The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States: A Speculative Novel

Jeffrey Lewis

Aug 2018 · Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

About this ebook

This “brilliantly conceived” novel imagines a devastating nuclear attack on America and the official government report of the calamity (Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and Command and Control).
 
“The skies over the Korean Peninsula on March 21, 2020, were clear and blue.” So begins this sobering report by the Commission on the Nuclear Attacks against the United States, established by Congress and President Donald J. Trump to investigate the horrific events of the following three days. An independent, bipartisan panel led by nuclear expert Jeffrey Lewis, the commission was charged with finding and reporting the relevant facts, investigating how the nuclear war began, and determining whether our government was adequately prepared.
 
Did President Trump and his advisers understand North Korean views about nuclear weapons? Did the tragic milestones of that fateful month—North Korea's accidental shoot-down of Air Busan flight 411, the retaliatory strike by South Korea, and the tweet that triggered vastly more carnage—inevitably lead to war? Or did America’s leaders have the opportunity to avert the greatest calamity in the history of our nation?
 
Answering these questions will not bring back the lives lost in March, 2020. It will not rebuild New York, Washington, or the other cities reduced to rubble. But at the very least, it might prevent a tragedy of this magnitude from occurring again. It is this hope that inspired The 2020 Commission Report.
 
“I couldn’t put the book down, reading most of it in the course of one increasingly intense evening. If fear of nuclear war is going to keep you up at night, at least it can be a page-turner.”—New Scientist

Ratings and reviews

Finished this book in 3 days. Absolutely incredible read.

About the author

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 previously worked for the Department of Defense. Also a former director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation and former executive director of the Managing the Atom Project at the Belfer Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, he is currently the publisher of ArmsControlWonk.com, the leading blog on disarmament, arms control, and nonproliferation. In addition to hosting the Arms Control Wonk podcast, he was profiled on This American Life, and has written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Daily Beast, the Washington Post, and elsewhere.Neil Hellegers grew up in New Jersey and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a BA in theater arts and a minor in psychology before getting an MFA in acting from the Trinity Rep Conservatory in Providence, Rhode Island. He moved to New York City in 2003 and, since then, has made a career of theatrical performance, percussion, theater education, and audiobook narration. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.