The man who sent the original alert has never been publicly identified. He is referred to only as Employee 1 in a report issued by the state after an investigation into the incident. That report claims that he has "been a source of concern…for over 10 years" and that he "has confused real life events and drills on at least two separate occasions."

Employee 1 disputes all of that and told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that he was a scapegoat for a chaotic and badly supervised drill. He says he did not hear "exercise, exercise, exercise" but that he did hear "this is not a drill"—language that, unsurprisingly, is not typically included in a drill. He maintains, in fact, that he believed a missile really was inbound. So when he opened a drop-down menu on his computer, he deliberately clicked the line for the live alert and not the line that was nearly identical except for the word "test" in it. And when a box popped up asking him to confirm his choice, he clicked yes.

It's certainly possible this was an honest mistake. But no one else present was confused.

Either way, he was fired in late January. He's appealing, and his attorney says he might sue the state, too.

No one was reported to have died that morning, not from the nuclear panic, anyway. One man started vomiting on Sandy Beach, drove himself to a clinic, and promptly went into cardiac arrest. A surgeon put four stents in his chest after that, though, so correlation isn't necessarily causation. There was security footage of students scrambling around a college quad that the cable networks seemed to play on a loop, if only because there wasn't much panic-in-the-streets imagery to be found. Everyone also knows about panicky people driving 100 miles an hour on the H-1, but they all seem to have heard it from a guy whose cousin saw it.

"But people talk about PTSD," he said. Vern was in the military for almost four decades. He knows about PTSD. "My personal view is we had 38 minutes of inconvenience."

That is not completely surprising. Every minute believing a nuclear missile is inbound is a minute spent preparing to die or to desperately survive. There is not solely, or even mostly, panic. There is slow-motion shock, and no one knows how he will react until he is forced to. Maybe he'll open that bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue he won in a raffle four years ago, toast the bill collectors who won't be calling anymore, get half-drunk before the terror is called off. Or he might sit mute in a chair at Supercuts, pretty sure he should be terrified—the man on the radio said to move away from windows, and Supercuts has huge windows—but no one else seems worried, so he sits very still and hopes the woman with the scissors by his head has steady hands. Maybe he'll try to drive far away, across the mountains, and he'll call his family to say goodbye, but they won't believe him, and when they finally do, he has to spend his last moments on earth calming his parents.

Maybe he'll be a little more patient with his son.

Maybe he'll tickle his daughters.

Maybe she'll think very, very hard about what to wear to the apocalypse, and she will laugh about it later, but in the moment it is the most important decision she will ever make.

And it is funny, in hindsight. That said, the false alarm revealed weaknesses in preparation and, in some people, instincts for how to best protect themselves. One widely circulated video, for instance, showed a man helping his child down a manhole.

"Putting kids in manholes is not a good idea," Vern Miyagi told a few dozen people six days after the fact. "The sewers are full of methane. Please, don't do that."

Vern was in the cafeteria of the Pearl City Highlands Elementary School on a Friday night in late January, ostensibly as part of a public-awareness campaign. There were handouts, including one showing the relative safety of various structures (the building techniques of the three little pigs are a reasonable guide) and rooms within them—low is better than high, interior is better than not. He ran through a slide presentation, a major point of which was to keep threats in perspective. A hurricane is exponentially more likely to wreak havoc than a North Korean nuclear attack, unless and until Kim Jong-un becomes suicidal. Andrew Canonico wasn't being irrational: A month and a day later, a student killed 17 people in his former high school in Florida. And even if Kim detonated his biggest nuke directly over Pearl Harbor, most people on Oahu, 80 or even 90 percent, would survive it. Hans and Becca, Chris Luan, Wade if he stayed put—they'd all be stumbling through the wreckage, unless they had two weeks of provisions to wait out the fallout.