Works of fiction that purport to be collections of documents—let’s call them “assemblage novels”—are hard to pull off. The Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet succeeded in 2015—and ended up on the Booker Prize shortlist—with His Bloody Project, a novel that was supposedly a collection of documents relating to a 19th-century murder. Max Brooks’s Zombie Survival Guide, a clever fake manual for enduring the zombie apocalypse, is another recent entry in the genre.
After the Bombs Fell
Imagining nuclear war with North Korea
STR / AFP / Getty
Now comes Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and a prolific tweeter (he’s @armscontrolwonk), and his 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States. The book is conceived as a 9/11 Commission-style report, issued in 2023, examining the causes of North Korean nuclear strikes on New York, Northern Virginia, Hawaii, and South Florida that occurred in March 2020. The book is a mixture of nonfiction and speculation: Every event that occurs before the book’s publication this August actually happened. The rest is the work of Lewis’s imagination.
As a piece of literature, Lewis’s book fails. The key to a successful assemblage novel is maintaining utter fealty to the tone of the documents you purport to be presenting. In other words, you can’t break character. As such, The 2020 Commission Report should be written in the dispassionate, wooden, bureaucratic tone that characterized not only the 9/11 Commission Report, but also the 1946 Barkley investigation that looked into the causes of the attack on Pearl Harbor. And at times, Lewis affects this tone. But all too often, he veers into more a novelistic, ｅxpressionist style that would never show up in a document we’re to believe was written by a group of public servants.
Lewis also attempts a ham-handed parody of Donald Trump, including fake tweets and a supposed statement from the then-former president about the commission’s findings. The Trump parody simply doesn’t work. That’s not to single Lewis out in particular: Almost all Trump parodies fail. The trouble is that the president is already so extreme in his personality—and, really, such a weird guy—that he’s just about impossible to parody. The funniest Trump tweets are the ones he really writes.
Literary intentions aside, as a thinly disguised polemic about the horrors of nuclear war, Lewis’s book is very effective and deeply affecting. And as a warning of how close we are to unimaginable catastrophe, it’s downright chilling.
The story goes like this: In March 2020, a South Korean airliner with malfunctioning navigation equipment veers dangerously close to North Korean airspace. The North Koreans, in light of recent incursions by American bombers and ongoing war games by South Korea and the United States, think the plane is a military one. (We learn that the talks between North Korea and the United States eventually broke down and so-called war games resumed.) North Korea shoots down the errant plane, killing all aboard.
South Korean president Moon Jae-in feels compelled to act: He orders limited airstrikes on North Korea, targeting its air force headquarters and a villa belonging to Kim Jong-un and his family. The attack knocks out North Korea’s communications, isolating the dictator, who is in a remote part of the country. Without sufficient information and convinced this attack is the beginning of an American invasion of North Korea—a tweet from President Trump suggesting as much doesn’t help—Kim orders nuclear attacks on U.S. military facilities throughout Asia. These horrific attacks devastate Seoul, Tokyo, and Busan.
Kim, like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein before him, underestimates American wherewithal: He expects his attacks on Korea and Japan will compel a negotiated settlement. He is mistaken. America swiftly begins a bombing campaign against North Korea. In a final attempt at “regime survival,” Kim orders the launch of nuclear-tipped ICBMs against American targets. Some fail, including all eight of those aimed at U.S. bases in Guam and Okinawa. Others succeed, to utterly devastating effect. Manhattan, Northern Virginia, Honolulu, and South Florida are pulverized.
Testimony from survivors of the attacks demonstrates the horrors of nuclear war. (Lewis reveals at the end of the book that he based the accounts on those of survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) Lewis also shows how the effects of nuclear war linger far beyond the initial devastation: “Extraordinary amounts of black smoke from burning cities has led to a period of global cooling . . . which . . . is believed to be responsible for the famines that have struck Africa, South Asia, and China over the past few years,” the commission writes. Public health facilities were devastated, leading to outbreaks of the plague and other diseases.
Lewis is also frighteningly convincing when describing the political and social ramifications of the attacks. Unlike the 9/11 attacks, the 2020 nuclear attacks do not unify the country. Partisanship grows more intense, and pernicious Alex Jones-style conspiracy theorizing is alive and well: “As their wounds and burns attest, the millions of survivors are not ‘crisis actors,’” the commissioners write. “It is shocking to us to see that these opinions appear widespread and persistent online, as well as in many parts of the United States not directly affected by the attacks.” Shocking indeed, but all too plausible.
