. And family that may not fully understand why she needs to speak to them for what she believes is the last time. So I parked the car as close as I could to the steps to the cave and I started running towards them. It was still ringing and ringing. And just as I got to the foot of the steps to the cave, I was in a hurry to get to the cave. She picked up and I said, Mackenzie, I don't know if you've heard, but we've all got this message on our cell phones. It's going to be hit by a nuclear missile and we're going to shelter in the cave if we can. And I'll call you if I can from the cave, but I just want you to know that I love you. And she said, Mom, I love you too. At that moment, time stopped for me and I just stood there frozen. It was the moment that it all became the most real for me. And I thought, am I ever going to hear her voice again? There was another thought. If Cynthia could survive, would she want to? Today's nuclear arsenals are a thousand times more powerful than the bombs dropped in 1945. Depending on how far I would be away from the epicenter, etc., if it struck anywhere nearby, first of all, the chances of survival would be minimal. And then if I did survive, there's the understanding of, based on what we know what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just the horrors of what happened to the people who immediately survived, but were suffering from radiation sickness, etc. One of the Hibakusha survivors of Hiroshima, Setsuko Thurlo, describes them as, you know, when she was a child, she was a school child, her survived. And she saw what she thought were ghosts, you know, with skin falling off their bodies and blood. I mean, everything you can imagine, just horrific. So I thought I probably wouldn't be able to survive and that I probably wouldn't want to survive. I mean, Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, said that the living would end be the dead after a nuclear war. At Haima, workers realize the alert has gone external. At this point, you'd think there would be something like an undo button, another single mouse click that could retract the alert and send out a notice that it was just a drill. But the software doesn't have that. There are just two options, fake alert and real alert. The employee who pressed the button or clicked the drop-down menu is frozen in place. Other employees scramble to take over his terminal. While they can't take back the message, they can prevent it from being sent out over and over again. If someone had their phone off or is out of cell range, then cancelling it means they won't get the message when they turn it back on. That's better than nothing. But actually reversing course and letting people know they're not in danger of nuclear annihilation is proving it to be challenging. Within minutes, Haima is able to call the Honolulu police and notify them of the error. While that allows cops to inform people individually and through the bull horns on their patrol cars, the police don't have enough reach on social media to spread the word quickly. 911 is overwhelmed. Instead of getting a few hundred calls that time of day, the norm, they get over 7,500. Instead of gushing out via a single channel, the correction trickles out and relatively few people see it. Even when they do, how do they know what to even believe? There's a bigger problem. Haima is under the impression, the mistaken impression, that they need to reach out to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, for guidance on releasing a retraction. There are different types of recalls, and they want to be sure they use the right one. They actually don't need to confer with FEMA on this, but they think it's the prudent thing to do. But trying to establish contact with FEMA wastes more time, which is already flying by. By the time FEMA gets on the line, it's 8.30 a.m., 23 minutes after the alert had been sent. There's social media. State Governor David E. Gay opens his Twitter app, or what's now known as X. But E. Gay has a problem. He can't remember his password. What could be an official channel for getting the word out that the alert is false isn't going to work for another 15 minutes. Haima employees can post to the agency's social media accounts, but not everyone is going to think to check those pages. The same holds true of local news. At 8.19, Hawaii News Now is able to confirm the message was sent out in error, but only two people with the Hawaii News Now app on their phones. It only adds to the chorus of confusion. Haima has one card left to play. Create, on the fly, a retraction message in the AlertSense program. That's the channel reaching the greatest number of people and the quickest. But that message can only be drafted and sent via another portal. So Haima waits as an employee works remotely, manually programming an all-clear message. This will take a relative eternity of about 14 minutes. Across Hawaii, people are continuing to seek what shelter they can. Some are climbing into bathtubs. Others are spotting