Nuclear Rationality and the 2020 Commission

Jeffrey Lewis 0:02

What I like about Trump is he illustrates things that were true even under Obama and Bush and Clinton and Bush and Reagan and Carter and Ford and Nixon and... You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:36

And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafik Kariri Center for the Middle East in a very warm, muggy, and nasty day on the east coast of the United States. I won't tell you how gorgeous it is here. I was queuing you up to tell me how good the weather is. It's atrocious outside. You have to wear a swimsuit.

It's like doing Bikram yoga, just walking from my office to get my iced coffee. I'm doing my sun salutations as I'm meandering across the crosswalk.

Jeffrey 1:10

Whereas here, it's God's air conditioning. You know, nice, sort of not too bright and hot, but just a little bit of fog, a little bit of cool mist that's slowly burning off into what I expect will be a glorious afternoon that I may well spend on the beach.

Aaron 1:28

You can do that now as a published author of fiction.

Jeffrey 1:32

Yeah, yeah. I really don't want to talk about North Korea today. Yeah, so we're not going to do it.

Aaron 1:38

I mean, sort of we are, but not really.

Jeffrey 1:41

Yeah, well, you know, you had proposed this idea of doing a conversation about the book that's spoiler heavy, right? We did the tease that was the beginning that didn't have any spoilers, and now is a chance to talk about the stuff that's in the novel. The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States, available from all fine bookstores.

But... You know, I don't want to talk about the North Korea piece of it because there's like other stuff there that I would love to talk about. But this is going to be like super spoiler heavy.

Aaron 2:12

Yeah. So I think we should say at the outset, if you haven't read the book and you plan to and everybody should, this probably isn't the podcast for you. But if you still want a podcast this week, we are rolling out a new feature at the Arms Control Wong podcast, which is for our wonderful members. We will have a short and sweet podcast that drops every Tuesday about topical issues in the WMD field and nonproliferation sphere.

That are too short for a full episode, but stuff that we were already talking about privately, either in the Slack channel or amongst ourselves in a DM, WhatsApp, Signal, or whatever your method of communication is. So if you would like to listen to that podcast, you can flip on over to Patreon.com slash ACW podcast, and you can sign up now.

So, again, just spoiler alert, and why don't we talk about what is really the main theme of your book, which is about the horrors of nuclear weapons, their effects, even a small, quote-unquote, limited nuclear strike. And, you know, how it challenges our assumptions about nuclear war fighting. Because, you know, one thing after I finished your book, and I did finish it in one day, is I went back and dusted off the classic Wizards of Armageddon.

Ah, that's a good one. Yeah, you know, because it's a good book because it synthesizes, like, a lot of the trajectory of how we think about nuclear weapons, at least, like, within the bureaucracy and how crazy some of those ideas were.

Jeffrey 3:54

Yeah, although, you know, one of those wizards was Tom Schelling. I know. Who was on my dissertation committee. I know, I know. I gotta be careful about... I just... I loved Tom. No, I mean... By the way, before we get into this, did you see what Alice, Tom's widow, did with his Nobel Prize? No, I did not.

She auctioned it off and gave every penny to the Southern Poverty Law Center to fight hate. That's just cool. Yeah, Tom really did not like bigots.

Aaron 4:35

Maybe it was a good time he passed when he did.

Jeffrey 4:40

Well, yeah, I mean, there may have been a reason.

Aaron 4:43

But, you know, one of the things, so a story about your book is I was working out of a shopping mall because of child care obligations. I had to go to and from to pick him up while my wife was traveling. And there was a Barnes & Noble there. And so I did pick it up at Barnes & Noble, even though you did send me a copy.

And I was reading it sort of in the atrium of the shopping mall. And I was laughing. And then a woman actually asked me what I was reading as I got up to leave. And she did take a picture of your book to go buy later. And I hope she did. But I was laughing. I think it's chapter three is where we get our first introduction to your fictional President Donald Trump.

And he is a comedic foil at the beginning of your book because he's basically doing Trumpian things, but he actually becomes quite a tragic figure towards the end because of his inability to grapple with the realities of compressed decision-making and nuclear war.

Jeffrey 5:43

Yeah, well, so I really struggled with how to present Trump Because, I mean, there are really, I guess, two reasons. One is he is such a ridiculous figure in real life. You know, the things he says and does when you do them as a fictional author come off as just absurd and cruel and unkind, even though he does them himself in real life.

And so that's difficult to navigate.

Aaron 6:21

But then also, you know,

Jeffrey 6:23

What I like about Trump is he illustrates things that were true even under Obama and Bush and Clinton and Bush and Reagan and Carter and Ford and Nixon and Johnson and Kennedy and Eisenhower. You know, like... So I didn't... You know, I did not want Trump to be the villain. Like, I didn't want it to be like, U.S. nuclear policy is fine, and then along comes this evil guy.

I actually wanted it to be like, nuclear policy is screwed up, and along comes this force of nature, and all the people around him aren't villainous either. They're just trying to manage him, and they spend so much time managing him... That the inertia of our nuclear weapons policy, you know, is able to sort of drag us into a war that no one wants.

And so I really did want this to be, in many ways, an exploration of some of the problems of U.S. nuclear weapons policy and some of the pathologies of decision-making rather than just an anti-Trump Jeremiah ad. Although, you know, judging by the handful of one-star reviews on Amazon, some people felt that way. Really? Yeah. I mean, it's actually very funny because I gave the book to a friend of mine who was a Trump voter, but like a California Trump voter, like not a D.C. political person.

And I was really interested to see his reaction. And he was actually pretty... Worried about reading it, and you know, he finished, he was like, I loved the book, and the portrait of Trump was was was not nice, but fair, you know. And so he sort of picked up that like, it wasn't really like, it wasn't like Trump is a bad guy who starts a nuclear war, it's Trump is a force of nature with some really bad habits.

