In the past year, whenever US-North Korea relations were at a particularly low point, I would occasionally wake up in the middle of the night, reach for my phone, and check Twitter to see if nuclear war had begun.
That a social media service could play a role in the end of the world might once have seemed absurd, but such is the reality of 2018. I was reminded of this again the other day when, as I was idly scrolling through my feed, a message stopped me in my tracks. 鈥淟ITTLE ROCKET MAN WON鈥橳 BE BOTHERING US MUCH LONGER!鈥� the scowling face of the Tweeter-in-Chief. 鈥淚s this it?鈥� I wondered, before noticing the username 鈥� not @realDonaldTrump, the US president鈥檚 genuine account, but @tehDonaldJTrump.
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Investigating further, I realised this was a parody account set up to promote The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Attacks on The United States, a fictional but all-too-real account of a nuclear conflict in which Twitter plays a defining role. Written by Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California and frequently quoted in the pages of 快猫短视频, it takes the form of an official US report published in 2023 to determine the causes of a North Korean nuclear attack.
The tone 鈥� set midway between bureaucratic sterility and a Tom Clancy thriller 鈥� works very well. It helps that both genres heavily favour acronyms. The setup: a technical glitch in a South Korean passenger jet (inspired by real-life aircraft failures) leaves the pilot drifting along the Korean border. The North Koreans mistake聽the plane for a US bomber and shoot it down, sparking a retaliation from South Korean missiles.
Lewis gradually ratchets up the tension as Korean leaders Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in decide how to act. Then 鈥淗urricane Donald鈥�, as one chapter is titled, comes in to play.聽His ill-fated tweet (above) prompts Kim to retaliate with nuclear strikes on South Korea, Japan and the US mainland.
Maps lay out the devastation in chilling detail. A nuke exploding over New York City creates a kilometre-wide fireball.Most residential buildings in central Manhattan are destroyed 鈥撀爄ncluding Trump Tower 鈥� and people suffer radiation burns within a 6.5 kilometre radius. Without medical treatment (and, needless to say, hospitals are plunged into chaos), radiation kills 50 to 90 percent of those exposed. You can create your own scientifically-accurate nuclear destruction with the , if that鈥檚 the kind of thing you enjoy.
The commission reports the personal stories of those who survive the blast. I was shocked to reach the end of the book and discover that these testimonies were actually adapted from people who survived the real-life nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Lewis explains, grounding these historical words in our present-day reality powerfully brings home the true horror of nuclear weapons.
If Lewis has one flaw, it鈥檚 his portrait of Trump. While the US president is known for his outlandish statements and short attention span, the Trump in the novel is slightly too broad. For all of his flaws, I don鈥檛 believe that Trump would declare a nuclear fireball rising over the coast of Florida to be 鈥渁bsolutely beautiful鈥�. A statement from the fictional Trump at the end of the report decrying it as 鈥淔AKE NEWS鈥� also comes across as generic bashing.
That said, I couldn鈥檛 put the book down, reading most of it in the course of one increasingly intense evening. If fear of nuclear war is going to keep you up at night, at least it can be a page-turner.
