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

by Jeffrey Lewis

  She dropped to her knees just as the blast ripped through the hospital, slapping the glasses off her face and smashing the blood sample against the wall. She shouted for the chief resident. He was in his office, badly cut by debris. The entire hospital was in chaos. The windows were blown out, beds were overturned, and parts of the ceiling had collapsed. There was blood and glass all over. Patients were screaming. Others were lying motionless. At the end of the hallway, Oh’s patient was dead. So too were the technicians in the laboratory she’d been heading to with the blood sample. In fact, Dr. Oh was the only doctor on staff who was not seriously injured—but without her glasses.

  She quickly grabbed as many bandages as she could and began treating the injured, cleaning their wounds and dressing them one after another. Working steadily on the wounded patients and doctors inside the hospital, she was so focused on her work that she did not realize that thousands of maimed and dying residents of Busan were gathering outside.

  Busan had billed itself as the “medical hub” of Asia. In the developing world, there are usually about six hospital beds for every 1,000 people. In South Korea, that number was nine beds for every 1,000 people, and in Busan it was nearly twenty-one. With more than 72,000 hospital beds, Busan was as well equipped to handle a massive humanitarian crisis as any city in the world.

  But the scope of the humanitarian crisis now facing Busan was extraordinary. Two 20-kiloton nuclear weapons had detonated over the docks in the city’s harbor. The explosions killed almost 100,000 people and seriously injured more than 400,000, many of whom were too injured to move. Those who could move—or those whose friends or family members were able to carry them—were now descending on the city’s hospitals by the tens of thousands.

  The nuclear weapons that had killed and injured so many did not discriminate among their victims. The bomb does not spare doctors or nurses. Many hospitals in Busan were ravaged by the explosions and their aftereffects. St. Mary’s, less than a mile from one of the detonation points, was totally destroyed. And Pusan National University, where Dr. Oh was working, had a direct line of sight to the other explosion. With nothing to shield it from the blast, it had suffered terrible damage, although so far it had not collapsed. Thankfully, Busan is nestled in the mountains. So although the port district and its medical facilities had been partially leveled, the surrounding areas were somewhat shielded. Other hospitals, nestled in Busan’s mountains, had been largely spared—but now they, not to mention the surviving doctors, nurses, and orderlies at the stricken hospitals, were overwhelmed.

  As Dr. Oh began to treat the wounded, she noticed that, in addition to abrasions and lacerations, patients began appearing with terrible burns. Quickly she realized that she was running out of supplies, from medications to treat the burns to simple bandages. She kept treating one person after another. By this time, she recalled, that spark in her personality that had led her to try to see each patient as a person who deserved a bit of special treatment had disappeared entirely. She moved mechanically from one patient to the next, treating the same problems over and over again. She worked for seventeen hours straight, desperately trying to care for the wounded. When she attempted to sneak off to sleep, just for a few minutes, a group of wounded people found her and excoriated her for sleeping while they suffered, left untreated.

  As March 22 stretched on, Dr. Oh began to realize that there were simply too many patients to treat. She needed to make decisions. Which injuries were too light to bother with? Which were too severe to bother with? It was no use treating someone who was just going to die. And where were the other doctors and nurses? She remembered reading a study that said, after the Fukushima accident in Japan, many doctors, nurses, and clerical staff simply did not show up for work. Absentee rates were especially high among clerical staff. Where were they now that she needed help? She was angry—and then she felt a pang of guilt, as she wondered whether the absent colleagues she was cursing were among the dead or dying.

  There were so many patients dying now. They were dying inside the hospital, and they were dying outside, in the parking structures and in the street. The worst part was that there was no one to take the bodies away, and no place to take them. The smell inside the hospital was unbearable. A colleague told her that she should eat, but the thought of food sickened her.

  It was only at the end of the first day that she noticed new doctors and nurses had begun appearing.

  Local authorities had been able to organize a relief effort: the surviving hospitals in the port district were being staffed up with doctors from the countryside, and the wounded were being evacuated to hospitals throughout the region. One of the first decisions made by the authorities was to shut down the operations at Pusan National. Severe damage had made it structurally unsound, and most of the staff were casualties themselves. As the new doctors arrived to organize the evacuation of the patients, they reassigned the doctors on the scene, mostly either sending them to another hospital to get care for wounds that had been neglected or just sending them home for some sleep.

  Soon, one of the new doctors noticed Dr. Oh. She was past the point of exhaustion, having worked nonstop for more than twenty-four hours with neither food nor sleep. She was bandaging a patient who was long dead. The doctor stopped her, sat her down on a chair, and asked where she lived. Dr. Oh mentioned her mother’s address in the countryside. He walked her over to an evacuation point and sent her home.

  North Korea’s Strike in Context

  In the early-morning darkness of March 22, North Korea had conducted a limited nuclear strike against US forces throughout South Korea and Japan. Kim had targeted US bases throughout the region as far as Okinawa and Guam. His forces fired nuclear-armed ballistic missiles at a total of twenty-one military targets, most of which were US bases. Overall, in the course of forty minutes, North Korean units at nine different locations all over the country fired fifty-four nuclear-armed ballistic missiles against targets in South Korea and Japan as well as eight more missiles at American forces stationed in Okinawa and Guam.