And when put into this particular context, the underlying problems that aren't really about Trump at all come to the fore, you know, which, you know, I gave him credit for. It was such a sophisticated analysis of the book that I had to go back and ask him, so why the hell did you vote for Trump again?

Aaron 8:48

So one of the things I wanted to peg sort of the start of this conversation to was, you know, Secretary Mattis... And General Dunford gave a recent press briefing, relatively infrequent these days. And, you know, within Mattis' opening statement, and it applies to your book, he goes, you know, "...we have released our nuclear posture review outlining the necessary steps we are taking to strengthen America's nuclear deterrence.

So these weapons are never used, nuclear war being a war that cannot be won and must never be fought." And this is a theme that comes out as you introduce your Trump character, sort of the fictional John Kelly. And it's John Bolton, right?

Jeffrey 9:36

No, it's... Bolton and Kelly get fired, but Jack Francis, the fictional character, is John Kelly. Right. I wanted a Kelly character. I just couldn't... I didn't have the confidence that he wouldn't be fired. I still don't have the confidence he would be fired tomorrow. And I... There's the... Oh, yeah, that's a spoiler, so it's fine. There's the Twitter massacre where Kelly... Basically where Trump...

Things happen exactly as they're happening now, right? And so the process collapses. And Trump blames Trump is looking to blame people, which is exactly what he's doing now. And after he gets done blaming Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un, he turns around and he blames Mike Pompeo and fires him. He blames Kelly. He fires him. But he also fires Bolton and replaces him with Keith Kellogg.

So we're back to an H.R. McMaster Kelly like partnership. Of people who are actually trying to restrain the president and manage him more so than... I mean, it would have been fun to write a Bolton-like Iago who, you know, whispers the president into nuclear war, but I think that would have been less compelling. Because, again, I don't want any villains in the book.

I want everybody to be trying their hardest to avoid the nuclear war. Right, but so, like, Chapter 3... And still for us to get there.

Aaron 10:51

Right, and Chapter 3 plays out where they're in Mar-a-Lago, and, like, you talk about sort of the... The real-life problems associated with going to the, you know, the Winter White House, which is, you know, where staff has to stay, and the lack of a secure facility that we saw with, you know, basically right at the start of the Trump presidency with Prime Minister Abe from Japan, you know, having to get briefings right in the middle of the dining room.

Jeffrey 11:19

By the way, I can't believe I'm going to say this. I think... Trump got a little bit of a bad rap for that Abe thing. Why? I looked really closely at it. There is a skiff in the basement, and I think they went down into the basement. Got the classified briefing. And then, because I looked at the timeline, and they were at dinner much later.

And so what the White House said, which I do believe is true, is they had the meeting in a classified space, had come up, and they were doing dinner, and then the staff brought the statement that they were going to issue to them to review over dinner.

Aaron 12:06

Okay. Okay.

Jeffrey 12:08

Which by the way, never, I mean, I took me, I don't know, like two wasted days of research to work out that timeline. Sometimes it's nice to be a scholar or a senior fellow, right? I mean, I, I do have to say like, it was kind of like, cause I really wanted to write that into the book.

Like I wanted them to be like getting this like wildly inappropriate you know, classified briefing. But again, I tried to do nothing in the book that the president hadn't already actually done. You know, I didn't want to make them villainous or be unkind to them, even though I don't care for them that much. And so I worked through this and I was like, no, no, there is a skiff.

And then it turns out that I was trying to figure out where the skiff was. And I'm guessing, but I'm pretty sure I'm right. There were bomb shelters that Marjorie Merriweather Post built underneath Mar-a-Lago because she was a nut job. And she put them at the, what's the house in Rock Creek Park that she had? Oh, I don't know.

You know far more about her than I do. Hillwood? What, you lived in D.C., didn't you? Yeah, but, you know, this is sort of. So, Hillwood. Hillwood is a place where rich people get married. It was her estate in, well, she had lots of estates because she was a crazy rich lady. But, yeah, she was like nutty for bomb shelters.

So there is a bomb shelter under Mar-a-Lago. I believe that's what they converted to the skiff. I think that's the room that they're in, in that famous picture.

Aaron 13:37

Yeah, and what struck me, though, if you juxtapose that statement, is that your two characters, from the outset of the crisis, which is a sequence of events starting with... U.S. efforts to essentially coerce the North Koreans by simulating bomber flights. A South Korean passenger jet that has an electronic malfunction and goes slightly off course and mimics the flight path of a U.S. bomber getting shot down.

This takes place over chapters one and two. As you get into chapter three, As you said earlier, the assumption of the Kelly character is that a nuclear war must never be fought, and therefore it doesn't really enter into their thought processes from the outset. It's more how to manage the logistical challenges of running a government from basically a non-government building.

And one as complicated as Mar-a-Lago. So it's a lot of that sort of thing, if you wanted to put this onto the broader context of compressed decision-making time and how sometimes crises don't take place at a time and place of the American government's choosing.

Jeffrey 14:52

Yeah, well, so that's why I was kind of going on and on about the bomb shelters, because once I started to look at Mar-a-Lago as like a location... It was in instantly fascinating to me as a place where a crisis would play out. Like, so I started, you know, getting satellite images of Mar-a-Lago and I can now tell like, even if the president or, or, or Mrs. Trump were to make a visit without announcing it, we've, well, I figured out the, there are signatures like where the overflow parking is.

And how the Secret Service sets up so he can access the portion of Mar-a-Lago he lives in. So, like, I got maps of the place and started looking at satellite photographs. And, like, suddenly the geography or the physical reality of that building. Like, do you know why he crashes all those effing weddings? Because the wedding venue is literally located between the portion of the estate that is his residence and the gate he uses for access.

So anytime he goes in and out, he has to go by the wedding venue. So it's like right there. It's not like he has to cross. He doesn't have to go seek it out. He actually can't avoid it.

