It just needs an ‘under construction’ GIF to make it perfect.

An ICBM will land about 30 minutes after it launches. At those kinds of timescales, every delay you put in somebody's path to issue the warning, even a few seconds, is going to be a cost measured in lives.

How many people are you willing to kill to reduce the risk of a false alarm?

> An ICBM will land about 30 minutes after it launches. At those kinds of timescales, every delay you put in somebody's path to issue the warning, even a few seconds, is going to be a cost measured in lives.

Actually, considering that timescale and all the variables involved in detection and tracking a few seconds is less than the margin of error for predicting the warhead's arrival. While the goal should obviously be to get a (valid) warning to the public as quickly as practical, the "every second counts" mantra in this situation is overly dramatic. In fact, I think it is even counterproductive because it can lead to a "better safe than sorry" attitude that triggers unnecessary false alarms.

> How many people are you willing to kill to reduce the risk of a false alarm?

Depends. How many people might die in a false alarm? How many people might die if they stop trusting the alert system and fail to properly react to a true alarm?

Since this was a false alarm, how many people died? What was the damage? I've yet to hear of any details like that.

That's true. But somewhere between one click or "Alexa, send the nuclear warning alert" and having multiple people confirm the message with some complex procedure, there's probably a reasonable medium. False alarms also have significant risk, including encouraging people to ignore a real alarm whether for tsunamis or missile attacks.

By that argument, this is worse because the person might have to hunt around in a pile of similar looking links for the one button, with an increased chance of getting it wrong and issuing the wrong alert.

Really, there is no way to justify this as in any way "intentionally designed".

They could at least make the non-test warnings a Red hyperlink or something, and organize them on a separate part of the page away from the test warnings... If that picture is legit, it's laughably bad. I have a feeling adding a confirmation dialog that takes an extra 200ms to click isn't gonna make much of a difference either when a thermonuclear warhead is heading your way...

In the current UI, the 'real alert' and the 'drill alert' have equal visual weighting, hence equal priority, and share about 75% of the same text.

I agree that the 'real alert' should not be impeded and they could at least put a red or black rectangle around the 'real alert' button to make it stand out from the others.

In my opinion, this begs the question: what was the population of Hawaii expected to do in response to this warning? From my reading of the articles, for the most part people did not know what to do. In their position, without a clear plan, I might just hug my partner and children that one last time.

I wonder if there is a clear plan, and if there's a better way to communicate that to the population. That seems like maybe it should be more of a priority then this alert message, which seemed to only sow confusion.

There probably is a plan, but nobody wants to be taught it because of backlash to civil emergency plans.

The "Duck & Cover" stuff is lampooned for being rediculous, but it's actually what you should do. The idea that everyone will die from being incinerated in a nuclear blast is a misconception. Most people in America would survive the initial nuclear blast from a full Russian strike (and China, etc. have even smaller arsenals).

In the short term, act like you would in a Tornado. Basement or if you don't have one, an room with no windows.

Longer term--stay in side for as long as you can because fallout will disipate. The longer you don't go outside the better.

You think a few seconds is going to make a difference in lives with a nuclear strike? Will people be able to run to the nearest bomb shelter in that time?