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A review by mikerickson
The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States by Jeffrey Lewis
5.0
Horror is easily the genre I read the most and I've dipped my toe into just about every subgenre it has to offer. This book, despite being written and marketed as something wholly different, is probably the scariest thing I've read all year.
It's presented as a dry, technical, after-the-fact report of a hypothetical nuclear exchange that took place in March of 2020 (this book treats itself as being released publicly on May 1, 2023, and uses August 17, 2018 as a point-of-divergence from real history). The prose was distant and removed in an effort to appear professional and unbiased, but the sheer emotion of the tense brinkmanship leading up to the horrific aftermath of a gamble gone wrong still managed to seep through and I was hooked on every page. I felt like I was watching the world's most terrible arrangement of dominoes being set up, hoping that they wouldn't fall but knowing that they already had.
I do have criticisms of the book. For all the moving parts there were to keep track of and how believable it all was, I think the things that weren't mentioned were more noticeable. I don't understand how during high-stakes planning and negotiations over the span of just 48 hours, somehow the literal Vice President Mike Pence, or hell, Congress isn't even mentioned until the last chapter. Despite a lot of the early actions being centered on the Korean Peninsula, I thought it was strange how there were no mentions of NATO or non-Asian allies checking in with the US along the lines of "what's going on over there?" I also thought it was unusual that the governments of both China and Russia, two countries that share a land border with North Korea, were also absent for an evolving crisis right on their doorstep.
But I was so gripped by what was happening, I can overlook what didn't.
This book is not gonna be for everyone, but I've certainly never read anything like this and I find myself wanting more of this kind of speculative, "here's how it could happen" fiction.
It's presented as a dry, technical, after-the-fact report of a hypothetical nuclear exchange that took place in March of 2020 (this book treats itself as being released publicly on May 1, 2023, and uses August 17, 2018 as a point-of-divergence from real history). The prose was distant and removed in an effort to appear professional and unbiased, but the sheer emotion of the tense brinkmanship leading up to the horrific aftermath of a gamble gone wrong still managed to seep through and I was hooked on every page. I felt like I was watching the world's most terrible arrangement of dominoes being set up, hoping that they wouldn't fall but knowing that they already had.
I do have criticisms of the book. For all the moving parts there were to keep track of and how believable it all was, I think the things that weren't mentioned were more noticeable. I don't understand how during high-stakes planning and negotiations over the span of just 48 hours, somehow the literal Vice President Mike Pence, or hell, Congress isn't even mentioned until the last chapter. Despite a lot of the early actions being centered on the Korean Peninsula, I thought it was strange how there were no mentions of NATO or non-Asian allies checking in with the US along the lines of "what's going on over there?" I also thought it was unusual that the governments of both China and Russia, two countries that share a land border with North Korea, were also absent for an evolving crisis right on their doorstep.
But I was so gripped by what was happening, I can overlook what didn't.
This book is not gonna be for everyone, but I've certainly never read anything like this and I find myself wanting more of this kind of speculative, "here's how it could happen" fiction.