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

by Jeffrey Lewis

  Perhaps all that unites these individuals is the powerful sense that the portrayal of the events of March 21 by the media and political figures has been misleading, inaccurate, and heavily sanitized. We on the commission have come to have enormous sympathy for those who suffered through those terrible days.

  Thus, rather than attempting to offer a definitive account of the events of March 21, 2020, the commission has opted to collect the stories of more than a dozen survivors. Their voices can convey what our words cannot.

  Emergency Alert

  Following the first reports on social media that North Korea had used nuclear weapons against South Korea and Japan, there were isolated reports of panic across the continental United States, Alaska, and Hawaii. The traffic leaving major US cities picked up as some people sought to evacuate. Social media posts showed empty store shelves as Americans tried to prepare for the same kind of cataclysm that had befallen their Asian allies.

  On the whole, however, most Americans did nothing. For as long as anyone could remember, war was something that happened to other people, in other places. They were not warned that this was different, nor were they told to prepare.

  Few Americans, even those in positions of power, expected that North Korea would strike the United States. Many doubted that North Korea even had such weapons, while others were confident that the Pentagon had a plan to protect Americans. And above all, perhaps, the dull pressure of everyday life held many Americans to their routines.

  North Korea’s first missile was fired at Mar-a-Lago in the middle of the night in Korea, at 1:02 AM Pyongyang time. A second missile followed fourteen minutes later, headed for Pearl Harbor.

  Florida has no system for alerting citizens to a ballistic missile attack. In fact, Hawaii is the only state that does. As a result, it was the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency that provided the first warning to the public that North Korea was attacking the United States. At 6:24 AM local time—just before dawn—a text message appeared on phones throughout the state of Hawaii.

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  Emergency Alert

  BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

  Josh Goshorn, an electrical engineer from Carmel, California, was on vacation on Oahu with his family. He was getting ready to go surfing as soon as the sun broke over the horizon—what is called “dawn patrol”—when his phone lit up. “It was scary for sure,” he later explained, “but there had been a false alarm before. I was still planning on going out, but my wife Molly called me and said, ‘Joshua, come home now, the kids are really freaking out.’”

  Despite the obvious escalation over the past twenty-four hours, very few people took shelter. Hawaii had been testing warning sirens consistently since 2018, and many people simply assumed that this warning was either yet another exercise or a false alarm. After all, a false alarm with identical wording had been mistakenly sent in 2018. Most people believed that March 21 would be a day like any other.

  “I wondered who was going to get fired this time,” Goshorn recalled thinking.

  Astronauts

  After that lone warning, the nuclear warheads began landing throughout the United States. The first hit Florida, where the nuclear weapon aimed at Mar-a-Lago fell up the coast in Jupiter. Then a nuclear weapon hit Pearl Harbor. New York was next, suffering a direct hit from a nuclear weapon that exploded over Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan. A nuclear weapon, presumably aimed at the White House, missed and exploded in Arlington, Virginia, followed by another an hour later and a few miles away. Finally, another nuclear weapon that had been aimed at Pearl Harbor fell in Honolulu.

  All told, seven nuclear weapons, each exploding with a force twenty times greater than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, brought death and destruction to the United States over a six-hour span.

  For most Americans affected by the attack, memories begin with the flash. Survivors almost uniformly remark on the intense white light followed by pitch blackness—a darkness both literal and figurative. The blast wave that arrived shortly after the explosion’s flash engulfed survivors in a black cloud of ash, broken glass, and other debris—cutting them, breaking bones, and blotting out the sun.

  [Name withheld], Honolulu, HI: There was the flash and darkness. I think I was unconscious for a while. We came to and called each other’s names.

  [Name withheld], Honolulu, HI: It was like a white magnesium flash. I lost consciousness right after or almost at the same time I saw the flash. When I regained consciousness, I found myself in the dark.

  [Name withheld], New York, NY: When the blast came, my friend and I were blown into another room. I was unconscious for a while, and when I came to, I found myself in the dark.

  [Name withheld], Jupiter, FL: I was at the window when the flash went off. It was so bright—ten or a hundred or a thousand times brighter than a camera flash bulb. The flash was piercing my eyes and my mind went blank. The glass from the windows was shattered all over the floor. I was lying on the floor too.

  [Name withheld], Arlington, VA: I cried out, and as soon as I did I felt weightless, as if I were an astronaut. I was unconscious for twenty or thirty seconds. When I came to, I realized that everybody, including myself, was lying at one side of the room. Nobody was standing. The desks and chairs had also blown off to one side. At the windows, there was no glass in the panes, and the window frames had been blown out as well.

  As the survivors regained consciousness, they found themselves surrounded by dead and injured people. Many survivors were seriously injured themselves but in the shock did not realize it. Only slowly did they begin to reckon with the death and destruction that they now saw all around them.

