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

A sobering, all too plausible near future hypothetical

Jeffrey Lewis very persuasively conjures up a scenario in which incompetent, petty leadership by #45 combined with undisciplined messaging could potentially lead us to war and destruction, given the relationship we have with nuclear-armed adversaries and the increasingly fraught ones with our allies.

What almost scares me more than the thought of the potential destruction and loss of lives, though, is that if despite all this it's still plausible that Pence would be our next President

Since this book does try to resemble a Commission Report, it was a little dry (although not nearly as dry as a real report). It's gripping because it feels so plausible and real -- terrifyingly so.

This is not a novel. This is speculative fiction in the style of a non-fiction book. No protagonist, no dialogue, just description. Trump did this Mun Jaein¹ did that, Kim Chŏngŭn² did that. The rule for novels is “show, don’t tell”. The rule here was “Tell, tell, tell. Then tell some details everybody knows. Then tell some unimportant detail you came across during research.” That is how the whole book is written. “Now this politician decided this. That is like what happened before, in 2013 in Korea and in 2003 in Iraq.³” Again and again and again. It’s quite tedious.

Let’s take the first scene: in an airliner most of the instruments suffer a power failure. In a novel, you would start with one of the pilots thinking about this or that, maybe the young passengers going to live in yurts for a few weeks, and then you have em getting quite a fright when suddenly they whole aircraft is broken and ey has to work hard to keep it flying. Great drama. Nice opening scene.

But no, we get about a page or two about how several A320s did In Real Life suffer this exact problem. I have the receipts! Here is when and where it happened. (But something’s wrong there: a flight from London to Budapest had problems over Nantes‽) There is something else odd in the scene, too: an aircraft leaving the planned flight path and flying towards enemy territory without answering the radio is reason to scramble some QRA-style interceptors, especially when the transponder is off.⁴

No, seriously. Don’t print “novel” on the cover of works that are not novels. And don’t spend something like half of your “novel” talking about past events only remotely connected to the plot.

There’s a bunch of other stuff that would cost it one star (★★★★☆ instead of ★★★★★), some minor, some not so much. Who calls an A320 a “jumbo jet”? Why is nobody panicking because of fallout and radiation in chapter 6? Why isn’t the whole post-attack horror show done then, but only in chapter 10, after America is attacked?

That said, yeah, looks like a nuclear war might break out this way. That leaves the question: how to get the real politicians to be half as scared as this book has left me?

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¹ In Revised Romanization, apparently the main Romanization in South Korea
² In McCune–Reischauer romanization, apparently the main Romanization in North Korea
³ And then there is an end note citing the sources to proof that those things in 2013 and 2003 really did happen.
⁴ With the transponder on, you usually just have to re-establish communications, that is, wake the pilots up.