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Comment by cantrip | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I think it's one of the worst reactions you could have.

Without any indication of how bad the attack actually is, you should really assume the best and set yourself up to be able to survive.

What if it's a conventional bombing, or you're not directly in the blast zone? Or if the nuke fails to detonate?

The immediate aftermath if the most important time. While he's futzing around with Youtube and getting drunk the more intelligent people are coming up with a plan to live.

Whether it's getting the fuck out of there or stockpiling water or climbing into a storm drain, almost anything is better than sending emails and jamming away to cliche songs.

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>What if it's a conventional bombing, or you're not directly in the blast zone? Or if the nuke fails to detonate?

Yeah, this has been the most frustrating thing reading all of these accounts. A "ballistic missile" does not necessarily have a nuclear warhead. I don't see anyone correcting this and it seems like an important thing to know.

No country is going to risk that for two reasons in the current global context.

First, everyone will assume the payload is nuclear. Once the launch is detected, literally no one is going to even consider for a single moment that the missile might have a conventional payload. All actions, responses, and threat assessments are going to treat it as a nuke. If you're going to launch ICBMs at people, you might as well mount a nuke to it because the rest of the nuclear club is going to respond as if you had.

Second, the alert was for Hawaii. Given their isolation (they're over 7,500km from Korea), that means the missile is an ICBM. The Hwasong-15[0] can carry an estimated ~1,000kg payload, though it's unknown if it could do so for its full range.[1] That's tiny for a warhead. Mounting it on an ICBM, even if your country doesn't get blown to hell after launch, would just be a waste of money. The same goes for SLBMs as well. The only exception would be for precision strikes, but that's not really relevant to NK.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwasong-15

1. http://allthingsnuclear.org/dwright/nk-longest-missile-test-...

Context. It's hard to explain to people who didn't go through it. The word "threat" didn't even register. There is no other information to evaluate except the message and the dprk situation. No one is going to launch a conventional ballistic warhead into Pearl Harbor. The ONLY conclusion you can come to in the minute after you just got the info is some serious nuclear stuff is about to go down (but please let it not). The head of our (US) armed forces has been saber rattling for months. The risk of miscalculation is off the charts. Also there was no indication who sent the message (state, fed, ?). You are also in a surreal stunned state. Then you start looking for shelter and yes monitor twitter. Honestly I'm surprised people didn't freak out more and get hurt.

Not all ballistic missiles are nuclear, but anyone throwing one will expect that the recipients will assume it's nuclear and be likely to respond in kind and not wait to find out which. So who would want to launch a ballistic missile without a nuclear payload, if the response is probably nuclear?

The US has tried to build conventional missiles for fast global strike capability but it's somewhat complicated by the Russians being unable to distinguish them from nuclear ballistic missiles...

Yes, but in the minutes you have between warning and impact, how do you make this assessment? I think most people's immediate thoughts after the warning was North Korea and Nuke.

It's not that you need to know definitively, you just need to understand that there is a strong possibility that the warhead is non-nuclear and therefore a strong possibility that the worst-case doomsday scenario won't happen even if the attack is real.

This is apparently really important for people to understand, since so many commenters are saying they'd just wait to die since they assume a nuclear attack is not survivable. Few people would make this assumption about non-nuclear weaponry, so they should know that missile attack is not necessarily synonymous with nuclear weapon.

Actually there is about a 0% chance of a conventional ballistic missile attack on the US. If that. South Korea and Japan, yes, followed by a fire storm not seen since WW2.

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