There are books you read before bed, and there are books that make you wonder whether going to bed is a good idea. Jeffrey Lewis’s The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States and Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario belong to the latter category. Neither will improve your sleep. Together, however, they make an good argument that we have become much too comfortable with weapons whose continued non-use depends on people behaving sensibly under circumstances almost guaranteed to discourage sensible behavior.
The authors take different approaches. Lewis, a nuclear-policy specialist, writes a speculative novel disguised (thinly, as we will see) as a government investigation into a disaster that has already happened. Jacobsen, the journalist, assembles reporting and expert interviews into a hypothetical disaster unfolding practically before our eyes. Lewis recreates a pseudo-9/11-like Commission that explains how everything went wrong. Jacobsen provides a minute-by-minute countdown during which there is increasingly little left to explain His book appeared in 2018; hers in 2024. The catastrophe Lewis assigned to 2020 did not happen, thankfully, but I checked many of the events that led up to the nuclear exchange. They are all real as are Trump, Moon and Un, participants all. Personalities are important.
Flight BX 411, an Airbus 320, was shot down. The Airbus 320 has had periodic navigational and electrical cockpit issues requiring a reset. [1] During the blackout period, the plane wandered off course and into North Korean airspace. They thought it might be a bomber, the radar technicians all terrified they might make a mistake and let a bomber through. Kim Jung Un issued a belligerent statement, one that infuriated South Korean President Moon, and as one of the aftermath's survivors recalled, the meeting shifted from a possible rescue mission to one of getting revenge. The hawks were ascendant. They had been outraged after two previous NK provocations when they had wanted to respond but had been restrained by the U.S. [2] Lewis’s catastrophe begins with a mistake. North Korean air defenses shoot down a South Korean civilian airliner that has strayed into their airspace. South Korean President Moon Jae-in responds with conventional missile strikes, including one against a residence belonging to Kim Jong Un. Kim, isolated and struggling to obtain reliable information, concludes that something considerably larger may be underway: an attempt to remove him permanently from the business of governing. Into the mess tweets Donald Trump (yes, it takes place during his first administration.)
The plan the U.S. developed in 2016 was a massive missile attack intended to "decapitate " the North Korean leadership. (Sound familiar?) [3] Trump plays a major role, it is after all, 2020, so the historical players are all in the novel with as much verisimilitude as possible, which makes it even scarier.
Kim’s circle interprets the South Korean strikes as further evidence that a decapitation attack is in progress. Kim orders nuclear strikes against targets in South Korea and Japan. When the United States subsequently begins a conventional campaign to destroy North Korea’s remaining missiles, the effort fails to prevent launches against American cities. In Lewis’s fictional accounting, the attacks immediately kill 1.4 million Americans, with further deaths from injuries and radiation in the weeks that follow.
If that mistake sounds familiar. On September 1, 1983, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Boeing 747 traveling from New York to Seoul via Anchorage, strayed far off its intended route into Soviet airspace and was shot down by a Soviet fighter, killing all 269 passengers and crew aboard. Soviet officials claimed the aircraft was conducting espionage, but subsequent assessments indicated that the airliner had inadvertently gone off course and that Soviet forces may not have correctly identified it as a civilian aircraft before attacking. The destruction of the plane provoked international outrage; President Ronald Reagan strongly condemned the attack, and the tragedy further intensified already severe Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. But it might have had a different outcome.
The U.S. is not immune from error. On July 3, 1988, the US Navy guided-missile cruiser USS Vincennes mistakenly shot down Iran Air Flight 655, over the Strait of Hormuz . The Iran–Iraq War was ongoing at the time and tensions were running high. All 290 aboard, including 66 children, were killed. During a battle on the surface with Iranian gunboats, the ship’s crew tragically mistook a civilian Airbus A300 flying a normal route for an attacking Iranian F-14 Tomcat fighter jet. There was a lot of combat stress, time pressure and a misinterpretation of data from the ship's advanced Aegis combat system when the cruiser fired two surface-to-air missiles into Iranian airspace. It was one of the deadliest civilian aviation disasters caused by military action, and it left a deep and lasting scar on U.S.-Iran relations. The U.S. never apologized for which the Iranians have never forgiven nor forgotten.
What makes Lewis’s premise persuasive is that the participants do not have to share the same understanding of events. Indeed, the disaster requires that they don’t. One government sees punishment. Another sees preparations for invasion. A threat meant to intimidate becomes confirmation that an attack has already begun. Each side reacts to what it thinks the other side is doing, and the distance between those interpretations fills up with bodies.
This is Lewis’s strongest insight. Nuclear war need not require an irrational leader who simply wants to burn down the world. It can arise from leaders pursuing recognizable goals—survival, retaliation, credibility—while working from bad information. (More holes in the Swiss cheese lining up.) Their decisions may have an internal logic without being remotely sensible in the larger picture. As one comparative critic has observed, Lewis’s story is frightening precisely because governments concerned with their own survival misread one another and escalate beyond recovery.
