For all the panic resounding on the Internet today, a North Korean nuclear attack on U.S. soil seems highly unlikely. Nevertheless, it can’t hurt to be prepared. Unfortunately for residents of Washington State, being prepared is illegal.

Nervous Washingtonians should perhaps feel even more nervous than the rest of us, because their state has a law on the books forbidding emergency planners from preparing for nuclear attack.

Yes, you read that right. According to the Seattle Times, Washington State passed legislation in 1984 stipulating that the state military department’s “comprehensive, all-hazard emergency plan may not include preparation for emergency evacuation or relocation of residents in anticipation of nuclear attack.”

That year was, of course, the middle of the Cold War’s final decade, a time when the federal government was highly concerned about possible nuclear war with the Soviet Union. As a result, the government pressured state and local jurisdictions across the country to develop contingency plans.

But Dick Nelson, a state representative in Washington at the time, would have none of it. Along with a majority of his fellow legislators, he believed it was insensible to waste emergency resources preparing for the possibility of nuclear war, which seemed more than unlikely to them.

“We were feeling better about our relationship with the Soviet Union in the ’80s — that’s before it collapsed — and we had nuclear treaties with them to reduce nuclear weapons,” Nelson said to the Seattle Times this April. “Anything that was a prescription for more concern, like civil-defense exercise, was felt to be nonproductive. . . . People didn’t want to be in any sort of posture that people were anticipating more (nuclear) threats. We wanted to reduce the threat.”

As a result, Nelson sponsored the successful bill that today prevents Washington State from preparing for a possible nuclear attack from North Korea. At the time that the bill passed, this stance put Washington at odds with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) nuclear-attack planning guidelines, leading FEMA to withhold $1.4 million in emergency funding from the state.

Like the rest of us, Washington probably doesn’t need to worry too much about threats from Kim Jong Un. But if the state’s legislators are smart, they’ll get rid of this outdated law — which is just about as crazy now as it was in 1984.