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

This is an important and challenging policy question. There are many strong and differing opinions, even among the commissioners. Ultimately, however, they agreed that it lay beyond the scope of their mandate. The commission’s task was to understand how the nuclear war came about and to provide the American public with the facts of the situation in the most objective way possible. They have done this. To go further and ask what implications those facts might have for issues such as nuclear strategy or foreign policy would be to engage in speculation. Such speculation, in the current partisan environment, they felt, would only serve to further inflame passions and undermine the fragile national unity upon which our recovery depends. This commission of politicians and other distinguished public servants was asked to answer the simple question of what happened. Now that they have completed their task, they return to their lives as private citizens who each possess one vote in our great Republic—one vote that counts exactly the same as every other American citizen’s.

April 2, 2023

The so-called 2020 Commission is a total Witch Hunt and just more Deep State FAKE NEWS.

The Democrats will NEVER accept that I defeated Crooked Hilary even though 3 million illegals voted for her.

They can’t stand that I won the Republican nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party, and then beat their candidate.

Now the Democrats want to blame me for the Nuclear War (which was very terrible) and that they caused. The SAME nuclear war that killed Melania who was so beautiful.

The Democrats like Lyin’ Chuck Schumer will never admit that I almost made a deal with Rocketman. It would have been a very good deal for the world. And the Phony media says negotiations “collapsed” but never admit that it was the Democrats that didn’t want a deal and said that it was terrible (although they did and very often). Crooked Hilary, Lyin’ Chuck and the Democrats did every thing to kill the deal because they can’t stand me winning. VERY DISHONEST.

Fortunately, we have many great Americans who remain very supportive of our Great President Mike Pence and the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to take our Country back and build it up much better than it was before, rather than trying to burn it all down.

I am deeply indebted to Hidehiko Yuzaki, the governor of Hiroshima prefecture, for inviting me to be a member of his roundtable on disarmament. Visiting Hiroshima each August is a profoundly moving experience. 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. These interviews were translated into English by the college students Yumi Kodama, Junko Kato, Junko Kawamoto, Masako Kubota, Chiharu Kimura, and Kumi Komatsu, who were advised by Laurence Wiig, and they are now posted at the Atomic Archive. I want people to read the stories of the survivors. I hope that I did right by them.

Along the same lines, John Hersey’s 1946 book Hiroshima is probably more responsible than anything else for my interest in nuclear weapons. While there really is a South Korean television drama with a doctor named Oh Soo-hyun, the Dr. Oh depicted in Chapter 6 is a fictional homage to the very real Dr. Terafumi Sasaki, who was profiled in Hersey’s Hiroshima . Everyone who cares about the fate of this world and the danger posed by nuclear weapons should read Hersey’s book and the stories of the Hibakusha, and then visit the city of Hiroshima. Do it and you will understand.

Similarly, I used many stories from 9/11—particularly those relating to events on Air Force One. If you are interested in that day, I found Garrett Graff’s oral history “‘We’re the Only Plane in the Sky,’” published in Politico, to be completely spellbinding.

All of the casualty estimates were created using Alex Wellerstein’s incomparable Nukemap website.

I am also thankful to a slew of local friends, including Josh and Molly Goshorn, who let me use their real-life experience with the false alarm in Hawaii, and Jay and Chloe Dolata, who let me sit for hours at Carmel Belle writing.

I am grateful to the suggestions of those who read drafts of chapters, including Joe Cirincione, Ian Martin, Adam Rawnsley, Peter Scoblic, and Erin Simpson. I am shamelessly stealing your suggestions and taking credit for them.

Bill Potter, the director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, and my colleagues at the center were tremendously supportive. Melissa Hanham, Josh Pollack, and Dave Schmerler helped me think through so many scenarios and picked up the slack when I was overextended. Grace Liu provided translations and notes on Korean culture.

I am grateful to Mike Madden at the Washington Post for commissioning the op-ed that was the germ of the idea that grew into this book.

My literary agent, Gillian MacKenzie at MacKenzie Wolf, was a tireless advocate for this book project, reading chapters as soon as they were finished.

My editor, Alex Littlefield, and the entire team at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have been a joy to work with, even on some of the more emotionally difficult chapters. Cynthia Buck did an incredible job copyediting the manuscript.

Finally, and most important, I am grateful to my wife, Jill, and our three children—Sebastien, Julian, and Alma. They bore the brunt of the many weekends I spent writing instead of parenting.

on October 22, 2005, a British Airways A319 flight from London Heathrow Airport to Budapest, Hungary, suffered a similar problem: See UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch, “Report on the Serious Incident to Airbus 319-11, Registration G-EXAC, Near Nantes, France, on September 15, 2006,” Aircraft Accident Report 4/2009, July 2009.

a United Airlines flight from Newark to Denver suffered a nearly identical failure: National Transportation Safety Board (NTSA), “Safety Recommendations A-08-53 through 55,” July 22, 2008.

At least four such incidents had occurred in the United Statesafterthe FAA directive was issued in 2010: David Porter, “Airbuses Suffer Cockpit Power Failure, Await Fixes,” Associated Press, August 11, 2012.

a Reagan-era program of psychological operations initiated to strengthen deterrence against Moscow: The Reagan-era PSYOP program and its contribution to the “War Scare” of 1983 are described by Benjamin B. Fischer in “A Cold War Conundrum: The 1983 Soviet War Scare,” intelligence monograph, Central Intelligence Agency, September 1997.