fallout shelters left over from the Cold War, wrongly assuming that they lead to safe harbor. But virtually all of those signs are relics that lead to shelters long since repurposed or closed up. As Haima works, much of the island is wondering what to do with the few minutes they have remaining. Cynthia is one of them. She gets off the phone with her daughter, jogging toward the cave she sees her friend smiling. I ran up the hill to the cave and as I got to the door of the cave, it opened. And it was my neighbor, Colleen. And she walked out smiling and she said it was a false alarm. It took our government 38 minutes to send a message out on our cell phones, announcing that it was a false alarm. In the closet, John Aaron gets the same message. We were there for like the full, you know, 30 plus minutes, just sitting and waiting to see what was going to happen. And then I don't know if someone knocked on the door or if someone all of a sudden got a little bit of cell service, but we heard, you know, hey, we got the all clear. And, you know, it was just the biggest relief washing over you after that. And so does Holly Dubey. Then we got a text over our phone again or an alert over our phone that said this was a false alert. There is no nuclear bomb. Repeat, there is no nuclear bomb. You're not in danger. And everybody just sort of quietly dispersed. The high EMA employee working on the message has finally succeeded. The alert read there is no missile threat or danger to the state of Hawaii. Repeat, false alarm. Highway signs offer the same information. Missile alert in error. There is no threat. It took 38 minutes from the time the alert was sent out to the time the correction was made. 38 minutes for an untold number of people to confront their mortality, say goodbye to their families, and wait for impact. What the people in Hawaii experienced was human error turned into human terror. But in the nuclear age, it's not unheard of. And worse, it's likely to happen again. Everyone knows at least something about the Cuban missile crisis, which brought the threat of nuclear destruction to the feet of President John F. Kennedy. This government, as promised, has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba. Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that the Cuban military has been able to take over the Soviet military. And the evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island. When nuclear superpowers have very real, very human people at the helm, mistakes can be made. And when you realize that, it's almost a miracle what happened in Hawaii doesn't happen more often. And in my favorite, there was one in Chicago, the White Sox, I believe, had won the pennant. And the fire marshal was also the person in charge of the air raid siren. And he thought it would be good fun to celebrate this by setting off all the air raid sirens and indicating that nuclear attack was about to begin. That's Alex Wellerstein. Alex is a Harvard-educated historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He's a nuclear historian. And for him, the Hawaii incident is, well, kind of inevitable. If you have a sufficiently complicated technical system and it involves humans interacting with it and it can have technical errors of any sort, especially ones that are involved, sensors that are pointed at the sky and things like this, it's inevitable that you'll have some level of error. In 1979, NORAD computers began lighting up with information that prompted defense workers to sweat profusely. It looked as though the Soviet Union had launched nuclear weapons directly at the U.S., seemingly intending to disable U.S. defense capabilities. Fighter planes were launched before satellite data was retrieved, indicating it was a false alarm. Someone had mistakenly inserted a training tape into the computer systems. A similar incident took place in 1980, when U.S. defense computers warned that Russia had dispatched more nuclear missiles. Quickly, one could see a pattern in the data. It went from two missiles to 200, then zero. It was glitchy. Again, fighter planes were in the air, but it was an error, this time coming from a faulty computer chip. Russia isn't exempt from scares either. In 1983, the country's version of an early warning system detected five missiles coming from the United States. The monitoring worker Stanislav Petrov could have acted on it and could have conceivably started a world war. But as Petrov would later explain, he didn't think the U.S. would kickstart Armageddon with only five missiles. His common sense may have spared us all. But these are examples of internal errors. Public-facing ones, like Hawai'is, are vastly different in that they cause widespread panic and misinformation. These are thankfully rare, but Americans have endured them before. In the late 1950s, a number of false alarms went off in American cities, including that World Series flub. In each case, only a quarter or so of people took the alerts seriously. Ideally, these events would not happen