{"id":32061,"date":"2018-03-08T06:54:33","date_gmt":"2018-03-08T11:54:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=32061"},"modified":"2018-03-08T06:54:44","modified_gmt":"2018-03-08T11:54:44","slug":"false-alarms-and-exaggerated-threats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=32061","title":{"rendered":"False Alarms and Exaggerated Threats\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

False Alarms and Exaggerated Threats<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n
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Photo by Anthony Quintano | CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Three days after the January 13 false alarm of a North Korean nuclear attack on Hawaii, Japan\u2019s public TV broadcaster NHK\u00a0issued its own false alarm around 7 p.m., warning in error that North Korea had launched a missile at Japan. As reported by CNN, Jan. 17, and by the\u00a0New York Times, National Public Radio, and\u00a0Reuters\u00a0Jan. 16, the shocking message was received by Japanese smart phone users and by\u00a0NHK\u00a0TV website viewers.<\/p>\n

Like in Hawaii, the Japanese public was amazed to read, according to a translation from\u00a0Reuters<\/em>: \u201cNORTH KOREA APPEARS TO HAVE LAUNCHED A MISSILE. THE GOVERNMENT URGES PEOPLE TO TAKE SHELTER INSIDE BUILDINGS OR UNDERGROUND.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike Hawaii\u2019s scare, which threw the state\u2019s population of 1.4 million into a panic,\u00a0NHK Japan\u2019s fake news was broadcast nation-wide to about 127 million people. The TV network blamed the terror alert on a \u201cswitching error\u201d and corrected it in less than 10 minutes. \u201cWe are deeply sorry,\u201d\u00a0NHK\u00a0announced on its 9:00 p.m. news Jan. 16.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0Arsenals of Folly<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0author Richard Rhodes documents how US government \u201cofficials frequently and deliberately inflated their estimates of military threats facing the United States, beginning with \u2026 exaggerated Soviet military capabilities.\u201d A review in the Feb. 7, 2008\u00a0New York Review of Books\u00a0said, \u201cThe exaggeration of foreign threats, however pernicious, is a tactic,\u201d and quotes Rhodes\u2019 study: \u201cThreat inflation was crucial to maintaining the defense budgets\u2026 Fear was part of the program \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

The New York Review\u00a0also noted that in 1998, the US Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States \u201cwarned that Iran and North Korea could hit the US with missiles within five years.\u201d Twenty years later, neither country can do so.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

False Alarms and Exaggerated Threats\u00a0 Photo by Anthony Quintano | CC BY 2.0 Three days after the January 13 false alarm of a North Korean nuclear attack on Hawaii, Japan\u2019s public TV broadcaster NHK\u00a0issued its own false alarm around 7 p.m., warning in error that North Korea had launched a missile at Japan. As reported […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","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":[5,6],"tags":[5493,19151,17903,379,8838,452,12087,1426,2006,655],"class_list":["post-32061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-counterpunch","tag-exaggerated-threat","tag-false-alarm","tag-government","tag-hawaii","tag-japan","tag-john-laforge","tag-misinformation","tag-north-korea","tag-propaganda"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32061"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32063,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32061\/revisions\/32063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}