Audiobook6 hours
The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States
Written by Jeffrey Lewis
Narrated by Neil Hellegers
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States is an exciting piece of "speculative fiction." The novel posits that there was a nuclear attack against the U.S. on March 21, 2020 by North Korea, and that a national bipartisan commission was created to investigate what and how it happened. It's pretty scary stuff.
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Reviews for The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States
Rating: 3.9843750625 out of 5 stars
4/5
64 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I skimmed through this story in one day. Much of this speculative story appears plausible given that Trump is the President. Story begins when North Korea mistakenly shoots down South Korean commercial flight filed with kids headed for a trip. South Korea retaliates, without consulting U.S. and this continue to go quickly downhill from there. North Korea fires nukes at South Korea, Japan and the United States. New York City, Northern Virginia and Jupiter Florida are some of the areas hit by North Korean nukes.
Trump panics. Millions die. Trump takes no responsibility. Trump had argued that North Korean missiles would break up before they struck the U.S. Melania dies as she was staying in Trump Tower when the nuke hits. Trump is not exactly broken up about it. Kim dies too as North Korea gets wiped out. Trump had also considered an attack against China too. Maybe this book is not as far fetched as one may think.
I sense the author is not fond of Nikki Haley. She is still our UN ambassador in the story and there is a reference to reputed affairs she may have been involved.
Pence becomes President in this book and there is no f’n way he takes over if the United States sustained that type of damage and casualties.
This book is food for thought as the author captures how thoroughly inept the current adminsitration is. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Extremely readable and frequently terrifying, especially with almost everything being rooted in fact and linked back to true events. It essentially reads like a thriller with footnotes.
Wasn't so keen on the scenes with Trump as Lewis never really captures his voice quite right, which takes you out of the story at key times. The book doesn't go as much as I'd expected onto the immediate psychological effects of a nuclear attack to the wider country (and world), but I guess that's outside the scope of the form being used.
Good read in general, hard to put down. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When I was much younger, reading books about nuclear war and about survival after such a war was my guilty reading pleasure. I devoured them all. But as we moved away from the Cold War, such novels began to appear last often, and I now read very little post-apocalyptic fiction. I came across this book several weeks ago when I was browsing the library, and never having heard anything about it, checked it out on a whim. For context, I checked it out before the US went to the brink of war with Iran, but read it after that little boondoggle.This book is a fictional, but plausible, account of how the US (and Japan, South Korea, and Guam) could end up under nuclear attack by North Korea. It is written in the form of a Commission Report several years after the attack to attempt to explain what went wrong. As such, its focus is geopolitical, rather than an examination of the devastating effects of such a war, or any efforts to rebuild after such a war. (The author is some sort of Think Tank expert, and I think this is his only fiction.)The book is a study on how our political leaders and various countries play games of brinksmanship with each other, and how each side frequently misreads the intentions of the other side, leading to escalation after escalation. In this book, real characters in the drama include Trump as president, Mattis as Secretary of Defense, and Kim Jung Il. The fictional Trump behaves much as I expect the real Trump would behave. I found the book to be chilling, especially as I was reading it almost contemporaneously with the Iran crisis.Several of the Amazon reviewers were disappointed with the book because its focus was not the effects of the war and its aftermath and victims. As I said, the intent of the book seems to have been to consider the political circumstances which could lead to such a war, and I think it did a good job. It is more cerebral than graphic. Some other critics were dismayed that Trump was portrayed as a clownish figure more interested in golf, but to me that's his reality.3 1/2 stars
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I couldn't put it down! An incredibly realistic portrait of a very imaginable situation. And a wake-up call to those who feel diplomacy via Twitter is not harmful. Lewis penned a fast moving story about how an entirely plausible accident escalates to nuclear war. Very believable. Very frightening. Honestly, this short book should be required reading for all of our Federal Government Representatives. And to those who believe that the President's Twitter rampages and threats are not to be taken seriously. Most of all, maybe someone could read this to the President himself, if his attention span was long enough to pay attention!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A speculative novel, written by a nonproliferation expert, that deals with the simple question: How could an accidental nuclear war with North Korea happen, and what would it look like?
I made my way through the book in two evenings, foregoing most other activities, which should tell you all you need to know about this book. It is a well-written, sobering reminder that with nuclear weapons in the mix, we are always on the brink of killing large numbers of people because of misunderstandings, bad communication, and just plain old bad luck.
Speaking a few days after the release, in August 2018, the book is very much up to date, with Donald Trump and his cadre of officials (some of which are still those in power today, some their inevitable replacements) presiding over the debacle that occurs in this fictional version of year 2020. There are some nice touches, with Trump tweets playing a central role, but it never gets implausible.
I should note that while the book is written in the form of a report by a commission tasked with investigating the events of 2020 (hence the title), it contains graphic descriptions of what happens to victims of nuclear attacks, and as you might imagine, these are not for the faint of heart. I found this book to be yet another powerful reminder for why nuclear weapons are dangerous, and why we would all be better off without them in the mix.
If you are at all interested in nuclear weapons or foreign policy, read this book.