My chief reservation concerns Trump. Lewis sometimes pushes his characterization toward caricature. The behavior may be consistent with recognizable traits, but the satirical edge occasionally competes with the broader argument. Readers who dislike Trump will enjoy the recognition; readers who support him may decide the whole book is a partisan exercise and stop paying attention. Admittedly, as Trump becomes more and more a parody of himself, it’s difficult to avoid.
That would be a shame, because Lewis’s central warning is much larger than one president. Personality matters, but so do broken communications, military signaling, political pressure, and fear. Making the president look ridiculous is less unsettling than showing how a system might fail even with people who consider themselves quite serious.
So these are the holes that line up:
Bad weather obscuring events on the ground from satellite coverage.
Concurrent activities that are misinterpreted, e.g. airline off course, provocative activities (bombers flying close to enemy radar sites to track their efficiency,)
Assumptions that sensors will work perfectly.
-Dark period. Satellites see the initial firing of missiles but after the initial burn they go dark and can no longer be tracked except by ground radar. satellite data alone cannot confirm warhead separation or precise target destination. Ends at burnout and warhead separation (typically at an altitude between 500 and 700 miles).
-Midcourse Phase (20 Minutes): The warhead coasts through space along an exoatmospheric trajectory toward its target.
-Terminal Phase (1.6 Minutes / 100 Seconds): The warhead reenters the Earth's atmosphere and descends to target detonation.
Problems inherent in ground-based radar. Ground-based radar systems—such as the 5-story Long Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR) at Clear Space Force Station near Fairbanks, Alaska—are physically constrained by the radar horizon. Ground radars cannot transmit through the Earth's curvature to detect an ascending missile immediately following launch.
Communication failures. For example North Korea’s cell phone network had no backup systems because of sanctions preventing normal installation, so Kim Jong Un lost communication with his military resources and assumed the worst. Loss of WiFi reduced informational resources in the U.S.
Ill considered comments by leaders. Trumps tweets suggesting a decapitation attack on NK predisposed Kim Jong Un to fear the worst. President Moon’s reluctance to check with the U.S. was because he didn’t not want to be considered as being under U.S. control or being viewed as “soft” hence his response to the attack on the airliner. These added to command pressure.
Command pressure. System glitches, computer chip failures, atmospheric phenomena, or solar activity can generate false indications of an attack, initiating a launch sequence under severe time pressure. Leaders have just a few minutes to make decisions to launch or not. Under "Launch on Warning" policies, combining space-based sensor alerts with an 8-minute ground-radar blindspot creates structural pressure to order a retaliatory launch before secondary radar tracking can fully confirm the threat.
Annie Jacobsen's approach is more matter-of-fact. She starts the machinery and then explains how it runs. Lewis provides more explanation on why decisions might be made.
Her scenario begins with a surprise North Korean nuclear attack against Washington, D.C., and California’s Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. I did not know that NK has several diesel subs carrying nuclear warheads in ballistic missiles, that could easily be parked off the coast. When those missiles are launched the response time is considerably diminished . The United States retaliates against North Korea with 82 nuclear warheads. American land-based missiles travel on trajectories over Russia, where their launch is interpreted as an attack on Russia itself. Russia responds with a massive nuclear strike; the United States then launches its own all-out retaliation. The central sequence unfolds in 72 minutes.
Seventy-two minutes. There are meetings about lunch arrangements that take longer.
Jacobsen’s minute-by-minute structure is extraordinarily effective. Detection, assessment, briefing, interception, evacuation, retaliation: each stage consumes time that cannot be replenished. Technical capability does not necessarily produce understanding. A system may identify a missile launch with remarkable speed while the humans operating it remain uncertain about intention, destination, and what else may be coming.
Drawing on numerous expert interviews, she takes readers through warning systems, command arrangements, missile defense, and presidential decision-making. These are not abstract boxes on an organizational chart. In her narrative, they are systems that must function while the country is being attacked and the people responsible for decisions are being rushed out of harm’s way.
The book is particularly good at stripping the euphemisms from nuclear warfare. Terms such as “exchange” and “response” make the subject sound almost contractual. Jacobsen restores the physical meaning: blast, fire, collapsing infrastructure, catastrophic injuries, and the longer consequences of smoke entering the atmosphere and disrupting food production. Her account of Washington’s destruction is difficult to read, as it ought to be.
My larger difficulty is the initiating attack. Lewis gives us a crisis in which Kim comes to believe his survival is threatened. Jacobsen begins with a surprise strike whose motivation is much less developed. Once the missiles are flying, she excels at describing consequences. Why someone would begin this particular sequence is less convincing. Her catastrophe is technically elaborate but psychologically thinner.
Lewis shows us that we died because the Wi-Fi dropped and the President was mad on Twitter, framing our doom around institutional incompetence, flaws in materiel, and fragile egos. Jacobsen shows us that we died because Mach 24 physics does not leave time to ask questions, blaming automated machinery and hair-trigger doctrine. Lewis forces us to realize our leaders are far too foolish to be trusted with the apocalypse, while Jacobsen proves that even if our leaders were towering moral geniuses, the system we built does not give them enough time to think anyway.
