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January 30 - April 8, 2020
basis of a Reagan-era program of psychological operations initiated to strengthen deterrence against Moscow. “It
“The purpose of the psychological operations was to have a strong containment alternative to the military strike that Bolton kept pushing.” The proposal garnered widespread support within the Trump administration after it became evident that the main alternative—the so-called punch in the nose—carried even greater risks.
of SCATHE JIGSAW was to unsettle Kim Jong Un and his military leaders. A secondary objective was to persuade leaders in Beijing that a failure to resolve the crisis on the Korean Peninsula might result in a military conflict.
“The idea was to keep ‘Pots and Pans’ limited to a small circle,” one of Bolton’s aides explained. “Only the core staff at the White House and Mattis’s people executing it would know about the program, along with the Chinese and North Koreans, of course.”
informing US Forces Korea, as dictated in contingency plans that had been agreed between Seoul and Washington.
All agreed, however, that the Americans had been slow to recognize that South Koreans no longer saw themselves as junior partners in the defense of their own country and its citizens.
“Pompeo kept feeding Trump assessments that US military threats will force Kim to bow to US demands for nuclear disarmament,” one former White House official said. Some officials felt that Pompeo’s characterizations went far beyond what the CIA analysts
The State Department’s Policy Planning Office, which was normally charged with developing long-term strategy, had instead assumed control over day-to-day operations that should have been conducted by assistant secretaries—officials
Ma’s proposal appears to have caught Ambassador Haley by surprise. The United States did not have diplomatic relations with North Korea. Within North Korea, Sweden was the “protecting power” for US interests, serving as an embassy by proxy. In the United States, North Korea had a mission at the United Nations, a line of communication that diplomats sometimes called “the New York channel.” Now Ma was suggesting that Haley activate this channel.
after the other. The South Korean missiles destroyed two buildings—the headquarters of the North Korean Air Force in Chunghwa and a villa at the primary Kim family leadership compound in Pyongyang.
After smoke began pouring into the National Military Command Center (NMCC) beneath the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the US Department of Defense took more than an hour to activate its alternate command center at Site R in rural Pennsylvania.
Kim believed that the United States in general and Donald Trump specifically were embarked on an active campaign to assassinate him.
correctly judged that Kim was a “rational actor” motivated by clear, long-term goals that revolved around ensuring regime survival—that is, his own survival.
First, Kim believed that the United States had engineered this crisis, staging the provocation with an American bomber. His aides were adamant that the aircraft had been a military plane,
Second, over the past month the United States had massed a large number of troops, aircraft, and ships on and around the Korean Peninsula as part of the annual FOAL EAGLE/KEY RESOLVE military war game conducted with South Korea.
In December 2014, North Korea suffered a massive distributed denial-of-service attack that knocked down its internet after President Barack Obama promised a “proportionate response” to allegations that North Korea had hacked the company Sony Entertainment
Neither Kim nor his aides seriously considered the possibility that the missiles were South Korean or that they had been launched without the approval of the United States.
grown to involve dozens of missiles against a much larger number of targets.
Like so much of the Iraq War, it was based on flawed intelligence.
“Kim Jong Il believes that if North Korea creates more than 20,000 American casualties in the region, the US will roll back and North Korea will win the war.”
Using drones to attack missile defenses was hardly a novel idea. Iran had, for many years, trained its proxies to attack American-made Patriot defenses by sending cheap drones that used GPS to navigate along waypoints, before diving down on the radar and exploding.
North Korean units at nine different locations all over the country fired fifty-four nuclear-armed ballistic missiles against targets in South Korea and Japan, as well as eight more missiles at American forces stationed in Okinawa and Guam. From the first launch to the last, the entire attack occurred in a span of about half an hour.
We have concluded that there is no evidence of any conspiracy—just a tragic series of mistakes and errors of judgment. The signals of the coming nuclear attack were simply blotted out by the sun that spring day.
