Plausibility Check: Mass EBS Attack Warning False Alarm, Spring '86

The events in Hawaii two weeks ago gave me an idea for a story, and I'd like to know the plausibility of it all.

The setup for the story is that in the spring of 1986, not long after the US strikes on Libya on April 15,a series of accidents leads to a nationwide activation of the Emergency Broadcast System in a way that convinces a sizable portion of the US population that a Soviet nuclear attack has been launched against the United States.

A somewhat tamer and possibly more plausible version that would work for the purposes of the story might be a cockup by state authorities leading to a nuclear attack warning being issued for the state of Indiana, similar to the Hawaii missile alert or the 2005 Connecticut evacuation incident.

In either case, this is solely a civilian error. There is no increase in American military readiness as a result of the false alarm, much like in Hawaii. Also in either case, it takes anywhere from 40 minutes to an hour for a retraction to be issued, leading to panic in affected areas.

So, is this in any way plausible, or should I shelve this one? If it is plausible, any pointers as to how it could play out? I've already decided that overzealous local authorities might activate air raid sirens, increasing panic in affected areas.
 
Certainly plausible; there was a ESB radio false alarm in 1971, from the simplest of causes: a civilian DoD employee at Cheyenne Mountain accidentally used the "real attack" tape rather than the "this is a test" tape during a scheduled nationwide test. Though supposedly many, if not most stations did not respondent correctly to the message (i.e. they didn't broadcast; sometimes they misplaced the codebooks used to verify messages, or didn't know how to interpret them. Some managers may also have decided it must be a mistake and not broadcast, since there was no international crisis and the alert came out during a scheduled testing period). The solution on the DoD's end was low-tech; they just moved the 'real attack' tapes to the other end of the room. I'd imagine that they weren't too happy with the radio stations who didn't broadcast a genuine (if mistaken) attack alert, so I assume there were some overhauls on the broadcaster compliance side afterwards.
 
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