  Hair Loss

  With the United States under nuclear attack, Colonel Tom Miller, the pilot of Air Force One, had to decide where to take the president, who at the moment was accompanied only by Secret Service agents and relatively junior staff. None of them were in a position to make a strong recommendation about a destination. “I’d never heard the word ‘decapitation attack’ before,” one aide recalled. “There are still missiles out there and the Secret Service says to the president, ‘We don’t think it’s safe for you to return to Washington.’”

  Given that Barksdale Air Force Base had been literally targeted on a map released by the North Koreans, Colonel Miller decided that the best thing to do would be to cruise off the coast until the situation became less chaotic. “The pilot says at that point, ‘Let’s just go cruise around . . . for a little bit,’” said the communications systems operator aboard Air Force One. “That was our Pearl Harbor. You train for nuclear war, then you get into something like that. All the money they pumped into us for training, that worked. We could read each other’s minds.”

  Aides recalled the surreal feeling of knowing that the country was coming under attack, but being unable to do anything about it. They had no cell-phone reception and nothing to do. They simply waited, watching cable television as the first scenes of horror unfolded in Florida and Hawaii. “We were able to get some TV reception,” one aide recalled. “They broke for commercial. I couldn’t believe it. A hair-loss commercial comes on. I remember thinking, in the middle of all this, I’m watching this commercial for hair loss.

  “She Was Alive and We Were So Glad”

  Over the next few hours, the horror of the day repeated itself again and again, immeasurably. The nuclear weapon that fell directly on Manhattan exploded with the force of 200 kilotons—about ten times the power of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. The two bombs that hit the Washington metropolitan area leveled much of the northern Virginia suburban area—home to more than three million people—but missed the White House, which was largely empty. And another nuclear weapon fell on Pearl Harbor.

  On the ground, survivors were beginning to collect themselves. In New York City, Nikki Haley’s apartment building at UN Plaza had been heavily damaged in the explosion, but it was still standing. She recalled that the windows had b
een blown out and the building had bent over so far under the pressure that she felt it might snap, before it rocked back violently, swaying like a ship on rough seas. “When I came to, I was anxious to know what happened to my son,” she recalled. “I thought, I have to go, I have to go and find him.”

  There was no electricity or water, and the building’s windows had been blown out. Haley lived in the penthouse, fifty stories above the city, and the wind was fierce. Although injured, she walked down the interior stairwell all the way to the ground level and then began to make her way down FDR Drive toward the school where her son had spent the morning in a spring tennis program.

  “I saw a young boy coming my way,” she told the commission later. “His skin was dangling all over and he was naked. He was muttering, ‘Mother, water, mother, water.’” she recalled. “I thought he might be my son, but he wasn’t. I didn’t give him any water. I am sorry that I didn’t.”

  In the confusion and horror that followed each nuclear strike, the main impulse of many survivors was to move to safety—either to find help or offer help to others. Many survivors also tried to find friends and family members. This was difficult in the darkness, with collapsed buildings and mangled cars blocking roadways.

  [Name withheld], Arlington, VA: I looked next door and I saw the father of a neighboring family standing almost naked. His skin was peeling off all over his body and was hanging from his fingertips. I talked to him, but he was too exhausted to give me a reply. He was looking for his family desperately.

  [Name withheld], Jupiter, FL: I really thought I was dying because I drank so much water. I don’t know how many minutes passed, but anyway I found something like a piece of wood, but it was very soft and sticky. I touched it. It was actually my friend’s leg. She was alive, and we were so glad to see each other.

  For many survivors in urban areas, the most intense memories in the immediate aftermath of the strike were the enormous amounts of rubble and ash left by the tall buildings that collapsed—and the cries in the darkness coming from underneath the debris. Many people were buried completely, while others were simply trapped by debris or so seriously injured that they could not move.

  [Name withheld], New York, NY: I couldn’t see anyone around me, but I heard somebody shouting “Help! Help!” from somewhere. Then I realized that the cries were actually coming from beneath the rubble I was walking on.

  [Name withheld], New York, NY: I found one of the other kids in the school alive. I held him in my arms. It is hard to say this: his skull was cracked open, his flesh was dangling out from his head. He had only one eye left, and it was looking right at me. First, he was mumbling something, but I couldn’t understand him. I held his hand, and he started to reach for something in his pocket, so I asked him, I said, “You want me to take this along to hand it over to your mother?” He nodded. I thought I could take him along. I guess that his body below the waist was crushed. The lower part of his body was trapped, buried inside of the debris. He just [refused] to go, he told me to go away.

  With the widespread destruction and collapse of infrastructure, millions of people began to simply walk out of the destruction zone. Over the course of the afternoon and well into the night, millions of people walked along expressways and over bridges to escape the misery and suffering within the cities. While many eventually made it home after walking ten or even twenty miles, many tens of thousands did not, falling along the way; the escape routes were littered with the bodies of men, women, and children.

