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

by Jeffrey Lewis

  Despite its proximity to the downtown government complex, the Blue House sustained only what is called “light damage.” The explosion shattered all the windows, sending shards of flying glass through the buildings. Although Im, lying in his bed, suffered lacerations on the side of his body facing the window, he was not seriously injured. The guesthouse did not collapse on him. A few of the buildings were seriously damaged when the blast wave pushed past them, then reflected off the massive hillside and hit them again from behind. The effect was like a riptide, straining the buildings in one direction, then pulling their foundations out from under them in the other.

  Im was able to stumble outside, although he was in a daze. He initially thought it was snowing. “Only after a few moments did I realize that it wasn’t snow, but that there were pieces of paper floating everywhere. I picked up one. It was the damage assessment that General Jeong had tucked under his arm.”

  After the blast knocked down the massive towers in central Seoul and the heavy steel-and-concrete structures fell, millions of sheets of paper from the office buildings now turned to rubble drifted up and wafted through what remained of the shattered city. Many survivors remembered the pieces of paper as a snowfall. Many others found a sort of solace in tracing the pieces of paper that they picked up that day and, for some strange reason they said, could not throw away. Each scrap of paper seemed to help connect many of the survivors to those others with whom they shared that terrible day.

  It is not possible, however, that Im picked up a copy of the damage assessment distributed the night before. When the blast hit, General Jeong was in a car driving from the Central Government Complex to South Korea’s military headquarters—the blast wave flipped his car, then buried it beneath ten feet of rubble from the buildings it pushed over. When the general’s body was recovered, all six copies of the damage assessment were still locked in his briefcase. Im’s shock and confusion, it seems, had simply gotten the better of him.

  Im then attempted to make his way on foot to the Central Government Complex a mile away, not realizing that it was totally destroyed. There was so much dust and ash in the air that he could barely see or breathe. As he picked his way through the wreckage, his progress slowed to a crawl as his coughing and choking got the better of him. A seemingly endless number of crushed or overturned cars littered the vast, indistinguishable landscape of rubble.

  After a nuclear explosion in or near an urban area, collapsed buildings spread a debris field of rubble almost evenly across the blast zone. In Seoul, a modern city with towering skyscrapers, the debris field was more than twenty feet high in some places. Im found that he could not go more than a few hundred yards before he had to turn back.

  When Im arrived back at the Blue House, he found it completely deserted. There were no security guards at any of the checkpoints. He was able to walk through the grounds, into the main building, and then down into the bunker without stopping once to show anyone a badge or let them inspect his briefcase. That’s convenient, he thought: in his haste after the blast, he had neglected to even dress himself, much less pick up his badge and briefcase. He was wearing nothing but the T-shirt and briefs in which he had fallen asleep. Both were soaked with his blood from the wounds he had sustained in the blast.

  As Im entered the bunker, he found Admiral Um, sitting alone. Um had also attempted to go downtown after the blast, but he too had found his way blocked. When that failed, he thought perhaps he should make his way to the Crisis Room. The two of them sat there, alone in the bunker, with all the television screens off and the telephones dead.

  Im asked if they could go someplace else, but the admiral had already considered that. “No car,” he told Im. His driver had fled after dropping him off. The two continued to sit there, with the admiral in his splendid uniform and the civilian in his bloodied underwear. “It was really quiet, and then I heard thunder,” Im recalled. “Admiral Um listened for a moment, then shook his head. He just said, ‘Artillery.’”

  Tokyo

  Kenichi Murakami was the chief of the Tokyo Fire Department. He was very proud of that fact. Of course, all around the world, young boys and girls dream of growing up to be firefighters. But in Japanese culture, firefighters are more romantic bandit than simple hero. The traditional ladder-wielding fireman depicted in Kabuki theater or in a woodblock print is more likely to be found brawling with sumo wrestlers than putting out fires.

  The firemen of Edo—as Tokyo was called during the early nineteenth century—certainly had plenty of fires to fight. Traditional Japanese homes were built of wood and paper, and they were packed close together. Great fires ripped through the city on a regular basis—so often that people began to call the conflagrations edo no hana (“the flowers of Edo”). The cultural difference between firefighters in other parts of the world and the tobi (firefighters) of Edo can be explained by the simple fact that the latter did not fight fires with water; they had no water trucks or water pumps, just a few buckets and ladders. The primary method of controlling fires at the time was to knock down houses to make a firebreak, which allowed the fire to burn itself out without spreading. Thus, the fire brigades weren’t there to fight the fire but to fight any homeowner who might—understandably—resist seeing his home demolished.

  A sort of protection racket arose around the firefighters. After all, it was far better if the tobi sacrificed a neighbor’s house to the firebreak rather than your own. Naturally, the Edo firemen became a tough lot—drinking, brawling, and covered in tattoos. Indeed, the distinctive tattoos that mark the Yakuza, today’s Japanese gangsters, are a relic of the Edo fire brigades.

