Books and arts - Imagining nuclear war

The terrifying thing about “The 2020 Commission Report” is how much of it is real

The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States: A Speculative Novel. By Jeffrey Lewis.Mariner Books; 304 pages; $15.99. WH Allen; £9.99.

OPEN-SOURCE intelligence is the art of learning things by procuring and analysing unclassified (if not always very accessible) evidence. Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on arms control and disarmament at the Middlebury Institute in Monterey, California, is a keen exponent of this craft. In “The 2020 Commission Report” he applies it to the near future.

The fiction is framed as an American government report, published in 2023, into the loss of 3m lives—1.4m of them Americans—to North Korean nuclear weapons in March 2020. Like the reports of the Roberts Commission on Pearl Harbour and the 9/11 Commission, it finds that the disaster could have been avoided, but that the evidence of the escalating threat was missed—because the people in charge were misreading the world they lived in. Mr Lewis’s message is that anyone who believes that either supine summitry or threats of a “bloody nose” are good responses to North Korea’s nuclear programme is guilty of just such a misreading today.

The imaginary sequence of errors—in software, communication, tactics, intelligence and politics—that leads to the spasm of mass murder is chillingly plausible. This is largely because, as the book’s notes make clear, most of them have already happened in real life. Jets have indeed strayed off course because of software glitches; airliners have been taken for military probes of air defences and shot down. Decision-makers have assumed that actions by one ally were sanctioned by another; America has tried to kill its adversary’s leaders on the eve of war. The commander-in-chief has tweeted threateningly in ALL CAPS.

Though some of the characters in the book are invented, its cast includes Presidents Donald Trump and Moon Jae-in, plus Kim Jong Un and Jim Mattis, America’s defence secretary. Again, they mostly say and do things very like those they have said and done before. The harrowing tales of victims are similarly authentic; Mr Lewis has adapted many of them from accounts of survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The book’s American publication came one day after the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing.

Fans of “Arms Control Wonk”, Mr Lewis’s podcast, will expect notes of absurdist and scornful humour; they will not be disappointed. More surprising is that, in a sense, the book is optimistic about American democracy. The devastating blow that it envisages might undo even the sturdiest polity. Given the existing rifts in American society at a time of relative peace, it is easy to see the recriminations and repercussions after a nuclear catastrophe capsizing its politics altogether. Yet Mr Lewis’s premise depends on America’s institutions continuing to function in recognisable form. That implies a bedrock faith in the resilience of the republic—more, perhaps, than soberly assessed open-source intelligence might warrant.