  Fewer than half of North Korea’s missiles successfully delivered their nuclear payloads to their targets. Both the US military and the South Korean military claim that the missiles that did not arrive were probably stopped by their defenses. Other experts believe that the missiles simply broke up during flight, as some North Korean missiles have been known to do.

  Of the nuclear warheads that struck South Korea, Japan, and Guam, most missed their intended target by a significant distance—up to a kilometer and sometimes more. In some cases, this resulted in significant casualties in neighboring communities. In other cases, the warheads detonated harmlessly at sea. Not one of the eight missiles fired at US bases in Okinawa and Guam struck its target. Some failed to arrive, while the remainder landed in the water off the coast. The only fatalities reported in Okinawa and Guam arose from traffic accidents when the bombs went off.

  The metropolitan areas of Seoul, Pyongtaek, Daegu, and Busan in South Korea and Tokyo and Yokohama in Japan were the hardest hit. All told, about 1.4 million people died as a result of the attacks on March 22, 2020, while more than five million were severely wounded. Most of the casualties were in these urban centers.

  Among the six million people killed or wounded in North Korea’s nuclear strikes that day were about half of the ninety thousand American troops stationed in the two countries, as well as nearly thirty thousand of their dependents. The American service men and women deployed in Korea and Japan, along with their families, paid a steep cost—often the ultimate cost—to fill that role. Their sacrifices and examples will not soon be forgotten.

  And yet this was not to be the final sacrifice of March 2020. Although North Korea had expended a significant fraction of its nuclear arsenal in the March 22 strike, Kim Jong Un retained about a dozen high-yield thermonuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that could reach the United States.

  Kim Jong Un hoped that the loss of US forces in the r
egion and the horror of the casualties that day would cause the United States to halt what he believed was a coming invasion of North Korea. And if the bloodshed in Asia did not do the trick, Kim Jong Un hoped that the big missiles he was holding back, the ones that could strike the United States, would force Donald Trump to see sense. Tokyo was lost. Was Trump so eager for revenge that he was willing to risk Trump Tower as well?

  Kim was now betting his life that, having suffered through the terrible day of March 22, the United States had had enough.

  7

  Fumble

  In the hours before North Korea launched its nuclear strikes on South Korea and Japan, senior White House officials had become convinced that Kim and his generals were planning something significant.

  The warning that reached Keith Kellogg and Jack Francis at 1:16 PM on March 21 had been followed by additional warnings, all based on communications intercepts that documented encrypted communications flowing from North Korea’s military command out to missile units throughout the country. And yet, even as the evidence that North Korea was preparing a large-scale missile attack accumulated, White House officials were working on the assumption that North Korea would conduct a series of missile tests in response to the South Korean missile strikes on Pyongyang and Chunghwa—nothing more.

  At most, a few officials expressed concern that North Korea might arm one missile with a nuclear weapon and fire it over Japan and out in the ocean as a demonstration. This would be a momentous and extremely dangerous development, to be sure. And the possibility of a North Korean retaliation up to and including such a test caused great consternation in the Trump administration as the hours passed on March 21.

  No one in Washington, DC, or at Mar-a-Lago seems to have realized what was in store. The political crisis now bearing down upon them was not another North Korean missile test. It was a second war on the Korean Peninsula.

  Warning

  As the warnings accumulated on the afternoon of March 21, Francis and Kellogg had made the decision to leave Mar-a-Lago and travel over the bridge to the mainland. Trump was lingering over lunch, and while no one on his staff wanted to disturb him, Francis now felt that it was important that the chief of staff be physically near the president. Other former members of the Trump administration suggested later that Francis was still worried about the appearance of the president being at a golf club, and that the decision to move was intended solely to give the impression that the president was taking meetings and calls while at the club. In his interviews with members of this commission, Francis strenuously denied those allegations.

  Francis was expecting that North Korea would launch a number of missiles, but he was expecting a launch like those in 2006, when North Korea fired seven unarmed missiles into the sea. If there was to be a repeat of a missile launch such as that one, he knew, a statement would need to be made and the president would need to be the one to make it. “At this point,” one staffer recalled, “[Francis] mostly wanted to be near the president to make sure that, after the test, he could get the president back to Mar-a-Lago so any statement came from there, not the golf course.” Francis said that this is a mischaracterization of his motives. His only concern, he told the commission, was moving the president as soon as possible back to the secure facility at Mar-a-Lago, where he would be able to more effectively coordinate and manage the government response to any provocation or attack.

  About ten minutes after four o’clock, Francis was in the car traveling from Mar-a-Lago toward the Trump International Golf Club. At that moment, the first North Korean missiles, just launched from sites throughout the country, were breaking through the clouds over South Korea, Japan, and Guam and coming into full view of US early warning satellites, which detected their brightly burning exhaust.

  The satellites relayed the missile detections to a ground station in Germany, which passed the data back to North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) in Colorado Springs, which determined that the bright flashes really were missiles.