Aaron 16:08

This is in the book. It's an independent clause in the broader sentence, I remember it, because I remember going, huh, that makes sense.

Jeffrey 16:18

Yeah, so it turns out like Mar-a-Lago ends up being a character. Yes. You know, the physical reality of Mar-a-Lago and the constraints it imposes on the president and the people around him to me was just endlessly fascinating. And I've got, you know, I mean, I just I just leave him at Mar-a-Lago for that. You know, I shouldn't say the whole damn thing, because in the end, he finally gets the finally came the hell out of there.

But he's there most of the crisis. And I I just couldn't get enough of him.

Aaron 16:48

Go into, you know, because like on top of that, Mar-a-Lago is a very expensive place. And the U.S. government, I mean, if you've ever been to a U.S. government briefing, like at the State Department, or even if you're giving the briefing, like they can't even give you a bottle of water because, sadly enough, like corruption issues. They can't buy you a cup of coffee.

It's absurd, right? It is absurd. But, you know, there's vouchers where you have to stay is where I'm trying to lead you. Yeah.

Jeffrey 17:14

Right, so I started off very naively thinking that if the president's at Mar-a-Lago, then Mar-a-Lago is like filled with the staff. Because I was actually looking for signatures like automobile traffic. You know, like where does all the staff park? And as I... As I did that research, I realized that the staff don't stay at Mar-a-Lago. It's a private club.

It's a private club that has to make money. He doesn't give freebies.

Aaron 17:40

Yeah.

Jeffrey 17:40

Right? If the staff... I mean, there was actually the Secret Service. It was revealed they were having to pay rack rate at Mar-a-Lago in order to stay there. Right? So he's making money off of this. And so I noticed that John Kelly apparently stayed at a nearby hotel that they wouldn't disclose. But there was, like, enough... General information about it that I made a guess, and even that place was like above the per diem, and so in the end I I made a guess which I'm pretty sure is right that you know the President's at Mar-a-Lago, some of the more senior staff may stay at the Palm or the.

The colony, which is the closest hotel, but I think most of the staff are going to like be out by the airport and which is across the water, by the way. Right. Yeah. Connected by one bridge, which, you know, I mean, just if you've if you've ever written fiction, I mean, that's a delicious arrangement of humans. Yeah.

Aaron 18:41

Yeah, I actually met a friend of mine, and I'll be very careful, too. He worked in the executive office building up until very recently. And I asked him if he had read your book, and he said, I haven't yet, but it's on his reading list. And I said, oh, I was like, I would get to it because one of the really interesting things about it, because we were talking in general about how government functions and about how it's not as linear and clear as our simplified models for analysis make it out to be.

And I was like, well, you know, it's funny you should bring it up because my podcasting cohort, you know, Jeffrey Lewis has this book, and one of the things he brings up in it is about the physical constraints of Mar-a-Lago and the per diem caps that are placed on you guys and how You probably can't stay with the president.

So in the event of a crisis, you could be at sort of peak traffic hours, a half an hour away from him and his shoulders sort of slumped because he knows the whole backstory about how this book ends. And he goes, yeah, you know, it's logistically tough to go down in there. And he's already kind of an interesting character, to put it lightly, in terms of how he governs to begin with.

So he's a little untethered.

Jeffrey 20:04

Yeah. Well, so, I mean, I... I mean, again, right? Spoilers. It doesn't matter. This is a book for people who've... This is a podcast for people who've already read the book. But, I mean, one of the things I really enjoyed was... So early on, Trump is at Mar-a-Lago, and I'm just going to call him John Kelly, right?

Because that's Jack Francis. The Kelly character. Right. So Kelly and Kellogg, who really is also a lot like McMaster. Right. So in the first draft, it would have been Kelly and McMaster. They are away from... And so they don't want to wake the president up. So they want to wait for the president to wake up in his residence.

And then they want the president to come to, you know, they know he's going to flip on the TV. They figure he'll call Kelly right away because he'll see that things are getting bad. And then they'll try to get him to come down into the skiff, you know, where they like suddenly have him corralled. And it's like a good plan.

And it's a good plan because they don't want to wake him up in the middle of the night and get him all cranky. And like they want him to get his beauty sleep.

Aaron 21:14

He has a golf game to go to.

Jeffrey 21:15

Right. He has a golf game to get to and they want him to do the golf game. They want his day to be as normal as possible because they don't want him to be stressed out because a stressed out president is going to make bad decisions. But as he gets to the stairs, right, because the skiff is in the basement, you know, he's by the way, some people are still shocked with this.

You know, he's he's morbidly afraid of stairs.

Aaron 21:32

I didn't know this. I asked this to you. It's a real thing. I didn't know this. You told me. Yeah.

Jeffrey 21:37

Yeah, I mean, the British sort of admitted he asked Theresa May to hold his hand going downstairs. And then you see he was constantly criticizing Obama for bounding down the stairs of Air Force One. It's because he's afraid of stairs. So in that moment before he goes down the stairs, he reaches into his pocket for his phone for like a moment of like comfort.

And he tweets a bad thing.

Aaron 21:58

That's right. He tweets. He tweets.

Jeffrey 22:01

But then, then I'm actually, it comes back because, because he is at Mar-a-Lago with everybody, you know, I have him ditch all of the senior staff at Mar-a-Lago and take the helicopter basically alone to get on Air Force One. The shit has hit the fan. Right, right, right, right. Like Kelly was like imploring him to get in the helicopter and get on Air Force One and get out of Mar-a-Lago.

And Trump is refusing to go. And like Kelly is getting like Kelly is browbeating him more and more than Trump is comfortable with. And something in Trump snaps and he gets up and he walks out of the room in the way exactly the same way that he cancels real interviews. In fact, I use the phrase he used uses most often when he walks out of an interview.

And like Kelly thinks he's like walked out to blow out steam and he doesn't realize that Trump has decided to, in fact, get on the helicopter and leave his ass behind. That's right. And and and and so but it's nice because then I can ditch all those characters and I can bring in a new set of characters around Trump.