  Modern firefighters in Japan, of course, are a more professional group. The only real links between modern firefighters and the Edo firemen are the acrobatic teams that each department keeps; these are groups of skilled firemen who perform dangerous stunts atop ladders to thrill children. They are well educated and professional, respected for their bravery in the face of great danger. There are a number of women in their ranks. The model for the modern Japanese firefighter is less the Edo fire brigades than the professional firemen who helped battle the firebombing of Tokyo in the final months of World War II. On a single night in 1945, nearly sixteen square miles of the city burned in what was then the largest firestorm in history, and larger than the fire that would engulf Hiroshima a few months later.

  Today Japanese people expect a lot from firefighters. And Murakami expected a lot of himself. Ordinarily, he might have been on his way to the office at 6:02 AM, even on a Sunday. After all, he had so many preparations to plan for overseeing the 2020 Summer Olympics, which were set to open in Tokyo in just 124 days. There was much to do. But he was tired. He simply needed a day off, one day when he was not headed into the office while everyone else slept.

  Murakami was still in bed, then, when his cell phone buzzed.

  ⚠

  Emergency Alert

  Missile Launch

  2020/03/22 06:02

  A missile was reportedly fired from North Korea. Please stay inside your building or evacuate to the basement.

  (Ministry of Disaster Management)

  Five minutes later, at 6:07, a nuclear weapon exploded with the force of 30 kilotons high above Japan’s Defense Ministry. This was twice the size of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. A few minutes later, a second weapon exploded a mile to the north.

  Murakami saw both flashes. He called his office, but got no answer.

  If Murakami had been on his way to work, he probably would have perished while sitting in his car at an intersection. And had he survived the car journey, he probably would have been killed by the second blast, which severely damaged the Tokyo Fire Department headquarters less than two miles from ground zero. He was very lucky.

  He got dressed in a hurry and went outside. As he tried to start his car, he briefly remembered someone telling him that an electromagnetic pulse—one of the side effects of a nuclear explosion—could damage a car’s electronics. But the c
ar started. Murakami soon realized that the problem wasn’t going to be a dead car; rather, it was going to be the tens of thousands of working ones.

  When Murakami got to the highway, he saw a massive traffic jam caused by people trying to flee Tokyo. He got out of his car. His phone was working, but there was still no answer at the Fire Department headquarters. He started to wonder whether there still was an office. He started calling around to other headquarters within the Fire Department. Murakami soon realized that no one in central Tokyo was answering.

  He needed to set up a temporary command post. The Olympic Security Command Center (OSCC) was now largely functional and outside of central Tokyo, far from the blast zone. But it was still quite a distance away. Fortunately, the Tokyo Fire Department had a few helicopters to rescue people from burning buildings. The fire chief managed to get in touch with one of his fire stations where a helicopter was based and asked for a ride.

  In the helicopter, Murakami had a commanding view of Tokyo. He looked over the endless city and saw that the center of Tokyo around where the Defense Ministry had been was completely leveled. The blasts had knocked down all the buildings for more than a mile, and further out it had stripped others to their bare steel frames. Those bare frames stood like skeletons around the blast zone, keeping watch over the smoldering ruins. And then Murakami noticed what worried him most: fires were breaking out all around the city.

  Nuclear explosions release an enormous amount of heat, setting fires that, in many cases, can do far more damage than the blast from the explosion. But fires are hard to predict. Murakami’s fire department had trained for all kinds of disasters, including a nuclear explosion. He was prepared for fires to break out in residential areas and at low-rise public buildings constructed of wood. Most of the technical literature works from the assumption that modern cities, built of steel and concrete, are relatively resistant to fire. But the reality can be far more complicated—as Murakami learned when he arrived at the OSCC.

  In recent years, Murakami now recalled, there had been a spate of high-rise fires, many of which resulted from the flammable cladding on the outside of the buildings that has become popular because it both improves the appearance of a building and increases its energy efficiency. The Grenfell Tower in London that killed seventy-one people in 2017 was the most famous case, but there had been similar fires in Australia and South Korea. One survey of Melbourne concluded that more than half of the 170 buildings surveyed were a fire risk. In energy-conscious Japan, such cladding was also commonplace.

  Now Murakami was witnessing the same effect across his own city: many tall buildings were on fire. These structures might well have been perfectly safe in normal conditions, but the towers were simply not designed to withstand the intense heat of a nuclear explosion. To make matters worse, the widespread loss of power had led to sharply reduced water pressure throughout Tokyo, disabling many sprinkler systems. Fighting fires in high-rise buildings is one of the most demanding tasks any firefighter will ever face. Murakami was facing dozens of fires in tall buildings spread around the disaster area.

  Inside the OSCC, Murakami worked hard to coordinate the groups of firefighters throughout the city, but the fires erupted so quickly that he found it impossible to keep up. Told that a building was on fire one moment, he was often informed the next that it was hopeless and out of control—all before he could assign firefighters to deal with the problem.

  In the midst of this maelstrom, he received another text:

  ⚠

  Emergency Alert

  Missile Launch

  2020/03/22 07:23

  A missile was reportedly fired from North Korea. Please stay inside your building or evacuate to the basement.