  Once confirmed, a “missile event” shot up the chain of command.

  At 4:14 PM, while Francis was still in the car en route to the golf club, his military assistant called him to explain that there were “several launches” from North Korea. At 4:17, the assistant called him back to say that the number was now about two dozen, and that the missiles were headed toward targets in Japan and South Korea. Francis understood immediately that this was an attack, not a missile test.

  Later he recalled being surprised by the number of missiles. Francis was not alone in this reaction. A recurring theme in the recollections of various officials is surprise at the number of nuclear-armed missiles fired by North Korea, in spite of the fact that the total number of missiles fired in the first phase of the Second Korean War—sixty-two projectiles—was well within the range of the classified estimates on which policymakers had been briefed several times throughout 2019. Those estimates—including one from September 2019 entitled “North Korean Stockpile Continuing to Expand”—seem to have had little effect on shaping the expectations of senior White House officials. “There are so many briefings about this stuff,” one NSC staffer explained. “The briefers used to joke by saying, ‘Don’t worry, there won’t be a quiz.’ But there was.”

  Francis and other White House officials, according to a number of people involved in the deliberations, simply did not process how rapidly the ground was shifting under them. The North Koreans were advancing their nuclear arsenal at a breathtaking pace. The expansion was carefully tracked by the US intelligence community and dutifully relayed to policymakers. But the reality of what was happening did not seem to sink in with US political leaders. Perhaps it was all just happening too quickly, or perhaps they could not reconcile their notions of North Korea as a backward “hermit kingdom” with reports of the aggressive and technologically sophisticated research-and-development campaign taking place inside the country. One way or another, top officials within the Trump administration appear to have missed the signals.

  The year 2017 had been a particular turning point. The previous year, Kim Jong Un had posed in a photograph with a mock-up of a North Korean nuclear weapon. That image contained small details that, to experts, hinted at highly classified knowledge about far more advanced nuclear weapons designs. The mock-up was a ball made of pentagons and hexagons, like a soccer ball but far more complex. The actual geometric shape is called a “chamfered truncated icosahedron.” The analysts just called it the “disco ball.”

  The disco ball had one curious feature: an enigmatic metal object sticking out of the top, clearly designed to hold something. But that something was missing. US nuclear weapons designers speculated that the holder was designed for a component called a “pulse-neutron tube.” This is the same technology used to treat patients with tumors. A nanoscale pulse-neutron source—a tiny device that fires neutrons through a relatively simple fusion process—can be surgically implanted next to a tumor, where it can bombard the growth with neutron radiation. Put a larger version of the same device in a nuclear weapon and it can fire those same neutrons into the center of the weapon just before it explodes, making the bomb vastly more efficient and opening up new design possibilities.

  In September 2016, North Korea tested the weapon whose mock-up had appeared in the photo. The explosion shook the ground with the force of about 20,000 tons of TNT—more powerful than either of the nuclear weapons the United States had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The test prompted a frantic review inside the CIA and other parts of the intelligence community.

  American analysts quickly concluded that North Korea’s nuclear weapons might be far more efficient than they had thought previously. In practical terms, “more efficient” meant that North Korea could make more bombs from the same amount of nuclear material. While the advances surprised some CIA analysts, others pointed out that the United States had demonstrated these technologies in the 1950s and 1960s and that other nuclear powers, including the Soviet Union a
nd China, had followed suit by the 1970s.

  After reassessing the status of North Korea’s nuclear development, the highest estimate of how many nuclear weapons Kim Jong Un could have jumped from forty to sixty. (The low end remained at thirty.) The same intelligence report also concluded that North Korea could be adding as many as twelve nuclear weapons a year to its arsenal—each using a composite of plutonium and highly enriched uranium and each small enough to fit on a missile.

  One month after this report was completed, North Korea released a second series of pictures of Kim Jong Un, this time standing next to a different model of a nuclear bomb. This weapon—which analysts nicknamed the “peanut” after its shape—was a thermonuclear weapon. And sitting in its metal holder was a black pulse-neutron tube.

  Hours after releasing the picture, North Korea detonated a massive nuclear explosion, demonstrating that the bomb modeled in the photo was already part of its nuclear arsenal. That explosion was ten times bigger than the explosions that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  Policymakers were routinely briefed on the revised assessment that the US intelligence community produced after this weapons test. The new report indicated that North Korea’s nuclear stockpile was even larger and more sophisticated than had been previously thought. This information was widely available to the president, his staff, and members of Congress. The estimate that increased the number of North Korean nuclear weapons from forty to sixty had even been leaked to the Washington Post in the summer of 2017.

  Yet neither the classified briefings nor the leaks seem to have changed how senior officials saw the threat from North Korea. According to aides, it was only after the first reports of a nuclear explosion in Seoul that Francis realized that the vast majority of the missiles in flight were armed with nuclear weapons. “I don’t know why it didn’t really click until then,” said one former White House staffer, “but it didn’t. These briefing papers talk about deuterium and tritium and plutonium—it’s like reading a periodic table in chemistry class. It’s different when someone tells you that the missiles are in the air. Then it’s for real.”