You know, so literary, from a literary perspective, it was actually really nice because I didn't want to have too much of any one character. I wanted people to come in and go out. And just Mar-a-Lago was both perfect in a literary sense for doing that because, you know, people could be separated, but then also it served this broader conceptual purpose of explaining that like...

Decision-making doesn't work the way it does on paper. That, you know, the ability to connect with people and not connect with people ends up mattering. Like, who is in the room and who isn't in the room.

Aaron 23:34

Right, right, right, right. And we should back this up because he gets on... So, after the... Plane is shot down, the South Koreans go off script, and rather than be controlled by, rather than informing the United States in a timely manner, as they're supposed to do, and come under American control, The president decides to launch a small strike against North Korean targets, literally designed to control escalation.

And I know where you got this from, but that's where I want to take this now. He wants to appease his domestic critics to still be tough, but he's cognizant of the idea that he doesn't actually want to fight with North Korea, so he tries to calibrate a limited strike. And it's conventional. But he's trying to control escalation.

And Kim Jong-un, in your story, the real Kim, doesn't realize that this is a limited strike and assumes that the Americans are also involved.

Jeffrey 24:45

Yeah, I mean, you know, there are a couple things there. Like, one is... I mean, I've come in for a little bit of criticism about this for people who don't think that Moon Jae-in would ever use force, which, by the way, I think is wrong. Like, I think he's much more pragmatic and tough than people give him credit for, you know, because he's been so focused on diplomacy.

And I do think that's his first preference. People have this idea that he's like a softie. But, you know, when that North Korean soldier defected, And South Korean troops, because they were under UN rules, couldn't fire back at the North Koreans firing at the soldier. You know, he expressed outrage about that and said the rules should be changed.

If South Korean troops are fired on, they should absolutely be able to fire back. So, you know, I think there's a sort of a nationalist streak in him. And I think that there's a kind of pragmatic streak that suggests that, you know, if North Korea pushed him too far, I'm not sure he would back down. I think the caricature of him as some kind of, like, dove is maybe a little simplistic.

But also, you know, I wanted to talk about a decision-making pathology, which is the initial strike he gets briefed is the, you know, full-on massive punishment and retaliation strike, because that's what they have on the shelf.

Aaron 26:11

It's the Sunday punch, you know, to use Cold War American nuclear planning, although conventional.

Jeffrey 26:16

It's everything. Right. Well, but that's a real plan that they have. Right. And backed with real forces. And so, you know, I mean, I think in Moon's mind, he's scaling that back. He's like, I'm tough, but I'm not insane. And that's way too many targets. We'll just pick two. And we'll, you know, it will be very limited.

And he thinks, I'll hold back the rest of the strike. In order to deter escalation. You know, so it's a very orthodox Limited strike it is literally textbook embraces it is textbook american style thinking about controlling escalation in multiple different scenarios including the soviets and probably now too and it's got you know i mean it's got like a little bit of a little bit of korean flavor you know i i showed it to to friends and colleagues who were korean and you know they they've some of them some of them i mean it's funny when you listen talk to people about their culture Not everyone in a culture agrees without a describe their culture.

But there are definitely, you know, I mean, I try to sort of ignore that stuff and just treat people as I think they express themselves. But, you know, there's a slightly personal aspect there, too. Mm-hmm. A sense that what Kim has done is pretty awful, and I think Moon feels compelled to do something. So it's a textbook American strike, but I root it in the politics of the moment.

Moon feeling like he'd been so critical of Park, his predecessor, because she had taken so long to respond to the Sewol disaster. That he's actually impatient because he doesn't want to be accused of what he accused his predecessor of.

Aaron 28:15

And I think the important thing is that contrary to script and the idea that you hold something back in order to signal you want to de-escalate, but that signaling is also coercive because you're threatening that you can continue to escalate if need be. Kim Is playing by a different set of rules. He's not playing by that textbook.

Jeffrey 28:44

Well, you know, he's got... Kim has the classic problem, which is he only knows how many missiles Moon launched. He doesn't know how many missiles Moon didn't launch. You know what I'm saying? Like... Like, the North Korean perception is of the strike that happened. It's not of the strike that didn't happen. So from Kim's perspective, there's a strike underway.

And to him, it looks very much like the American attack on Dora Farm at the beginning of the Iraq War, which nobody in the United States knows about. It's crazy. You know, the United States opened the Iraq War with a decapitation strike against Saddam. That was a joke because Saddam was nowhere near the place we did the strike against.

And so we've forgotten that as a fool's errand. But in the book, the North Koreans look at that very carefully and conclude that an invasion of North Korea is likely to look like an invasion of Iraq. And it's likely to start with a Hail Mary decapitation attempt, which is how they end up interpreting Moon's limited strike. So I wanted to explore the idea that the same event could look so differently different From a meeting room in Seoul and a basement in Kusong.

Aaron 29:59

Yeah, and then Kim retaliates. And this is where I assume you make assumptions about their war plan against U.S. bases throughout Asia.

Jeffrey 30:11

Well, it's the war plan that defectors say they have. It's the war plan that they advertise in the exercises they do. And it's generally speaking, although it's very vague, it's the war plan that's hinted at in the documents they release, you know, which is... I mean, all the stuff in the book is true. The North Koreans have really said Saddam's mistake was waiting for the U.S. to build up an invasion force.

And they have said that they would not wait, that they would strike the invasion force when it was still massed. And, you know, that's what the nuclear weapons are for. You know, they've done, they did one test of a nodong that was a simulated nuclear strike against U.S. forces in port in Busan. You know, so, like, that's literally what they say they would do.

And, you know, it's interesting. If you look at that, the map of death, you know, the map of the United States they put up that showed the targets, you know, the four targets are really interesting. They're D.C., which makes perfect sense, Barksdale Air Force Base, which is interesting that I'll come back to, but the other are Pearl Harbor and San Diego.

