What to tell your children when you hear an air-raid siren in your kitchen...

From Pukguksong to ‘Gangnam Style’, what do you tell your kids when the possibility of a third world war has never loomed larger, asks Catherine Shanhan.

Pukguksong. What, I was asked over breakfast, was a Pukguksong? I took a punt.

“PSY’s follow-up to ‘Gangnam Style’?.

The youngest child seemed satisfied but the 11-year-old shook his head. It was nothing to do with a South Korean dance craze.

It was one of the medium-range ballistic missiles being flung about like golf balls by “that crazy guy” in North Korea, in his own demented version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - Tactical Nuke Gameplay.

If the conversation felt a bit surreal, the sound of an air-raid siren wailing from the kitchen radio as part of a news report on what was unfolding in East Asia made it plain weird.

Yet this was the ominous sound that roused Irishman Brendan Walsh from his slumber on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido last Monday. There’s a fair chance that Brendan, a 23-year-old primary teacher from Knocklyon in Dublin, would never have been big in Japan, only he happened to be in the right place at the right time, or the wrong place at the wrong time, depending on where you’re coming from.

Brendan, Our Man in Hokkaido from a media standpoint, woke in his apartment in Sapporo to the sound of an emergency alert from the national emergency warning system. In theory, this sounds a bit like our city and county council flood alert system, except on steroids. We’re not talking severe weather warning or minor flooding disaster, fended off by a couple of sandbags. We’re talking Proper Emergency: Earthquake, tsunami, volcano. Or, as was the case last Monday, ballistic missile launch.

Brendan, cool as you like, hadn’t paid much heed to the alert: A landslide warning last August came to nothing. Besides, his grasp of Japanese prevented his full understanding of the accompanying message.

“North Korea often tests rockets that land in the sea of Japan,” he said. “I assumed a missile had just got too close for comfort, and this warning was precautionary.”

A knock on the door from a neighbour telling him to go to the subway station to take cover hinted at greater danger than a mere, say, volcano. His biggest worry was for his sick girlfriend, currently in hospital. He feared that if she was too weak, she’d be left behind in the event of an evacuation, because, you know, when the chips are down, it’s survival of the fittest. “I kept thinking, I have to get to her and get her out. If I don’t, I thought, she’ll be fried alive.”

Perhaps the most remarkable facet of Brendan’s media interviews was the matter-of-fact delivery. It’s worth a re-cap. He packed essentials: Fruit, water, internet modems, phone chargers, photos of loved ones. These are the rational acts of a man facing the very real possibility of living underground while trying to outlive a nuclear holocaust. He even used the words “fried alive”. His coolness was, in a way, far more terrifying than hysteria.

I got a jolt at the sound of the air-raid siren rising and falling in my kitchen. Previous experience was curtailed to movies. My kids asked what it was. I hesitated. Scope for sugar-coating ballistic missiles is limited. But I don’t want my kids in therapy.

I didn’t tell them that Kim Jong-un is committed to the pursuit of nuclear weapons.

I didn’t tell them he’s a psychopath who allegedly ordered the murder of his half-brother.

I didn’t tell them how close North Korea might be to miniaturising a nuclear warhead for mounting on a missile. I didn’t really tell them anything really, because for once, I was stuck for words.

I mumbled something about two madmen squaring up to other, each with an ego even bigger than Kanye’s. I told them not to worry, it was on the other side of the world.

But there are no sides to a circle, they said. Show us where in the world? I showed them the globe and they could see Alaska was nearer than Ireland to that small enough looking peninsula that is currently punching far, far above its weight in the world terror stakes.

I showed them the map and they could see by looking at it that only a fool would fire on the US via Ireland because the range was far too great for anything even the North Koreans have invented. But there are many fools in this game.

But it would never fall on Ireland, right? Because Ireland is 5,742 miles as the crow flies from the toxic north of that peninsula and Alaska is 3,694. So it makes more sense, doesn’t it, that he would never aim in our direction?

Yes, yes, it makes more sense (how did “sense” even come into the conversation?).

But the questions didn’t end there.

What about the wind? If a nuclear missile hits Alaska, which way would the wind blow?

Would it bring toxic rain to Ireland? Would we die? Would our cousins die? Would everyone in Cork and the rest of Ireland die? Even Leo Varadkar? Or would they keep him in that bunker in Skibbereen with the people of Guam should North Korea go ahead with its threat to blast that island into oblivion? And how would they all fit? Or how would they even get to Skibb from Guam given the distance of 7,679 miles? Plus, you know, they’d have to make it quick if Kimmy gave short notice of warming up the Pukguksong?

And so on. And so on. And the more they asked, the less I was able to answer.

Just like Brendan Walsh was stuck for words when asked if the emergency he was alerted to last Monday turned out to be the real deal.

A tsunami could be scary, an earthquake could be scary, but when it came to missile strikes, he drew a blank. “When you hear of a missile strike, it’s very strange... I don’t know, I don’t know how I feel,” he said.

What he does know is that the main concern on the island of Hokkaido “only fractionally smaller than Ireland, similar climate, similar population, and of no strategic value” is “not this missile, but rather the next one and the one after that”.

So what do you tell your kids when the possibility of a third world war has never loomed larger? You distract them with YouTube, that’s what. I inform them that ‘Gangnam Style’ broke the YouTube view counter back in the day with more than two billion views. Has anyone topped that?

And off they go, from ballistic missiles and the dangerous public face of North Korea to the daft affable erstwhile public face of South Korea, where pony moves, not Pukguksongs, are all the rage.