That's the dumbest thing ever. A presidential alert basically means "nukes incoming."
[1] few disasters, man made or natural, reach national scope. Even a grid failure would likely only reach half the country, but do you need a national alert for that? What useful content could it have?
Many inbound nukes is about all I could see it used for, but I expect that would cause more panic and be less useful than not sending a message... And I'm not convinced a decision to send a message would be made in a reasonable amount of time. State or local messaging seems more likely.
What now? Sure it would cause less panic--in same the way shooting someone in the head unannounced would cause less panic than giving them warning to duck. If the nukes are incoming, "avoiding panic" is the wrong priority.
> And I'm not convinced a decision to send a message would be made in a reasonable amount of time. State or local messaging seems more likely.
IIRC, they're triggered directly for NORAD (or whatever it's called nowadays). There was actually a false alarm alert in the 70s, and it did get out quickly (google "code word hatefulness").
Well it got out quickly, but the cancellation was slow.
I have no doubt that the alerts would go out quickly, if there was a decision to send them (and assuming the means to send them is still around). More and more of these systems has gotten automated so there's no one at the local stations who would need to decide to send or not. I'm just not sure that the 25 minutes or so between detection and impact is enough time to decide to send an alert, amidst all the other activities that would certainly need to be done.
That's kind of understandable, though. If the nukes really are incoming, you want to make sure your alert system actually works, and the only way to really do that is to test it.
We are on Telus/Videotron.
The Canadian is based on the US system with different levels: National/Presidential Alert, AMBER Alert, Extreme Weather Alert, Dangerous Weather Alert, etc.
However in our system, all alerts are sent as 'National/Presidential Alert'.
The US system has different levels of alerts: Presidential/National Alerts, AMBER Alerts, Extreme Weather Alerts, Dangerous Weather Alerts, etc. On my Pixel 6, everything but the Presidential/National Alerts can be disabled. Same with my wife's Galaxy S22. I assume the same for iPhones.
However the Canadian system (which is heavily based on the American system) is setup differently. All alerts are sent as 'National/Presidential Alerts'. None of the other alert levels are used.