And that's because they're not hitting, they're not trying to, like, Hit big cities, they're trying to hit the forces that will bring in supplies, you know. So in the book I talk about how much sea lift was needed to sustain the Iraq invasion, and and I think the North Korean view is, yeah, you're not going to get to do that sea lift, like if you think you're going to bring all that fuel from the United States across the ocean and dump it in South Korea, think again, because they're going to hit them with nuclear weapons, right?

Aaron 31:50

Which is sort of akin to counterforce in the way we would think about it, too. And so it's their own way of doing coercive nuclear weapons planning, which is built around regime survival, which you make a point in the book, you know, told retroactively because there's a taping system in North Korea. Yeah.

Jeffrey 32:11

Wow, we have the Saddam tapes, so I wanted the Kim tapes.

Aaron 32:13

Right, so we just gain more insight. But, you know, I always found it fascinating, because as you brought this up, it triggered my mind, is that there's no bad, I mean, obviously Kim is a bad guy, but it's the same event told through his eyes, and his moves are rational, even if they end up in a place of his death.

Jeffrey 32:34

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, he's not, he doesn't, You know, there's a whole chapter dedicated to how all of the things that he puts together would lead him to think that an invasion was underway and if he does nothing, he is sure to die, right? So there's a whole discussion about how, you know, we think that he's crazy because he had his uncle executed and his brother assassinated, but actually those are, those are him learning the lesson that you hit your enemy before your enemy has a chance to hit you.

Which is probably an important lesson if you plan to be the bloodthirsty dictator of North Korea, but maybe not the best lesson if you're going to engage in a little nuclear brinksmanship. And he actually has a lot of evidence that from his perspective would indicate an invasion was underway. So there's full Eagle is underway. So there are a ton of U.S. troops in the area.

And so everybody is prepared for the possibility that an attack will come under the guise of an invasion of a guise of an exercise. Right. That's a real thing that militaries worry about. The airliner they shoot down, he is assured was a military aircraft. It had no transponder and was tracing the route of a bomber, so he is convinced it was a pretext in order to justify an invasion.

His cell phone is working only intermittently, which he is convinced is the sign of a cyber attack. There are missiles striking his residence, which he is convinced is a decapitation attempt. And then, last but not least, the President of the United States has now tweeted out, you know, an obvious threat to kill him. All of these are things that could happen in an isolation.

He'd be able to see them for what they are. But, like, together, when you're freezing in the basement in Kusong...

Aaron 34:34

Yeah, and that tweet, just to bring this full circle, is when he's steadying himself to go downstairs. And it's absent-minded.

Jeffrey 34:40

That's right. And it's nothing. And it's exactly the kind of thing he says offhand in rallies. You know, Little Rocket Man won't be bothering us much longer. But you put it in a different context. And it gets this dark quality to it that I think pushes things over.

Aaron 34:57

Yes, and so we should say that the first nuclear attacks, I think, hit Japan and South Korea.

Jeffrey 35:03

Yeah, that's right. U.S. forces. I mean, the only Japanese and South Korean targets are the Ministry of Defense.

Aaron 35:09

And you switch over to... And this is a lot of how the book ends, too, is... The holy f***ing hell that is a nuclear strike and just the, you know, it's one thing, actually, and I'm going to bring this up, is that friend of the podcast, Luke O'Brien and Scott LaFoy and I were emailing this morning. And he just sort of out of the blue, because he's Luke, and he's just sort of a maniac about this stuff.

He said, I'm going to read you his email. I found the most Rand Corporation paper ever on DTIC yesterday. Quote, unquote, some policy implications of nuclear winter. Written in 1985. Some policy. Well, my point is that you talk about the immediate aftermath and the sort of terrible struggles that would take place from dealing with the wounded of such a large explosion and how it's one thing to sort of write the 1985 Rand paper.

It's another thing entirely to actually live through it.

Jeffrey 36:17

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, you know... There are two nuclear horror chapters. And one of them, the first one, is loosely modeled on John Hersey's Hiroshima. And so it's three survivor stories. Two in South Korea and one in Japan. And then obviously then there's later the one in the United States, which is really just survivor testimony from Hiroshima, which has been references that would have marked it as being especially Japanese were removed, but otherwise it's the same.

And, you know, that was important to me because I, you know, I go to Hiroshima every year. I'm on the governor of Hiroshima's roundtable on disarmament. And, you know, I spend a lot of time with those testimonies. And, you know, I think it's really important that we engage with the reality of what happened because I think a lot of our discussions about nuclear weapons are sterile to the point of being misleading.

You know, I routinely encounter people who are like, well, what's so terrible about nuclear weapons? You know, and it's like, well, it's easy to ask that question when you routinely refuse to let people correctly describe the effects of nuclear weapons in meetings because it's too awful. And it's precisely, by the way, why the humanitarian initiative, the humanitarian consequences initiative, was so successful.

Because, you know, basically the way that people have dealt with the horror of nuclear war is to pretend it doesn't exist.

Aaron 37:56

It's to talk about them in abstract geopolitical great power terms, which I think is where we started this podcast.

Jeffrey 38:02

Yeah, but when you actually, like, talk about them as they are, they're pretty f***ing horrible. And so, you know, like... I wanted to do that fairly. I wanted to correctly represent what would happen.

Aaron 38:24

And that's where, if we were to flip... Is where the Trump character goes from being... He was funny. I mean, you wrote the chapter, and again, I was laughing in the shopping mall. Although it's like an uncomfortable laughter, if that makes sense. It's like watching. It's like watching... That's what I'm all about. It is watching. No, like, it's not awkward because they're off-color.

It's awkward because you know what's coming. And so, like, again, things that happen every single day, like a random tweet that, like, you know, for me, I have his Twitter feed on mute. But, you know, like, other people don't. And, like, things that just happen throughout the day that we dismiss, give this sense of foreboding because you know what's coming.

