The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War

by Fred Kaplan

On the Fourth of July, in what he called an Independence Day “gift to American bastards,” Kim launched a missile that, had it followed a different flight path, could have hit the West Coast of the United States. Three weeks later, he followed up with tests of another potential ICBM as well as four short-range missiles, which landed in the Sea of Japan. On August 8, ten days after those tests, Trump told reporters outside the clubhouse of his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” or else “they will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Kim Jong-un, he said, “has been very threatening, beyond a normal state, and, as I said, they will be met with fire, fury and, frankly, power, the likes of which the world has never seen before”—repeating the line, almost word for word, as if he’d rehearsed it after being told that this was how President Harry Truman described the effects of the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima.