The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against The United States

by Jeffrey Lewis

“Massive punishment, kill chains, KAMD—I don’t like things explained with military jargon,” Chief of Staff Im Jong-seok recalled. “But when General Jeong put it in plain words, I wasn’t sure it was an improvement.”

“We were so worried that the Americans might try to stop us,” Im explained, “that it never occurred to us they might make things worse. I don’t even use Twitter.”

They worried about the appearance of Trump playing golf during the crisis, but in the end they decided it would be easier to manage the fallout from the press than the fallout from the president.

The strikes on South Korea and Japan were not simply among the worst atrocities in human history. They were also a cowardly attack on America and those who served it. Kim had killed tens of thousands of US service personnel and their family members. Whatever happened, Mattis later recalled, he was going to make sure that Kim Jong Un died in North Korea. There would be no comfortable exile and no negotiated settlement. This was to the death.

The site was struck with no less than a dozen cruise missiles. They targeted not only the palace’s buildings but also the systems that provided electricity and ventilation to Kim’s bunker beneath the mountain. Although he was far too deep for American missiles or bombs to reach directly, there was another possibility—what the military calls “functional defeat,” or effectively turning the bunker into a tomb. At the very least, the bombs would make life very unpleasant for those inside by striking the entrances and the life support systems. With no electricity, it would be dark in the bunker. The increasingly foul air would be hard to breathe. Food would spoil, and toilets would not flush. Kim would be cut off from communications. The explosions might also trigger avalanches that would send rocks cascading over the entrance of the bunker, blocking the door.

Air Force officials believed that it was essential to destroy these ICBMs before North Korea could disperse them. Their concern was sometimes shrouded in euphemisms like “left of launch” and “pre-boost phase intercept,” but the jargon all meant the same thing: destroy the missiles before they could be launched.