  Raven Rock

  The president, over the course of the first few hours of the North Korean attack, grew increasingly agitated in his isolation. He insisted that aides put him in contact with Secretary of Defense Mattis. Communicating with anyone, however, was nearly impossible. As reports of nuclear explosions in the United States appeared on television, the volume of text messages, social media postings, and telephone calls quickly overwhelmed the communications infrastructure. Moreover, government officials were beginning to follow procedures to evacuate to safety.

  “Communications systems were overwhelmed with traffic,” one aide recalled. “Key officials were being evacuated in Washington, DC, and cell calls that got through were breaking up. Information was mixed with rumor. We had to switch to the military radio network. The president couldn’t reach key people on regular phones because people like the secretary of defense had abandoned buildings in DC. Cell phones were useless because the networks were saturated.”

  During this early period, Mattis was engaged in the important process of shifting Department of Defense operations out of the Pentagon and into Site R, the massive underground complex in rural Pennsylvania. Mattis had given orders to transfer operations to the Pentagon’s deep underground, alternative command center as soon as the first missile launch had been detected. Although the complex was kept on a sort of warm standby, it would still take time—more than an hour—to get the staff into the facility and activate all of its communications systems. Mattis himself was in the air, en route to the site. During this period, he was simply not available to the president.

  Unable to reach his secretary of defense, the president implored his remaining aides to find a way to contact his wife and children. He was particularly concerned about his wife Melania and their son Barron, who had been staying at Trump Tower. He was also demanding to talk to his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared. They lived in Washington. Both cities were now under attack, and the president was desperate to know that his family members were safe.

  “Wherever the Fire Touched, It Burned”

  If New Yorkers remember the rubble, people in Honolulu and northern Virginia—both largely suburban areas with wood frame houses—remember the fire. The intense heat of the explosions lit fires that grew steadily into firestorms, swallowing everything and everyone in their paths.

  [Name withheld], Honolulu, HI: We felt terribly hot and could not breathe well at all. After a while, a whirlpool of fire approached us from the south. It was like a big tornado of fire spreading over the full width of the street. Whenever the fire touched, wherever the fire touched, it burned. It burned my ear and leg. I didn’t realize that I had burned myself at that moment, but I noticed it later.

  [Name withheld], Arlington, VA: I still felt very thirsty, and there was nothing I could do about it. What I felt at that moment was that Virginia was entirely covered with only three colors. I remember red, black, and brown, but, but, nothing else. Many people on the street were killed almost instantly. The fingertips of those dead bodies caught fire, and the fire gradually spread over their entire bodies from their fingers. A light gray liquid dripped down their hands, scorching their fingers. I, I was so shocked to know that fingers and bodies could be burned and deformed like that. I just couldn’t believe it. It was horrible.

  [Name withheld], Arlington, VA: The houses on both sides of the railroad were burning, and the railway was the hollow in the fire. I thought I was going to die there. It was such an awful experience.

  [Name withheld], Honolulu, HI: I could see people running in the dark. Some of them were on fire, and some of them were just rolling around on the ground. Gradually it became lighter. And just then, the sun broke through the clouds. The light appeared in many different colors, red and yellow, purple and white.

  In Honolulu, it began to rain—giant drops of rain, blackened with the soot and ash from the fires. With so many people suffering from burns and especially thirst—a primary symptom of radiation poisoning—the rain initially seemed welcome. But it did not extinguish the growing fires.

  [Name withheld], Honolulu, HI: The fire and the smoke made us so thirsty, and there was nothing to drink, no water, and the smoke even disturbed our eyes. As it began to rain, people opened their mouths and turned their faces toward the sky and tried to drink the rain, but it wasn’t easy to catch the raindrops in our mouths. It was a black rain with big drops.

  In northern Virginia, the massive fire isolated the city of Alexandria. The two nuc
lear weapons had devastated much of the area to the north and west of the city, trapping its surviving residents between the growing fires and the Potomac River. As the fire swept into the city, survivors attempted to flee, but were chased by the flames into the water.

  [Name withheld], Alexandria, VA: It was all quiet and the city was wrapped, enveloped in red flames. Mr. W—— came to help me. He asked me if I wanted to swim across the river. The bridge was burning, and the river was very high. I had no choice. I could barely see by then, though. And Mr. W—— took my arms and told me to swim across the river together with him, so together we went into the river and began to swim. When we reached the middle of the river, I could no longer see anything, and I was starting to feel faint. And as I began to feel faint, I also began to lose control. Mr. W ​——​ encouraged me and helped me to reach the other side of the river. Finally, we reached the other side. What surprised me so much was all the cries of the children for help and for their mothers. It just didn’t stop.