Tuesday January 16, 2018
Tuesday January 16, 2018
Hawaii Democrat: false missile alarm shows Trump failure on North Korea
The false alarm about a ballistic missile strike that terrified Hawaiians on Saturday showed Donald Trump’s policy on North Korea is wrong, a Democratic US representative from the state said on Sunday.
“What makes me angry,” Tulsi Gabbard told CNN’s State of the Union, “is that, yes, this false alarm went out and we have to fix that in Hawaii but really we’ve got to get to the underlying issue here, of why are the people of Hawaii and the US facing a nuclear threat coming from North Korea?
“And what is this president doing, urgently, to eliminate that threat?”
Trump was on the golf course in Florida when the alert went out on Saturday morning, Hawaiian time. The alert text read: “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.”
“It was definitely kind of a panic zone,” Ashley Trask, 39 and from Kauai, told the Guardian. “Everyone knows you have about 15 minutes until detonation and no one knows where it will land.”
Family members “called us and they were crying because they realized they wouldn’t have made it to us”, Trask said.
Beth Ann Brooks of Haleiwa said she and her husband sheltered in their bathroom with their children.
“The fear I felt was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” she said.
As tension between the Trump White House and nuclear-armed Pyongyang has risen, Trump trading public insults with Kim Jong-un and bragging about the size of his “nuclear button”, fears that North Korea could reach US territory with a nuclear weapon have surged. (Continued: The Guardian)