Yeah. And so before he escapes on the helicopter, you know, he has his first sort of real come to grips moment with the football. Is that a pun? Come to grips? Unintentionally, but I guess that was like a Freudian slip. And sort of he becomes aware of the Power he has, if that's a good way to describe it, and he's not really up to the job.

And again, I don't think that's a knock on him. It's just to give a sense of, like, the sort of framing of the moment about what it is that he can order.

Jeffrey 39:51

Yeah, that's right. Well, and that's, I mean... I don't know. Some people don't like that scene. And I feel like it's absolutely essential because I wanted to have a conversation about what the president can order. Yes. And it would not be realistic. Strangely, it's not realistic to expect that anyone would disobey the order, although I do have someone disobey the order.

And the reason was because I wanted to show the consequences for disobeying, which is it's a literary way of making the point that, in fact, no one would disobey because this poor schmo ends up in prison.

Aaron 40:28

Yeah, yeah. Was there some of that... If you're a real fan of the podcast, you know, we did a... Before the Scott, before Arrow, which we don't talk about. Sort of like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Arrow. Sort of the whole 1990s.

Jeffrey 40:43

But anyways...

Aaron 40:45

This is like Sid Barrett, Pink Floyd. With David Hoffman about Dead Hand and...

Jeffrey 40:56

Exactly. That's who I was thinking of was Colonel Petrov.

Aaron 40:58

Yeah, I couldn't remember his name.

Jeffrey 40:59

But... Yep.

Aaron 41:01

It's the Colonel Petrov story playing out in the skiff at the bottom of the Mar-a-Lago in the basement after a round of golf.

Jeffrey 41:09

Yep. I mean... I wanted that Petrov character, and it was important. There's one thing to tell people. You want to show people, and I wanted to show people the consequences of disobeying, which leaves you with the sense that you can't really count on people in a situation like that. And then there was sort of another reason, which is, again, some people don't like that scene, but it is ambiguous.

About what Trump really intends. He and his defenders assert afterwards that he merely wanted to look at the briefing books inside the football. And that's clearly not what the major thinks, and that's clearly not what some other people in the room think. But you don't know, you know, and, and that scene plays out in, in the way it does.

And and then it was nice because I wanted it to transition, you know, again, as I talk about characters coming and going, I wanted that to be the end of the point where Kelly mattered to the president, you know, And I wanted to then move us on to other stories and set up the president getting on the helicopter.

Aaron 42:34

Yeah, so the president gets on the helicopter, f***s off. And then you have the Jim Mattis character who begins to execute the war, which remains conventional. But then that pushes him to then to use what he holds back. So this is like the whole back. Yeah. Which is the ICBM.

Jeffrey 42:51

You know, it was funny because one review I read, I shouldn't be complaining about reviews, but it's fascinating to see how people interact with characters. Like, some reviewer was disgusted by how much I admired Mattis, but I don't admire him at all. You know? Like, I don't actually think it's an admiring portrait of him. He's just been very negative about the role of nuclear weapons.

And so my best guess is that he would act like Chuck Warner in Desert Storm and say we shouldn't use these things. And it was really interesting because people took that to be my opinion. You know, my opinion put in Mattis' mouth. But, like, strangely, it's a mistake. You know? Like... The actual courageous thing for Mattis to do would be to suggest that we should de-escalate the situation even though this horrible thing has happened.

But everyone else is crying for blood. And the brave thing to do would be like, no, no, we should not keep going because this is going to get worse. So I actually don't admire him that much. And actually, there are people who really wanted the emotional satisfaction of nuking the crap out of the North Koreans. And I think that's kind of gross.

I wanted to deny them that.

Aaron 44:08

Right. And so the North Koreans nuked the U.S. homeland.

Jeffrey 44:12

Yeah, the correct decision was to surrender, right? Which, you know, Americans would hate that idea. We never surrender. We always win. And it's like, yeah, but it actually got worse.

Aaron 44:21

Yeah, and so it got worse. And so... The ICBM force that Kim had been holding back, he uses as he moves to a different location in North Korea. And these impact, I think he fired 11 missiles, if I'm remembering the book. 13. I think seven or six made it through.

Jeffrey 44:43

Yeah, about half. Okay, so about half make it through. And this is where... I could work it out in my head again. It's Mar-a-Lago, two on Northern Virginia, one on New York. So Jupiter, Northern Virginia, Northern Virginia, New York, two, I think, in Honolulu. Yeah. And then some break up in the air, some fall off to the ocean.

Aaron 45:11

None are intercepted.

Jeffrey 45:13

Well, you know, I don't think any are intercepted. Some of them break up in flight or in reentry. And so the Missile Defense Agency says they're killed. You know, it's a funny, that's a whole digression, which is to do it right, I probably would have needed the North Koreans to degrade some of our other radars to make sure we wouldn't have the data to know for sure.

But that was like a level of detail that I just decided would be too boring for the reader. So if you actually know how we would do that damage assessment, you have to assume that there was some other damage, but that's okay. If you already know that, you're smart enough to figure out how they might have done it.

Aaron 45:50

But then this is where Trump becomes the ultimate tragedy figure, is that he's flying. Barksdale Air Force Base.

Jeffrey 45:58

I shouldn't laugh because it's really terrible.

Aaron 45:59

He's flying at Barksdale Air Force Base. This is why you left that one hanging.

Jeffrey 46:06

Oh, you know, yeah. So that's the answer, though, is actually in this context, which is on 9-11. Bush was in Sarasota, and he got on Air Force One, and they hung out in the Gulf like they do in the book. I think in the book, I have them go out over the Atlantic. And they have to decide where to go.