completely in vain. They provide priceless data on how people respond at this level of crisis. But as Alex points out, data collection around them has generally been poor. So this accident, it's not a good thing, but it does create conditions that allow us to answer questions we can't otherwise answer. Like, what would happen if we sent everybody a text telling them that a nuclear missile wasn't coming? My sense is it wasn't studied as closely at the time as it should have been. Researchers did make some discoveries, like how people respond to these alerts can depend on demographics. Younger people tend to be more likely to make assumptions about them being false or unreliable. Acting on the belief nuclear war is no longer a pressing concern. Older people might be more inclined to believe them. Education matters, too. But one of the ones that fairly educated people had was they said, well, I knew that we weren't going to be at a war with North Korea at that moment, so I knew to dismiss it. And in some ways, that's the scariest response because what do you know about what's going on in Pyongyang? Do you even know what time zone it is over there? Do you know what's going on? False alarms introduce another problem. The prospect of nuclear war can feel so remote that when we hear of a mistake, we might be more inclined to treat the next alert, maybe a real alert, like a mistake, too. In Hawaii, some people reported that they disregarded the alert because it wasn't accompanied by air sirens used for natural disasters. A pretty major assumption. Will people disregard the message, though that is something worth worrying about? But with something like the Hawaii accident, is that going to make a place like Hawaii far less likely to broadcast the message or add hesitancy if they're not sure if it's real because they realize the political consequences are potentially very high for them? So what's the answer? Alex is an advocate of preparedness. Think Bert the Turtle, the genial character used by the Department of Defense to sell kids on the idea of Cold War drills in the 1950s. And especially in a democracy, we have some say in this. So that's my argument. Not so much that hiding under our desks is the best strategy, though in some cases it's not the worst strategy, but that this is a possible tool for thinking about nuclear weapons in a much more serious and tangible way than we tend to think about them. The Hawaii alert was, in a way, real. It was alerting us to the fact that in the face of actual nuclear attack, most of us wouldn't know what to do, where to go, or whether it's even survivable. A survey of 2,000 Americans published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists found nearly a quarter of people have given no thought to their game plan in the event of nuclear war. But what would that preparation even look like? Part of Alex's research is to look at the real-world consequences. If North Korea or another country had launched a nuclear strike, what would have happened? Hawaii has some unique geography. There aren't many homes with basements that could theoretically provide some cover for one thing. Homes are usually wood construction, not concrete or brick, which makes fire a problem. The mountains would reflect much of the blast, keeping it concentrated. That's just a few of the many variables. Is it going to detonate on the ground, or is it going to detonate in the air? Are you aiming at a military base like Pearl Harbor? Are you aiming at Honolulu because you want to do the maximum damage in Muslim people? For any of those scenarios, you'll get somewhat different answers. How far off from its target does the weapon detonate? According to NukeMap, Alex's simulation of nuclear strikes, a missile launched from Pyongyang to Honolulu could conceivably kill 158,000 people in an instant. Many more would be injured, and others would endure, as Cynthia explained, a fairly horrific radiation-related demise. There was also this. When a false alert is dispensed, there's always a possibility it triggers reaction before retraction. What if someone in a position of power had taken the alert seriously and retaliated? This might sound far-fetched, but think about it. If a nuclear alert is triggered, our government only has a small window of time to react. Remember that 1980 false alert? When asked if that could have conceivably started an escalation leading to World War III, Assistant Secretary of Defense Thomas Ross told reporters, I'm going to duck that question. That's not too comforting. A massive bit of misinformation like this false alarm, which could be regarded as that, could lead to escalations that would have really bad impacts. It's totally plausible. This is especially the case with systems where, for example, in the United States, the use of nuclear weapons is something that a single person, the United States President, can make the decision about that. There are not a lot of safeguards there. So I'm not saying it's something where you should be worried about