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

Book excerpt: This “brilliantly conceived” novel imagines a devastating nuclear attack on America and the official government report of the calamity (Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and Command and Control). “The skies over the Korean Peninsula on March 21, 2020, were clear and blue.” So begins this sobering report by the Commission on the Nuclear Attacks against the United States, established by Congress and President Donald J. Trump to investigate the horrific events of the following three days. An independent, bipartisan panel led by nuclear expert Jeffrey Lewis, the commission was charged with finding and reporting the relevant facts, investigating how the nuclear war began, and determining whether our government was adequately prepared. Did President Trump and his advisers understand North Korean views about nuclear weapons? Did the tragic milestones of that fateful month—North Korea's accidental shoot-down of Air Busan flight 411, the retaliatory strike by South Korea, and the tweet that triggered vastly more carnage—inevitably lead to war? Or did America’s leaders have the opportunity to avert the greatest calamity in the history of our nation? Answering these questions will not bring back the lives lost in March, 2020. It will not rebuild New York, Washington, or the other cities reduced to rubble. But at the very least, it might prevent a tragedy of this magnitude from occurring again. It is this hope that inspired The 2020 Commission Report. “I couldn’t put the book down, reading most of it in the course of one increasingly intense evening. If fear of nuclear war is going to keep you up at night, at least it can be a page-turner.”—New Scientist