Mattis would compliment the president on his strong instincts. But then, ever so slightly, he would complicate the story, eventually convincing the president that he wanted to do the opposite of what he had just said. Mattis understood that between the president’s susceptibility to flattery and disinterest in details, there was ample room to maneuver. Francis was counting on Mattis to use these skills to full effect in case they needed to talk Trump out
Kellogg thanked Admiral Rogers for the report, then hung up and discussed the matter with Francis. The two decided to take no action. The report was, according to senior officials, “vague and not specific.” And the timing was a challenge.
It seems not to have occurred to either of them that Kim Jong Un, cowering in a basement and struggling with only intermittent access to communications, might not share their clarity on these points.
These conflagrations swept through the cities and towns of South Korea and Japan, burning brightly enough to keep the darkness at bay for days.
Francis was expecting that North Korea would launch a number of missiles, but he was expecting a launch like those in 2006, when North Korea fired seven unarmed missiles into the sea.
At 4:17, the assistant called him back to say that the number was now about two dozen, and that the missiles were headed toward targets in Japan and South Korea. Francis understood immediately that this was an attack, not a missile test.
any strike against North Korea at all—would have to be integrated into a full air campaign to find and destroy those missiles before they could be launched, Francis explained. That would require hundreds of aircraft and could not simply be ordered up on a moment’s notice.
Steve Bannon, who famously believed that China, not North Korea, was the main threat to the United States.
“The nuclear weapon’s only good against cities,” observed retired general Chuck Horner shortly after the end of that war. “It’s not any good against troops in the desert, I mean it takes too many of ’em, so the problem you have is, you have a war where if you kill a lot of people, particularly women and children, you lose the war no matter what happens on the battlefield.”
These missiles were a real danger, and Mattis knew it would be next to impossible to find them all. Nor did he have much confidence in the missile defense system in Alaska.
used his [nuclear weapons] for sure. I needed to give the Air Force time to find them. I knew it was a long shot, but we had to try.”
They implied that Pyongyang believed that South Korea’s missile strikes on Pyongyang and Chunghwa were the beginning of a larger American military operation.
would like to seek asylum for myself and my staff. This is my decision alone. No one else knows this yet.” Seiler was stunned. In retrospect,
“But you lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s because war is a test of will. Capitalists aren’t willing to blow up the earth, because you care only about money. The supreme leader understood what I meant: with his strength of will, surely we would prevail.”
This approach had worked poorly during the 1991 Gulf War. Afterward, the United States could not confirm that even a single one of Saddam’s Scuds had been destroyed prior to its launch.
Even when the pilots saw a launch, it was usually from a great distance, and there was nothing they could do to stop it. It simply isn’t possible for aircraft to engage enemy missiles as they lift off. Many pilots recalled the helpless feeling of watching the huge missiles powering up into space,
Like so many other defense decisions, the GMD system was a product of compromises and technical limitations.
The system’s defenders—that is, those who wanted to fix it—knew that it needed many, many more tests. “There’s no way to prove out the design—let alone its reliability—without more flight tests,” one of the panel members complained. “It’s stupid.”
Administration after administration had scaled back testing, resorting to classifying ever more information about failures.
That left more than thirty interceptors with the old boards. “If there’s a foreign object in one unit, it’s sort of whistling past the graveyard to assume that that’s a once-in-a-lifetime event,”
It is far more likely, they argued, that the missiles broke up in flight or that the warheads disintegrated upon reentry.
Florida has no system for alerting citizens to a ballistic missile attack. In fact, Hawaii is the only state that does. As a result, it was the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency that provided the first warning to the public that North Korea was attacking the United States.
The president couldn’t reach key people on regular phones because people like the secretary of defense had abandoned buildings in DC. Cell phones were useless because the networks were saturated.”
Extraordinary amounts of black smoke from burning cities has led to a period of global cooling, which is almost certainly responsible for the recent rise in food prices around the world—which in turn is believed to be responsible for the famines that have struck Africa, South Asia, and China over the past few years.
would only serve to inflame partisan passions again, without bringing back the millions of dead. Although it is possible to disagree with specific decisions taken by senior officials, the commission found that they made the best decisions they could with the information that was available to them at the time.
