In the early morning of Saturday, Jan. 13, 2018, an emergency alert was sent to phones across the Hawaiian Islands.

The message read: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL”.

At the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, my brother and stampedes of students fled to the fallout shelter in the basement of the chemistry building, Leonora Bilger Hall. My brother tried calling my parents, but they did not pick up. My parents and I were fast asleep, oblivious to the panic spreading across the islands.

40 minutes later, a correction was issued.

The alert was a mistake. A mere mishap.

But this technological error held the weight of its danger. This was a real possibility – a long-range missile could have taken our lives that easily, leaving nothing behind.

In the end, how much space lies between a missile and a mass casualty?

Prior to this event, I never seriously considered the nuclear world and weapons of mass destruction. This seemed far away from my own reality. Yet, the fear I felt that day proved to me that destruction may not be as far away as we think.

I’ve learned that my own home is not safe in the nuclear world.

In order to understand how we have reached this point in time, we must look back and understand the chain of cause and effect.

At 5:30 AM on July 16, 1945, just 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico, scientists detonated the world’s first nuclear bomb. It was the infamous “Trinity Test,” conducted in the midst of a World War. The explosion released 18.6 kilotons of power, turning asphalt and sand into glass.

Seconds after the detonation, an immense flash of heat swept across the desert, forever altering the surrounding biosphere and life as we knew it.

At a sleepaway dance camp about 80 miles away, the blast threw a little girl from her bunk bed. Later on in the day, white ash fell from the sky like snow.

Radiation seeped into the bone tissue of vulnerable, non-consenting bodies. 11 girls and two adults at that camp would later die of cancers related to radiation exposure.

They were some of the first victims of the atomic bomb. Their lives will not be forgotten.

In 1942, the US began the Manhattan Project during World War II, directing the developments in nuclear energy towards military purposes. The UC-managed Los Alamos National Laboratory that stands today holds this history.

The two infamous atomic bombs deployed in the latter half of World War II were both conceived in the Los Alamos wartime lab.

The creation of the nuclear world thus requires us to understand the loss of innocent life that it has exacted. Where innovation in science, engineering and technology have enhanced and improved life, it has also furthered nuclearization. Truly, what does it mean for humans to coexist with weapons of mass destruction?

As a UCLA student, I was surprised to discover the UC’s academic involvement in the history of nuclearization. With a history of operating national laboratories, the UC is implicated in the proliferation of a US nuclear arsenal.

This is a matter that concerns us all. It is important to consider how academic institutions have shaped history and what they imply about our future. As members of a UC society, we only benefit from interrogating the past of our institutions and understanding how knowledge has changed the world.

In the Manhattan Project, academics became tools to affect war, thereby securing power on a global scale. Today, the UC-DOE Prime Contract serves to directly link the management and operation of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to the authority of the US government.

The weaponizing of atomic energy can only make the world a more dangerous place. In the nuclear history of humanity, we go back in time to confront fallout and the suffering of a people. It would appear that we are not aware of what we have created until blood has been spilled enough times.

On August 6th, 1945, U.S. Army Air Force then-Colonel Paul Tibbets dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki merely three days later. By the end of 1945, there had been an estimated death toll of 214,000. Many others would die later due to chronic illnesses and cancers that developed as a result of radiation exposure.

This is a mass grave in our history – a bloodied catastrophe that continues to haunt us.

Amidst the tales of battles, victories and losses written in history books, the truth is scarcely hidden. In war, no one emerges a winner – loss abounds, consumes.

My own family history has bore witness to this. In the Taipei air raids of World War II, my great grandfather, a principal of an all-girls’ middle school, felt bombs rain from the sky, destroying his school. Bombs that left the earth turned inside out, buildings flattened; bombs that left nothing behind.

My grandfather, once a teenager discovering the world for the first time, witnessed the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor in O’ahu, watched smoke travel up into the sky. His home was not safe.

My family history is fraught with stories of war, weapons, violence and loss. The 2018 false missile alert in Hawai’i carries the faint echoes of a terror once felt before.

In the end, I have come to understand that my great grandfather had his life uprooted by weapons that rained down from the sky. My grandfather had to learn that he was not safe in a world where weapons could destroy so much in mere seconds.

History has taught us these consequences. Still, we move forward. Now in the Age of Apocalypse, the potential for mutually-assured self-destruction is greater than ever before.

In the fabric of history, we must learn to do better by the losses we have suffered. If we do not reflect on these losses, we risk our humanity.

Predictably, the US government is mobilizing. The National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-autonomous agency within the Department of Energy, has seen its annual budget increase by $865 million for 2025.

Even further, U.S. nuclear force plans are estimated to cost a total of $756 billion over the next ten years. $305 billion will go towards the “operation and sustainment of current and future nuclear forces.” $247 billion will be allocated to the “modernization of strategic and tactical nuclear delivery systems and the weapons they carry.”

These weapons delivery systems, evolved over time, have shown us the potential for mass-scale destruction. Indeed, innovation has sharpened humanity’s capacity for war and destruction.

Today, the total nuclear arsenal consists of more than 12,000 nuclear weapons, many which possess more destructive potential than those detonated across history. They could destroy our world several times over.

Generational trauma now bleeds through a family because of weapons that once fell like rain. January 13th, 2018 thus becomes cruelly ironic.

It is my hope that in taking accountability of the not-so-distant past, we will become equipped enough to criticize the present and recognize the creation of a future. As citizens of a country heavily involved in the deployment of nuclear weapons of mass destruction, it becomes an ethical responsibility to realize what has been lost – and what life stands to be lost in the Atomic Age.

In a nuclear world, the stakes have never been higher.