And for Bush, they decided to go to Barksdale. And I think the North Koreans put Barksdale on their map because they thought it was the president's... Fallback location, in fact, it was just picked kind of randomly in the moment which goes to show the North Koreans don't really understand us any more than we understand them. But I think they were saying that you can run but you can't hide, even if you leave DC and flee to Barksdale, we'll nuke you there, right? And sorry, no no, that's okay, because that's where I wanted to go. And then he is then this tragic figure, they have to make the decision where to land I forget where they land Omaha, Omaha, that's right. They go, they go to Stratcom, they go to the Mole Hole.

Aaron 47:00

They go to Stratcom, but Melania is not with the president. No, she was at Trump Tower.

Jeffrey 47:06

Yeah, Melania is... By the way, I don't incinerate Little Baron, so, you know... Yeah, Little Baron is in Connecticut. He has a play date. I initially planned to incinerate Little Baron, but... That's cool-ish. You know what, though? It's a serious point in a couple of places. It comes up with Nikki Haley's kid, too. And I wrote that in a very deliberate way.

Aaron 47:30

Nikki Haley's a whole sub-character in this one, too.

Jeffrey 47:33

Like I want you to I want I want the reader to like worry what happens to her children. And then I want the reader to feel disgusted that they're only worried about what happened to the children of famous people. Because it doesn't matter which doesn't matter who the parents of the children who are dying are. There are lots of children who are dying.

So you should not feel especially bad for famous people's kids.

Aaron 47:53

That's a good point. I actually didn't think of it like that.

Jeffrey 47:55

That was a little bit of moralizing on my part. But anyway, I decided to let Little Baron live so we could make this just about Melania.

Aaron 48:03

Yeah, but Melania is, you know, for reasons that I think in real life are obvious, spending more and more time away from her husband. And chooses not to go to the Winter White House, but goes to where she feels her own room at her... Yeah, that's right. And her, I guess, her, I don't know what to call it, her house, her apartment overlooking Central Park.

And so she's killed. And you have this picture at the end of sort of a panicky Trump flying on Air Force One, not sure where to go, grappling with the fallout. And all he can do is ask what happened to his wife and his kid.

Jeffrey 48:50

Right, well, he wants them to get her on the phone.

Aaron 48:52

Yeah.

Jeffrey 48:53

And, like, you know, like, the TV's on, and you can see that there's a giant crater where Trump Tower was, you know? Like, and they're all looking at the TV, like, they know why they can't get Melania on the phone. But none of them want to tell him that, right? And so then there's a whole drama that plays out as they're trying to, like, And remember he's only surrounded by junior staff at this point because he's like abandoned everybody at Mar-a-Lago which again was a nice kind of aspect to the storytelling Mar-a-Lago is spared it doesn't it hits Jupiter yeah well you know that's a theme in the book is that only the good people die yeah You know, like Melania, who I think is, you know, I don't know if she's a good person, but, you know, she's relatively blameless in all this.

She's a prisoner. Yeah. You know, President Moon. It's not universally the case, I guess. But generally speaking, if a character dies some grisly death in the book, it means I thought they tried to help. If you live, it means I don't think very much of you. With one or two exceptions. I mean, there's the survivor stories, obviously, in the...

Anyway. So, yeah, they have to figure out who's going to break it, and then that gives me a chance to bring in some more characters. I guess it's a spoiler alert, right? It's Hope Hicks, which I just love that they're like... They don't want to tell him, and they can't figure out who, and so they have her call him.

Aaron 50:23

Yeah, Hope does the phone call, you know.

Jeffrey 50:26

Yeah, and it should feel very tragic, right? Because, again, he's not a villain. He doesn't want a nuclear war. He truly thinks he is a great president who nearly solved this problem, right? He's an idiot. He's not a, I mean, he is a terrible person, but I mean, he isn't a terrible person in the sense that he wants a catastrophe.

He wants something other than a catastrophe. And he is just unable to make that happen.

Aaron 50:53

He's a tragic figure because from the outset of your book, it's comedic because he's self-delusional. And he ends the book in tragedy because he's self-delusional. And then his cohort around him enable that self-delusion because they think they're doing right for the country to keep him normal. But it ultimately ends up where they can't tell him because... They want to keep that delusion going that his wife is alive and that nuclear war isn't as bad as everybody thinks it is.

And that his wife can withstand a direct hit on Manhattan. And so that's why he's a tragic figure in this book. It's because he's dumb and he does what he normally does. And then he ultimately pays the consequences of a series of events he can't control.

Jeffrey 51:44

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, and it's kind of the big takeaway. And I have to say, I'm super excited. War on the Rocks got Robert Jervis to write a review of the book, which I cannot wait for. I mean, God forbid he hates it, then I'll feel terrible.

Aaron 51:54

I'm the contributing editor over there. Maybe I'll call in a favor.

Jeffrey 51:58

Just kidding. Well, I mean, he's either going to like it or he's not going to like it, right? But, you know, so much of his work and the work of John Steinbrenner and, you know, others and Mort Halperin are baked in To this book you know and it's not that people are particularly awful and Scott Sagan too like it's that the way we approach nuclear weapons has some real risks and there are some real pathologies in decision making and those pathologies are on display here and they're not they're just normal people doing the normal things that they normally do all I do is curate the context so that there's a little bit of bad luck It's not really that much bad luck, to be honest.

Aaron 52:41

No, and we started this conversation with shelling, and maybe that's where we end before we skip to the plug to listen to our other podcasts.

Jeffrey 52:49

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, Tom was much less worried about these scenarios than I was, or say John Steinbrenner, who was at Maryland with us. I mean, I think Tom felt that deep down people are rational. And one of the things I always say is that for that whole generation of scholars who were at Harvard in the 60s, watching Vietnam unfold, I think they were all concerned with why governments do dumb things.

And for Tom, the idea was that people are rational, it's just that the rational micromotives may lead to irrational macro behavior. And I think John had a slightly different view. John Steinbruner thought that organizations adopt rule sets... To make decisions that are usually rational, but then break down in unusual situations like a crisis. And I think more Halperin had a, had a, a much more Bureaucratic view, you know, that that actually people are, I think more was kind of closer to Tom in how rational people's micro motives were but More was was much more focused on on how organizations sort and aggregate those preferences. All three of them were interested in like.

