Hawaiians Shrug Off Missile Threat
HONOLULU — Hawaii has long lived with the threat of wipe out, whether by tsunami,
volcano or foreign invader. Now the Obama administration says North Korea could
launch a ballistic missile in the state’s direction — possibly around the Fourth of July,
according to the Japanese news media — prompting the United States military to
beef up defenses here.
Antimissile interceptors are in place, the Defense Department said, and Hawaiians
watched the other day as a giant, towering radar commonly known as the golf ball
set out to sea from the base where it is normally moored. But if lifelong residents
like Gerald Aikau are on any state of alert, it would be the one telling him that his
octopus, caught in the waters here with a spear and his bare hands, is overcooked.
“What are you going to do?” Mr. Aikau, 34, a commercial painter, said as he proudly
grilled his catch at a beachfront park. “You are going to go sometime, whether it’s
on a wave, or a missile, or your buddy knocking you down and you hit your head.”
Vulnerability, and a certain fatalism about it, are part of the fabric of life in this
archipelago, 2,500 miles from the mainland and, as many residents seem to have
memorized since the Obama administration raised the alarm last week, 4,500 miles
from North Korea. People took comfort in the heavy, year-round military presence
provided by several bases here but also wondered if it made the state more of a
target.
In an interview Monday on CBS’s “Early Show,” President Obama, who was born and
spent much of his youth here, said, “Our military is fully prepared for any contingencies”
regarding North Korea.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced Thursday that the military had deployed
ground-based interceptors and sea-based radar to help deflect any long-range missile
from North Korea. Calls to Gov. Linda Lingle, a Republican, were referred to Maj. Gen.
Robert G. F. Lee, the state’s defense department director, who suggested the threat was
more saber-rattling from North Korea. He questioned whether its missiles had the
technological capacity to go very far, but just the same, he said, the state was ready
for hostile action.
“Our military assets should be able to protect us,” said General Lee, whose duties include
civil defense. “We, like all states, are prepared for natural disasters down to terrorism.”
He said the state’s disaster sirens were working, and residents, as always, were advised
to keep a three-day supply of food, water, medicine and other essentials in stock. “Out
here by ourselves, we have to be a little more prepared, just in case help does not get
here quickly from the mainland,” he said.
Of course, the specter of Pearl Harbor still figures prominently here, as well as the cat-
and-mouse of cold war maneuverings off the coast, including the mysterious loss of a
Soviet ballistic-missile submarine 750 miles northwest of Oahu in 1968.
“We are first strike from Asia,” said State Representative Joseph M. Souki, 76, a Democrat,
who still remembers the wave of anxiety that swept his neighborhood on Maui as Pearl
Harbor was bombed. “It’s not like we are in Iowa.” Still, he said, “more than likely nothing
is going to happen.” “Hawaii is like a pawn in a chess game,” he added.
The state can ill afford anything approximating a calamity. The recession has been blamed
for a nearly 11 percent drop in the number of visitors here last year compared with the year
before. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in May reached 7.4 percent, up from
6.9 percent in April and the highest in three decades. The tourists that did come carried on
as usual, taking surfing lessons, strolling Waikiki Beach and reflecting at the U.S.S. Arizona
Memorial, whose park includes a display of old Polaris submarine-launched missiles.
“Send one of these babies up,” suggested Clifton Wannaker, 45, an accountant from South
Dakota, when told of the North Korean threat. He knocked on the missile’s skin for good
measure.
Standing at the shoreline in view of the Arizona Memorial, Steve Brecheen, 54, a pharmacist
from Oklahoma City, seemed a bit more unnerved. “North Korea seems the most unstable
government as far as a threat to the U.S. is concerned,” Mr. Brecheen said. He motioned to
the memorial, which sits over the remains of the battleship sunk by the Japanese in the Pearl
Harbor attack. “In 1941, some of these people didn’t think the Japanese were an extreme
threat, and they got their minds changed pretty quickly,” he said.
But among Hawaiians, skepticism is mixed with annoyance and even anger that their state,
hypothetically at least, could be a testing ground. “I think they would be stupid to do that test,”
said Misioki Tauiliili, 39, a delivery truck driver, taking in the placid scene at a city beach near
Waikiki. “The U.S. should go out there and shake them.” By that he meant the United States
perhaps firing its own rockets in North Korea’s direction, “to test them.”
Mark N. Brown, 49, an artist painting nearby, was less bellicose. He said he took comfort in
the steps the military had taken and remained concerned that an act of aggression by North
Korea would lead to war. But, with a wry smile, he added that a neighboring island, far less
populated but a bit closer to North Korea, would probably take the hit.
“It would hit Kauai,” he said. “We are on Oahu.”
Mele Connor, 55, a lifelong Hawaiian shopping with visitors from the mainland at a clothing store
on Waikiki, laughed off the threat. “After North Korea, it will be somebody else,” she said. “They
know Obama is from here, so they want something. Everybody wants something from our pretty
little islands.”
