There’s a fine line between preparedness for a threat and panicking about it, unproductively. Hawaii now finds itself in that uncomfortable position, as the simmering tensions with North Korea tick up closer to a boiling point.

Turning up the heat has yielded one benefit for the state: Officials now are feeling the pressure to bring the islands’ civil defense and survival capacity up to date, after letting things languish for decades.

This is a good development, as long as the state’s leadership maintains its cool. Hawaii’s congressional delegation must add their voices to a rational discussion, arguing for funding of defense systems and personnel to an effective level.

The impasse between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, also known as North Korea, and its regional neighbors has persisted for decades but has deteriorated under the increasingly mercurial dictator in the Kim dynasty, Kim Jong-un.

A purely military solution — a pre-emptive strike of some kind — is seen as a dangerous option, given that the regime has demonstrated through testing that it has some nuclear capability.

A devastating outcome for South Korea, Japan or any other nation in the Asia-Pacific area would be a risk the U.S. does not want to take. Meanwhile, progress toward a diplomatic settlement has been excruciatingly slow, even worse under the current regime.

But with hostilities ratcheting up — most recently, with a brazen, if unsuccessful, missile test and a parade exhibiting what appear to be long-range missiles — so is the pressure to bring parties to the negotiating table.

That’s because the U.S. sees momentum building toward a North Korea with intercontinental ballistic missile capability. Hawaii stands out as militarily significant — and within the nearest reach.

U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, speaking to a group of his Hawaii constituents recently, voiced his own worries about the threat, but rightly cautioned people against overstating the risk. The islands have high value for North Korea but are minuscule and thus comprise a more technically difficult target.

He’s right, but that doesn’t negate the need for contingency planning — even pursuing anti-missile defenses on our own shores. There has been movement already in that direction, and it’s good that all reasonable options are being considered.

Almost exactly a year ago, the late U.S. Rep. Mark Takai announced he had joined a House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing, inquiring about the prospects for making operational a system on Kauai that’s currently classed as a testing site.

The site is at Pacific Missile Range Facility, Barking Sands. The Pentagon has been weighing operational uses for the so-called “Aegis Ashore” site. However, at a January conference held at the state Capitol, military commanders said a new radar tracking installation there would be the more likely plan for better protecting the state.

But the military is anything but passive in this. In February, a medium-range ballistic missile target was launched from Barking Sands; the Pearl Harbor destroyer USS John Paul Jones detected, tracked and intercepted the target using a guided missile, a successful test of a system jointly developed by the U.S. and Japan.

Meanwhile, state elected officials are taking steps, long overdue, toward needed improvements to Hawaii’s civil defense capacity. In recent weeks, state lawmakers, in a clear response to escalating tensions, introduced a resolution urging the state Department of Defense to update disaster preparation plans for Hawaii.

State and county agencies have neither updated such plans nor maintained the state’s hundreds of fallout shelters, in decades.

Encouragingly, Senate Concurrent Resolution 169 has the support of the department, represented at the Capitol hearing by Maj. Gen. Arthur J. Logan, its adjutant general. Specifically, he testified in favor of the proposal that Aloha Stadium’s parking lot be designated an alternate “laydown” area for shipping containers in the event of significant damage to port facilities.

Given that the stadium is in line for redevelopment, it would be prudent to consider this prospective use in the course of its design. Logan also said a neighbor island commercial port should be selected as an alternate should Honolulu Harbor and Pearl Harbor be severely damaged in “a major manmade disaster.”

These are distressing circumstances to consider. The best outcome would be that the Trump administration is successful in pressuring China to dissuade North Korea from continued provocation and testing. The real target should be multilateral negotiations for a diplomatic settlement.

However, preparedness for the worst outcome remains key to this persuasion, and to diverting Kim away from this cataclysmic course.