How could you rationally or reasonably get to a very unreasonable conclusion? And those are the themes I explore in the book. So I'm eager to see if Jervis picks that up and agrees or if he thinks it's all crap.

Aaron 54:25

Well, I mean, I think we went through the whole book there. I mean, I think the ending is Melania dies, but the U.S. prevails in a conventional war relatively quickly. But that's like a footnote in what is the broader tragedy. So we win, in quotes. But I think, as you said earlier, the proper play is to not play the game, Professor Falcon, and so to capitulate before you get to the point where ICBMs are flying at you.

Jeffrey 54:53

Yeah, basically, at every point, the right decision is to stop. And at every point, people figure out that they have some clever way in which they're going to, like, turn this show into some kind of victory. And that's just... And actually, I have the Kelly character say that very early on, you know, that they're going to, like, turn this into a victory.

And that's the wrong answer. You know, like, you're f***ing with the nuclear armed power. And this just... No. Like, both sides need a victory to get out of this.

Aaron 55:24

So, any other big meta takeaways before we jump to the plug? I mean, I think we covered this. I mean, I think it's important just to reiterate one more time that all of these things... I mean, I know what examples you were using, because I'm a nerd, but, you know, like, all of your scenarios, like the Petrov character, there's even some slight escalate to de-escalate in there.

I mean, all sorts of things in there are stuff that we talk about all the time. And it... It's pervasive in how we talk about these weapons. And I think, as you said, the tragedy never really enters into the equation. I mean, because one of the things that I find fascinating is if you go back and read older Cold War documents, again, it's very much within how to use these weapons to fight wars.

And it's talked about in numerical terms. We need X to do Y. Therefore, we need to invest in Z without talking about what X really means, if that makes sense.

Jeffrey 56:20

Yeah, well, I think the last thing I would plug is the footnotes, you know? I mean, somebody literally tweeted at me like, and maybe it was Scott, was like, it's too bad there aren't footnotes for the book. And I'm like, there are footnotes!

Aaron 56:30

He said that in a direct message.

Jeffrey 56:32

Yeah, the footnotes are great. I mean, I shouldn't say anything I do is great that's obnoxious, but the footnotes were the best part of writing.

Aaron 56:41

Yeah, yeah, and I think you should plug the book here in case anybody actually wants to go back and read it.

Jeffrey 56:47

It is called The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States. We just call it The 2020 Commission. It is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. You can get it at most book retailers. It spent the first couple weeks, I think, on the table at Barnes & Noble. The new releases table, which was really nice placement.

And it seems to be at a lot of independent bookstores. So you can buy a copy if you want to pick one up in person. You can also order it online. There is, you know, what does Donald Trump call Amazon?

Aaron 57:22

I don't know. Again, I told you I have him on mute, so if a nuclear war starts from his Twitter feed, I won't know about it until I'm dead.

Jeffrey 57:29

Yeah, that's good. So yeah, you know, you can definitely pick up a copy, and we will eventually... Houghton Mifflin's a little slow at the moment, but we're trying to do book plates that I can sign so that Patreon subscribers who go through the effort of purchasing the book will get a signed book plate that they can affix

Aaron 57:53

To their book. And speaking of Patreon subscribers, we have a new subscriber benefit for all of our listeners and members. We're calling it Brilliant Pebbles. Sorry for the voting online. Scott pulled a Vladimir Putin and we had 100% turnout and 100% votes in favor of Brilliant Pebbles as the name.

Jeffrey 58:16

People really like dialy yield, huh?

Aaron 58:20

Although we took care of them, didn't we? Enjoy the gulag, boys. Enjoy the gulag, Daily Yielders. But that's a mini podcast that we're going to be putting out every Tuesday, pretty much, which is one of the three of us, me, Jeffrey, or Scott, or special guests of the pod. Coming on and talking about cool and interesting things that aren't quite ready for a full 30 minutes, or in this case, hour-long episode, but certainly things that we're tracking in the non-proliferation sphere.

The podcast, I think the first one, Jeffrey, is with you. You were actually calling in from Hiroshima. God only knows what time it was, and you were talking about... Your impressions of the disarmament committee?

Jeffrey 59:05

Yes, and my proposal with Scott Sagan to have the United States adopt a policy that we would not use nuclear weapons in any case when a conventional weapon would do.

Aaron 59:17

Yeah, I listen to it. I am a subscriber. And episode two, which should already be out by the time this podcast hits the airwaves, which is about...

Jeffrey 59:28

China's nuclear air force, which is not me. It's Scott. I haven't heard it yet. I'm eager to hear what China thinks or what Scott thinks about the possibility of a new nuclear mission for China's air force.

Aaron 59:43

Yeah, it's about 10 minutes. I do the intro because, again, and Scott does all the talking because this is Scott's area, not mine. But with that said, we're still testing out formats here. We're trying to figure this out as we go. So if you have feedback and you are a Patreon subscriber, please drop it into the Slack thread because we are listening and we will make tweaks as we move forward.

So if you would like to have access to this podcast, Brilliant Pebbles.com. Hop on over to patreon.com slash ACW podcast. And for $3 a month, if you're a student, you can gain access or $5 a month if you're a regular person and you can get even more arms control long content. So Jeffrey, with that, I think we've, I think we've spoiled your book enough, man.

Jeffrey 1:00:29

Yeah. Hey, I was really fun to talk about it. You know, all this time I spent writing it, I had to more or less keep it to myself. And I, I love being able to talk spoilers.

Aaron 1:00:38

Yeah, it was fun. And again, really good book to go read because it's not really about North Korea. It's about everything else. So thanks, everybody, for listening. And thanks, Jeffrey, for joining me.