{"id":27424,"date":"2018-01-16T00:01:10","date_gmt":"2018-01-16T00:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=27424"},"modified":"2018-01-16T00:01:10","modified_gmt":"2018-01-16T00:01:10","slug":"so-what-about-nuclear-preparedness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=27424","title":{"rendered":"So, what about nuclear preparedness?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Hawaii residents were shaken to their core over the weekend when they thought for what seemed like forever that they were going to be blown to bits in a nuclear attack.<\/p>\n

Their cell phones sounded an alarm and it took 38 minutes for them to learn the truth: It was a false alarm.<\/p>\n

But, this incident begs many questions. Why did it take so long to call off the statewide panic? How did an employee “push the wrong button”?<\/p>\n

And then there’s this: What kind of preparation are other communities throughout the United States making in case<\/em> of a real nuclear attack?<\/p>\n

I’ve been thinking about that for the past day or so. What would happen if some enemy nation launched missiles aimed at a Department of Energy facility just northeast of Amarillo, Texas? You know about which I am mentioning here: Pantex, the sprawling compound in Carson County where this nation stores nuclear warheads. Many of us here refer to it light-heartedly as “The Bomb Factory.”<\/p>\n

But it’s no joke. They do serious work out there.<\/p>\n

What has Amarillo done to prepare for such an event?<\/p>\n

I have lived in the Texas Panhandle for 23 years. So help me, I never have heard about a community emergency response system. Whatever it is, I don’t know where to go.<\/p>\n

I grew up, of course, in the duck-and-cover era when the United States faced off against the Soviet Union, the other<\/em> nuclear superpower. It was just Uncle Sam vs. the Big Ol’ Bear. Us vs. Them. Good Guys vs. the Bad Guys.<\/p>\n

Today’s world is different. The USSR morphed back into Russia, but they’ve still got plenty of nukes. So do several other nations: India, Pakistan, South Africa, China, the UK, France … maybe Israel.<\/p>\n

Oh, and North Korea!<\/p>\n

The SNAFU in Hawaii has alerted all of us — or at least it should alert us — that the nuclear threat remains dire, perhaps even more so than it was during the Cold War.<\/p>\n

Are we prepared? If someone out there has a plan, let’s hear it.<\/p>\n

I’m all ears.<\/p>\n\n

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Hawaii residents were shaken to their core over the weekend when they thought for what seemed like forever that they were going to be blown to bits in a nuclear attack. Their cell phones sounded an alarm and it took 38 minutes for them to learn the truth: It was a false alarm. But, this … Continue reading So, what about nuclear preparedness?<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1054,3335,3355,6681],"class_list":["post-27424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international-news","tag-cold-war","tag-north-korea","tag-nuclear-weapons","tag-ussr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27424"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27426,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27424\/revisions\/27426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}