this as the number one worry on your list of worries, but if you're asking, is it possible? Is it plausible? Sure, it's totally possible, plausible. Do I think that it's super likely? No, not super likely. And we know it sounds sensationalist, very TV movie of the week. But that's the point. If we don't confront the horror of nuclear fallout by confronting the devastating consequences, then we risk becoming numb to the idea. So how do we prevent it from happening again? There were, of course, state and FCC investigations into the hows and whys of the Hawaii Alert. Haima called it a combination of human error and inadequate safeguards. The drill took place during a shift change, the agency said, confusing workers. The head of Haima resigned, as did the executive officer. The employee who selected the nuclear option was first reassigned and then fired. Some employees alleged the man, who had worked at Haima for over a decade, had made mistakes before. Confusing fake alerts for real ones, an accusation the employee disputed. While he said he hadn't heard the word exercise, other employees said they had. Speaking to the press, he insisted he hadn't made a mistake. That he heard the words, this is not a drill and nothing else. He did as he was trained. He thought a nuclear missile really was coming to Hawaii. He remained anonymous out of fear some angry locals might seek retribution. This was probably a good decision. One man who managed to get through to 911 told a dispatcher that someone, quote, deserved a beating for the mistake. Another Haima employee had his photo taken by the Associated Press, standing next to a computer monitor that ran with stories about the mistake. Some readers inferred he was the employee at fault and sent him death threats. He actually wasn't even in the office that day. In the end, only four medical events connected to the alert were officially reported. This included one elderly man who fell, one minor car accident, and someone who phoned 911 out of anxiety. No surprise there. The man who suffered a heart attack lived to sue and settled with the state in 2025 for $275,000. In July 2025, Haima sent out another emergency alert via phone notification. This one was clearly marked, this is only a test. The Hawaii False Missile Alert was an exercise in a certain kind of psychological experiment it would be impossible to ever replicate. For nearly 40 minutes, people believed that their time was coming to an end. It was a kind of near-death experience, the one that had implications for the entire world. So what happens after? How does that kind of event change how you live a life you didn't think you'd even have? For John Aaron, it meant realizing you could count on your brand new spouse. It was just like you'd been hit by a truck and you were just dealing with the aftermath. Yeah, no, I think it showed that we could trust each other implicitly and that we can work as a team. Like I told you, she told me to get my butt in gear and get out of the hotel room when I was taking too long. I told her we need to get down, we need to get lower and she followed my lead on that. So I think it was a good give and take and I think we knew that we could go through a really tricky situation together without melting down at each other, without getting caught up in nonsensical stuff. For Cynthia, it was about recommitting to the idea of disarmament, part of her life's work. We've been so lucky and I think people just need to understand that this isn't a dinosaur issue that went away at the end of the Cold War. That it's not something that's in the past, that it's right here and now. So that's, I think the first thing is to wake people up. The days following were interesting. It was an apocalypse that didn't happen and it was an Armageddon that didn't begin. And so for me, I decided pretty much in that moment, I mean I got home and the other thing that was going on for me is that my senses were all enhanced. It was like I was a child again. I have a crown flower bush. I'm looking at it right now. Outside my front door and the colors were all more vibrant than I'd ever seen them before. The greens, the purples, there were butterflies dancing and flying everywhere. And I just stood there and stared and I'd never done that before. Like a child would do at the wonder of life. But something else surprised her, even knowing the effects of radiation sickness, even after hearing about the suffering of survivors. When the moment came, she wanted to live. I found myself thinking, oh, I didn't do what I was supposed to do. I didn't think I could survive. I didn't think I'd want to survive for the reasons that I've mentioned. And now I'm in this moment and I want to try. For Holly Dubay, it meant marrying her skills as a songwriter with her need to process what had happened. After getting back from Hawaii, she remained in bed for two weeks, the post-traumatic stress of the situation leaving her exhausted. I would say it was really life-changing. So I think going through that