The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States: A Speculative Novel

by Jeffrey Lewis

The skies over the Korean Peninsula on March 21, 2020, were clear and blue.

Administration officials pointed to a tweet sent by President Trump as confirming, in a general way, the initiation of psychological operations. Donald J. Trump @tehDonaldJTrump If China doesn’t get little Rocket Man under control, we’re going to start RATTLING THE POTS AND PANS.

A clearer statement of the purpose of this effort is written in the margins of a draft copy of the order, retained by Bolton: “PRESIDENT SAYS KNOCK SOME SENSE INTO THAT FAT CRAZY KID.”

“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.”

This mismanagement of information within the Trump White House squandered several crucial hours during which American leaders might have otherwise managed the escalating crisis. This bureaucratic breakdown also resulted in confused messaging from the White House that, as we now know, dramatically increased the danger confronting the United States and helped to precipitate the cataclysm that followed.

president to get in. The president told Francis to get out and to sit in the passenger seat. As the president drove Francis toward the bomb shelter, golfers on the course—who were unaware of the impending attack—waved at the president. He waved back. One golfer posted a picture of the two driving to the shelter on his Instagram account with the caption: “Why does Jack Francis always look so sad? Smile like President Trump! He is MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. #MAGA.”

The president now seemed to recall the briefing he had received about these procedures—or perhaps to become aware of the military aide standing in the bunker with him. Because he suddenly turned his full attention to the soldier. “I just remember the president said, ‘Come over here!’ to the major with the football, gesturing with his hands,” one aide recalled. What happened next is a matter of some dispute. The president, Francis, and others have asserted that the president was simply asking for the football so that he could review the briefing book located inside it, the book that contained the different options for a nuclear attack. The military aide, however, in the Article 92 hearing for his court-martial, explained that he was uncomfortable with the president’s tone and demeanor. He said that he was concerned that he was about to be given an order that he believed was unlawful. He understood the president’s gesture to be a request for the football to order a launch, not merely to review the options.

Though it should be plain enough, we feel compelled to say directly that there was no “deep state” conspiracy to explode nuclear weapons throughout the United States.

Every time I visit Hiroshima, I find myself wondering how to persuade more people to listen to the stories of the Hibakusha—the Japanese people who survived the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. I made the decision to use their real testimonies to describe the horror of the fictional nuclear war in these pages. I did this because it is easy, as Americans, to let the slightly stilted grammar of a translation create a false sense of distance between ourselves and the very real people who suffered and died. But they were and are people, just like we are, and our fate might well turn out to be the same. The testimonies presented in Chapter 10 are largely drawn from interviews presented in the television program Hiroshima Witness, produced by the Hiroshima Peace Cultural Center and NHK, Japan’s national public broadcaster.