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

The public health implications of entire populations with compromised immunity are wide-ranging and severe: Jennifer Leaning, “Public Health Aspects of Nuclear War,” Annual Review of Public Health 7 (1986): 411–439.

more than 80,000 federal jobs were located in northern Virginia and the area was home to more than 100,000 federal workers: The statistics are from the FRED data provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

which in turn is believed to be responsible for the famines that have struck Africa, South Asia, and China over the past few years: All statistics are derived from Ira Helfand, Nuclear Famine: 2 Billion People at Risk? (Washington, DC: Physicians for Social Responsibility, 2013).

with the costs associated with rebuilding Manhattan alone estimated at between $15 trillion and $20 trillion: Estimates are derived (and adjusted for inflation) from Barbara Reichmuth, Steve Short, Tom Wood, Fred Rutz, and Debbie Schwartz, “Economic Consequences of a Radiological/Nuclear Attack: Cleanup Standards Significantly Affect Cost,” Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, 2005.

Jeffrey Lewis, PhD, is a columnist for Foreign Policy , a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, and a research affiliate at the Stanford University Center for Security and International Cooperation. He is the founding publisher of Arms Control Wonk ( armscontrolwonk.com), the leading blog on disarmament, arms control, and nonproliferation. He lives in central California.

“Astonishing… Lewis deftly intertwines real-world reports with a fictional narrative that extends some of the president’s worst flaws to logical conclusions.”

“Terrifyingly plausible… A horrific imagined future based on a quite plausible extrapolation of the present… In its efforts to tug at the sleeve of a blithe nation, Lewis’s book follows in the post-apocalyptic footsteps of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach or the 1983 film The Day After . In its black comedy, which surfaces in the deadpan prose of the report, it is a Dr Strangelove for our time. Trump is as flamboyantly grotesque a character as any cooked up by Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers.”

“Terrifying… the warning we need right now… [The 2020 Commission Report] aims to do what The Day After did, and spur us to action… It shows us an entirely plausible path from today’s tense geopolitics to atomic annihilation and beyond, to what comes after nuclear fire.”

“Lewis’s cautionary tale is a reminder of the grave risks at stake if diplomatic talks with Pyongyang fail, and the dangerous consequences that could follow if Washington returns to military brinkmanship and threatening rhetoric in a renewed attempt to pressure North Korea to unilaterally disarm.”

“A book with a ferocious pace and more black humor than one could imagine.”

“Jeffrey Lewis has taken one of our most serious security crises and imagined how it could erupt into a catastrophic nuclear war. The result is a book that is entertaining—it grips the reader with its dramatic story—but also educational: it informs the reader what an unprecedented catastrophe even a ‘small’ nuclear war would be, and how easy it would be for us to blunder into one. This lesson must be learned by more of us if we are to take the actions that could lower the probability of such a catastrophe.”

“The plot of this novel is so absurd and implausible—a nuclear war prompted by a presidential tweet—that it feels devastatingly true. The 2020 Commission Report is a brilliantly conceived page-turner. Let’s hope it isn’t prophetic.”

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Copyright 2018 by Jeffrey Lewis

All rights reserved

THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION—AN IMAGINATION OF A FUTURE BASED ON ACTUAL EVENTS. EVERYTHING THAT TAKES PLACE BEFORE AUGUST 7, 2018, IS TRUE AND SUPPORTED BY THE ENDNOTES, WHICH ARE ALSO TRUE. EVERYTHING THAT TAKES PLACE AFTER THAT DATE IS INVENTED. IN SOME INSTANCES, AS INDICATED IN THE ENDNOTES AND THE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, QUOTES FROM PAST EVENTS ARE SUPERIMPOSED ON INVENTED SITUATIONS.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.comor to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 9-781-328-57391-9 (paperback)

ISBN 9-781-328-57392-6 (ebook)

Cover design by Christopher Moisan

Maps by Mapping Specialists, Ltd.

v1.0718

According to a follow-up statement released by the White House, “consillary” is “an accepted anglicization of the Italian term consigliere ” and is “commonly used by real Americans who don’t learn Italian at fancy Swiss boarding schools.”

Former president Trump was emphatic that the commission note his score, which was one stroke under par. While the commission understands that the step of noting the president’s golf score may seem out of place in such a document, the former president, after a draft was shared with him for his comment, expressed his concern that “the fact that you didn’t publish the number proves that you are just like all the biased reporters who are part of the anti-Trump fake news media that never gives me as much credit as I deserve.”

Kim Jong Un appears to have been referring to a comment attributed to Trump: “If there’s going to be a war to stop Kim Jong Un, it will be over there. If thousands die, they’re going to die over there. They’re not going to die here.” Trump denies ever saying this.