“The skies over the Korean Peninsula on March 21st were clear and blue. None of the 228 passengers who boarded Air Busan 411 at Gimhae International Airport had any reason to expect an eventful flight.” So begins The 2020 Commission Report. Over the next 72 hours, an estimated 3 million would be dead, with 4.5 million succumbing to radiation poisoning and related injuries the days and weeks after. The speculative novel, written by nuclear nonproliferation expert and arms control wonk Jeffery Lewis, is probably one of the best attempts to alarm the post-Cold War generation about the still ever-present nuclear threat that remains in states like North Korea.

  The future of The 2020 Commission Report, follows the tale of, as you may expect from the title, a series of contemporary nuclear attacks on South Korea and the United States. After the shootdown of a glitched South Korean airliner over the Yellow Sea by a paranoid air defense crew, a short, yet intense increase in tensions occur, leading to a South Korean convention missile salvo. When a Tweet gets severely misinterpreted by North Korean advisors, they fear that a US-led invasion is about to occur. In order to prevent Kim Jong-Un and his cadre’s untimely demise, they proceed to go ballistic - Intercontinentally ballistic, so to speak. North Korea’s entire nuclear arsenal is flung against bases in South Korea, Japan, and the United States itself, following up with civilian targets right after to try and destroy the support for a full-on American attack.

  Of course, none of this is actually true - March 2020 may be on our doorsteps, but nothing of the sort has happened *yet*. But the plausibility of the book is one of its greatest strengths - Lewis transposes actual eyewitness accounts from survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, transferring them to the survivors from New York and the Washington suburbs who come to tell their stories to the Commission. The death tolls and destruction radiuses of the North Korean bombs are taken straight from NUKEMAP by Alex Wellerstein - a program used to calculate things such as burn radius and radiation spread. The novel uses mock interviews from actual Korean and American, aides, advisors, and cabinet members in order to create a clear picture of the bunkers of Mar-a-Lago, the Blue House, and Mount Myohyang.

  An important quirk of The 2020 Commission Report, is that it isn’t really a conventional novel. It isn’t told from the point of view of your average everyman - the book itself is told from the point of view of a government commission, taking the reports of both eyewitnesses and casualties and setting the scene immediately. In a way, the novel decides to cut the fat of establishing fictional characters and a protagonist - the author decides to dive right into the action and explore the idea of such an incident happening, which means this isn’t particularly the best book to read if you want to get attached to characters and explore their sorrows in such a situation. The only true slices of a narrative taking place in any person point of view are disembodied reports of about a dozen survivors in the remnants of Seoul, Tokyo, New York, and Northern Virginia, although they aren’t really touched on again, and remain anonymous. And yet, although you feel no connection with these eyewitnesses, you can’t stop turning the pages - you need to keep watching this happen.

  In terms of its actual point of view, The 2020 Commission Report is a combination of two things: the informative omniscience of a government commission which has access to official records, and the strange yet hilarious situations the leaders of the conflict come up with à la Dr. Strangelove. Most of the novel is told through interviews of the workers of the war rooms and mountain complexes of the Korean Peninsula and the United States, and given a cramped room with extreme amounts of stress, something is bound to happen - the war itself comes from a classic, all-caps Tweet from the president himself.

  Of course, in the post-Cold War era, there aren’t a lot of appearances of nuclear war and warheads in fiction  and real life - although, with tensions escalating between the hermit kingdom and the United States, as well as a false nuclear threat being sent out in Hawaii last year, the presence of nuclear warheads will haunt the Earth for probably as long as humanity itself will last. There isn’t enough fiction that accurately reports how many close shaves humans have had with certain destruction, or at least the long-misery of radiation poisoning and a changed climate. Of course, Generation Z is the first generation to fully grow up and live without a clear threat of nuclear hell itself raining from the sky, and although you can keep watching movies like Threads, or play games like Metro 2033 and Fallout to get a view of total atomic annihilation inspired by the Commie vs Cappie struggle of the 20th century, The 2020 Commission is wonderfully written, edited, and researched, and shows the new face of probable nuclear war - limited strikes. It will captivate, it will leave you scrambling for iodine pills, it will enthrall, it will leave you paranoid and wary of emergency alerts on your cell phone, but most importantly: It will inform. And it is an absolutely amazing way to do so.