SEATTLE, WA — It's a warm Monday morning in early September, and you're driving to work along I-5 near downtown Seattle. Out of nowhere, an emergency alert screeches out of your car radio. It's not a test, and the alert is warning you that a nuclear missile is headed toward Puget Sound. What do you do?

Rhetoric about nuclear war has picked up over the last 24 hours, with President Donald Trump promising "fire and fury" if North Korea continues its nuclear weapons program. Meanwhile, the Washington Post has reported that North Korea has successfully attached a warhead to an intercontinental ballistic missile. With our relatively close proximity, large population, big corporations and multiple military installations, Puget Sound is very likely one of North Korea's top targets. It's important to understand that a nuclear strike on Puget Sound by North Korea is extremely, extremely unlikely. North Korea is often portrayed as a maniacal regime with a wacko in charge — but it's not. And that's a good thing. North Korea wants to be around for as long as possible, and Kim Jong-un is not about to put his nation at risk just to launch a (relatively small) nuclear attack on the U.S., according to experts we spoke to.

But it's also important to be prepared. Patch spoke to a number of nuclear weapons and emergency preparedness experts to figure out what we would do if a nuclear missile was ever fired at Seattle, be it by North Korea, a terrorist group or even a friendly fire accident caused by our own government. What a nuclear attack would look like Assessments of North Korea's nuclear capability estimate that the nation possesses bombs that are about 20 megatons. One megaton is equivalent to 1,000 pounds of TNT. A 20-kiloton bomb is about equivalent to what the U.S. detonated over Hiroshima: "Little Boy" was 15 kilotons. By comparison, the most powerful nuke in the U.S. arsenal is about 455 kilotons.

About 160,000 of Hiroshima's 350,000 residents died during and in the months after the bombing. To put that in context, Hiroshima in 1945 had half the number of residents that Seattle has in 2017, but Hiroshima (350 square miles) is about double the size of Seattle (149 square miles) in terms of land area.

It would take about 25 minutes for an ICBM fired by North Korea to reach Seattle, so it's unlikely there would be enough time to evacuate. Upon detonation, the bomb would incinerate flammable buildings in its path and likely knock over some taller structures. Lisbeth Gronlund, co-director senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists' Global Security Program, estimated that concrete buildings built to withstand earthquakes would probably fare best.

Large buildings would provide some cover from the blast, but the pressure shockwave would stretch far from downtown Seattle. Of course, that depends on whether North Korea could hit downtown Seattle.

The question of accuracy Let's pretend for a second that North Korea is trying to hit a specific target, like downtown Seattle or Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Does it have the capability?

Gronlund says "not really." North Korea could fire a weapon at us with the intent of hitting downtown Seattle, but it doesn't really have the technology to pinpoint targets. So, a nuke heading our way might hit Enumclaw, it might hit Camano Island or it might splash down along the Pacific Coast. "When it reenters the atmosphere, there's a lot of buffeting, so it's really hard to get an accurate long-range missile," she said.