made me look at my life differently in that I kind of took on the philosophy of, if not now, when, you know. Am I waiting to do anything that I've wanted to do? Am I showing enough love to the people that I love? Am I being who I want to be? Am I doing everything I should be doing? So it gave me, in a way, I would say, a sense of abandon about holding back for anything. And it's actually been lovely and wonderful. Later in 2018, she began processing that trauma through her own unique lens, one that was formed by songwriting. I felt better after two weeks, but after that, and kind of after digesting that whole experience and so forth, I felt like, you know, one of those old movies, I'm going to write a musical about that. This is not a drill had its off-Broadway premiere in late 2025. It's about what happens when people are faced with their mortality as the seconds tick down. I would say that to anyone, whether or not you had thought you were going to get blown up by a nuclear bomb, do what you want to do. Don't be afraid. You know, explore your creativity. Ask for that new job. Ask for a raise. Go ahead and do it. Because none of us gets out of here alive, right? I just have to say, I find this episode so viscerally scary. I feel like I was scared for days after. Just like the horror of having to look your own mortality in the face. It like, this truly is my nightmare situation. And it's also, honestly, a nightmare situation for the guy who messed up at work, like imagining screwing up that badly. Oh, yeah. I've thought since we first recorded this, like, okay, who do you call with that last call? If you're with your family, do you still call my mom? Do I try to post something on social media that more people will see? Do I try to capture always thinking if we get out of this, it would be good to have some contemporaneous audio of the event just in case? Yeah. I think I go full journalist at that point and just start recording sound on my phone so I could have the document and hopefully they either find my phone or I survive. And I can be like, this is what it was like. Yeah. When we're thinking about very special character, I think it's Holly who is in the moment thinking about, well, how are they going to identify us if we're blown up here? Cynthia looking down and seeing like, oh man, my phone's only at 12%. That is like almost as terrifying to me as the text itself. That is 100% how I would be in a nuclear army again. Like right now my phone's at 14%. So I'm just that person. I was like, that's so real. There are a lot of characters in this one. I was able to cast them. You were? Yes. I went through and I thought for John Aaron, the morning news anchor, the birthday boy, I thought Aaron Eckhart, I just felt like he had that kind of like morning news anchor in Hawaii kind of thing. Yeah. He has that chin. Yes. Right. And then for his wife and Natalia Aaron, I thought Rachel McAdams, I may be like, you know, swept up by the recent movie she's been in, but for Holly Dubey, I was thinking Olivia Coleman. I just thought because she seems both practical, but also somebody who could say the word torso and make it really hit. And then for the nuclear experts, Cynthia Lazaroff and Bruce Lazaroff, I love by the way that they go to a meditation cave. That detail is amazing. So I wanted to make them a real life married couple. So I picked Rachel Weitz and Daniel Craig. I could just somehow see them, two of them both being nuclear experts. They're just so smart. This is another one that I'm surprised to see it doesn't appear to have been made into a movie yet. Right? Although there is that movie that Catherine Bigelow just made that I can't remember the name of. Oh, right. That's about like countdown to a nuclear disaster. Yes, I saw that. It's pretty harrowing. Yeah. It makes you realize like it's just about her pushing buttons and people panicking. And like also speaking of pushing buttons and people panicking, how does the system not have a let's undo this notice or send out a second notice? Like how do you design the program and not have like another button to push? Yeah, I think they probably revised the system. Or how about the governor who can't remember his Twitter password? Like how is X password? I thought that was amazing. David E. K. is like, are you kidding me? Once again, very relatable. Very special episodes is made by some very special people. This show is hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zaryn Burnett and Jason English. Our senior producer is Josh Fisher. Today's episode was written by Jake Ross. Editing and sound design by Chris Childs. Mixing and mastering by Josh Fisher. Additional editing by Mary Do. Original music by Elise McCoy. Show logo by Lucy Quintanilla. Social clips by Yarbara Media. Executive producer is Jason English. If you ever want to email the show, you can hit us up at veryspecialepisodesatgmail.com. Very special episodes is a production of I Heart Podcasts. This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed human.