Optimists would argue her book’s narrative momentum creates its principal weakness. Almost every turn takes the reader toward the worst available outcome. Opportunities for delay, restraint, clarification, or an alternative response receive much less weight than the forces driving escalation. An Air University review similarly notes that the book’s worst-case framing leaves little room for de-escalation and simplifies the institutional complexity of nuclear decision-making. Pessimist counter the short time frame leaves no room for any clarification or restraint. Optimists assume humans will always make good decisions. We know that’s not true particularly when one religious group is looking forward to Armageddon.
Lewis’s book is obviously pre-Hegseth, the “testosterone man.” Hegseth, in his book American Crusade make no bones that an attack on Islam is a Christian doctrine and worthy cause. His tattoos support it as do his recent comments. “We’re fighting religious fanatics who seek a nuclear capability in order for some religious Armageddon,” Hegseth said of Iranian leaders. “But from my perspective, I mean, obviously I’m a man of faith who encourages our troops to lean into their faith, rely on God.”
The radical religious beliefs of both Islamists and American Christian Nationalists represent just another hole in the Swiss cheese.
Notes:
[1] On certain Airbus A320 and A319 aircraft, electrical transients or software anomalies can occasionally cause a loss of the Integrated Standby Instrument System (ISIS) or main Electronic Instrument System (EIS) display units. To resolve these uncommanded blackouts or transient glitches, maintenance personnel and flight crews follow strict QRH (Quick Reference Handbook) protocols to cycle power or reset designated circuit breakers, allowing the avionics computers to safely reinitialize.
[2] Fact: In 2010, the Korean Peninsula experienced its most severe military escalation since the armistice through two consecutive North Korean attacks near the disputed Northern Limit Line in the Yellow Sea. On March 26, the South Korean Navy corvette ROKS Cheonon was torpedoed by a North Korean midget submarine, resulting in the deaths of 46 sailors. This was followed on November 23 by a sudden artillery bombardment of Yeonpyeong Island by North Korean forces, which killed two marines and two civilians and prompted immediate South Korean artillery retaliation. Together, these crises shattered remaining illusions of inter-Korean detente and fundamentally hardened Seoul's defense posture.
[3] Fact: You can read an in-depth analysis of South Korea's "Three-Axis" defense framework—which includes the Korea Massive Punishment and Retaliation (KMPR) doctrine alongside the Kill Chain and KAMD systems—in the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Analysis on South Korea's Revitalized Three-Axis System.
For more brain-numbing fear regarding its origins and conventional second-strike logic, you can also review the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Report on South Korea's Offensive Military Strategy. This 2024 report is particularly interesting in light of Trump pulling the aircraft carrier task-force away from Taiwan and South Korean where they had been ostensibly there to protect South Korea. It's the foundation in fact that makes this book so frightening.
N.B.
I used AI to check events in the book against real events. Then I double checked the AI. This is what it found.
* Technical and command-and-control flaws: North Korea’s actual nuclear and missile arsenals, alert postures, and communications vulnerabilities (such as reliance on fragile or unsecure command links) reflect real intelligence assessments.
* Historical risk of miscalculation: The danger of mistaking a civilian or commercial/neutral object for a military threat mirrors historical close-calls and shootdowns (like past airliner incidents). KAL and Iranian airliners shot down spring immediately to mind.
* Psychological and political friction: The book mirrors real-world crisis dynamics—how political posturing, social media/brinkmanship (such as Donald Trump's actual past rhetoric), and institutional miscommunication can compound errors.
* The author’s expertise: Jeffrey Lewis is a real arms-control and nonproliferation scholar; the footnotes and operational constraints in the text are anchored in how real military and intelligence bureaucracies operate.
Bibliographic essay
Wit, J. S., Poneman, D. B., & Gallucci, R. L. (2004). Going critical: The first North Korean nuclear crisis. Rowman & Littlefield. See how it was handled under the Clinton administration
This review was particularly useful in providing additional background on what was real in Lewis’s book. Far too much, really. Here’s a quote: “And of course, there is death by Twitter. How plausible would it be for Kim Jong Un, in a certain context, to misread Trump’s tweet, carelessly sent one morning from Mar-a-Lago: “LITTLE ROCKET MAN WON’T BE BOTHERING US MUCH LONGER!” This is Lewis’s fictional side, but disturbingly, it hardly feels like much artistic license.”
Interview with the author in the NY Times.
Genesis of the book.
Another interview with the author. When asked if there was something he wished he could have put in the book, but didn’t. “Definitely the thing about Trump not understanding time zones. I would have made so much hay with that, but if I had invented it, no one would have believed it. I would have had that be a consequential plot point, that he literally couldn’t understand that the Earth was round and that it was warm and sunny here and the middle of the night there.” When I read that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The interview is worth reading.
Comment from the military side: Plausible
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gQ1SxT-ges
Excellent interview with Jeffrey Lewis.
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