“All that type of stuff has been boxed up and put in the closets,” Gaynor says.īut not making specific preparations isn’t the same thing as not making any preparations at all, says Gaynor. RIEMA has no plans involving the old civil defense fallout shelters around the state and not much is left of civil defense pamphlets and documents from the 1960s. The agency has not made preparations specific to dealing with the effects of a missile attack in Rhode Island or in neighboring Connecticut. Also, after the recent false alarm about a missile headed to Hawaii, questions are being raised about preparedness for an attack on the United States.Īt the state level, what’s being done to prepare for the threat of a North Korean missile attack? Can the same type of bogus alarm that happened in Hawaii happen here in Rhode Island?Ī nuclear missile attack is not among the 21 hazards that RIEMA has identified as priorities: from natural events such as tropical storms to technological hazards such as a failure of a wastewater system to “human-caused” threats such as terrorism. But they do not know if the country’s nuclear warheads are miniaturized enough to fit the rockets experts also doubt that the warheads are tough enough to handle the fiery heat of reentering the earth’s atmosphere.ĭespite those uncertainties, North Korea’s missile advances worry many observers. In 2017, experts determined that North Korea had developed missiles capable of hitting the United States’ East Coast. “That’s a winter storm with a power outage.”
“We typically plan for the thing that’s most likely to happen next,” Gaynor says. The unthinkable scenario has become more realistic amid the stream of headlines about missile tests in the Hermit Kingdom and talk about nuclear buttons by North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump.īut the prospect of a nuclear missile attack remains too unlikely to warrant specific planning and training by Rhode Island's emergency managers, according to the director of the Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency, Peter Gaynor. PROVIDENCE - A North Korean missile, armed with a powerful nuclear warhead, rockets toward the northeastern United States on a trajectory that could take it to Rhode Island or somewhere close by.
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