  (Ministry of Disaster Management)

  Mildly surprised to see that the emergency alert system was still functioning, Murakami felt his spirits lift a bit, before the weight of his situation settled over him once more. He had a responsibility to do his part, even if his efforts seemed to be futile. He decided not to seek shelter, but to keep working. How can I hide underground when my firefighters are out there? he later recalled thinking.

  The next missile fired was not a nuclear one. North Korea had a small stockpile of nuclear weapons, most of which had been fired in the opening attack. Over the next twenty-four hours, Murakami’s phone would continue to receive missile alerts. Eventually, he remembered something he had read about World War II. During the war, after Allied bombers dropped incendiaries to set fire to German and Japanese cities, the Allies would launch a second wave of bombers with explosives—to kill the firefighters attempting to put out the fires. In Syria, the same kind of strikes were called “double taps”—one strike against a target, then a second strike to kill the first responders. As his firefighters were trying desperately to extinguish the blazes breaking out all over Tokyo, Murakami realized that the North Koreans were trying to stop them. They were trying to kill his firefighters so that Tokyo would burn.

  These follow-on missiles, armed with conventional explosives, were frightening, but far too inaccurate to really hamper the firefighters. Soon enough, the strikes dwindled. Over the course of the first day, the firefighters responded to warnings of incoming missiles by calling the warheads sumo-tori—a sly reference to the sumo wrestlers who had brawled with their predecessors of yesteryear.

  As the day dragged on, the fires burning throughout Tokyo began to draw air in toward the city center. March is the windiest month in Tokyo, and so, at first, Murakami merely worried that the stiff breeze might fan the flames at the individual fire sites, making the job tougher and more dangerous. But as the force of the winds continued to climb, his heart sank. It wasn’t a March wind at all. In fact, the morning had been perfectly calm.

  The fires were growing in strength and starting to make their own weather. This was the beginning of a firestorm.

  Not every nuclear explosion unleashes a firestorm. In August 1945, Hiroshima burned in one, but Nagasaki, nestled among the mountains, did not. Predicting whether a firestorm will or will not develop is nearly impossible—it’s so difficult, in fact, that the US military has never even attempted to calculate deaths or damage from fire in its models of nuclear war. Fire is simply too unpredictable, too wild, for neat and tidy calculations.

  As the wind speed topped 70 miles per hour—the same as a typhoon—Murakami realized that the unthinkable was happening. Tokyo was now a city of metal and glass, not wood and paper. But it would burn just as it did during the Second World War when the Allies dropped incendiary bombs on it.

  Modern firefighters, even with all their equipment and technology, are as helpless in the face of a firestorm as an Edo fireman with his buckets and ladders. Murakami understood that he could not put out a fire of this size and scale. He would have to treat it like a wildfire, containing it until it burned itself out.

  What he needed to make this tactic work were firebreaks. But how to make firebreaks in a city? The firemen of Edo might knock down a house made of wood and paper with their hands, but modern steel-and-concrete structures? Murakami took out a map and began to locate the natural firebreaks—rivers, open spaces, hillsides—throughout Tokyo. He began to order the crews to retreat to these points, leaving much of central Tokyo to burn. “I thought about those old guys, the ones who fought fires with not much more than their ladders,” he said later. “I felt totally helpless. Maybe firefighting today isn’t so different after all.”

  Busan

  Oh Soo-hyun shared a name with a doctor in a Korean soap opera. She was a doctor too, though beyond that single point of comparison, she was completely different from her fictional counterpart. The television Oh was rich and sheltered. The emergency room doctor in Busan, South Korea, was competent and thoroughly middle-class. The television Oh had a father who ran the hospital. The doctor in Busan had only her mother, who lived in a small hamlet two hours outside the city.

  Korean dramas about doctors typically feature the archetype of the �
�genius” doctor—a person with something resembling the magical power that most cultures attribute to healers. Oh knew that the only genius when it came to practicing medicine was working hard and paying attention. Still, she cherished little moments of, if not genius, then ingenuity—fitting an extra patient into her schedule, for instance, or bending a rule to help someone. This was especially true for patients from her hometown, who came to the city only when they had a serious problem. If she thought a patient didn’t have a lot of money, she might do a test herself rather than make a referral to one of her specialist colleagues. If it proved unnecessary, she wouldn’t charge the patient for the test.

  Lately, her supervisor had cautioned her about bending such rules. The warning was a mild one, but Oh took things seriously. She’d started to have a recurring nightmare in which her bosses discovered every single bent rule or infraction and then insisted that she pay them back for all the hospital resources she’d wasted. On the morning of March 22, she was tired, having spent another night wrestling with that unwelcome dream.

  Still, Oh didn’t exactly stop bending rules. At 6:02 that morning, she was doing it again—walking down a hallway and carrying a blood sample she’d drawn herself, quite against the regulations, from a patient who was now seated in one of the examining rooms at the end of the hall. She was just one step from the giant window that looked out over the courtyard when there was a giant flash—“like someone taking a picture in an old-time movie,” she remembered later.