The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States

by Jeffrey Lewis

  Eventually, Choe received a text message informing the party gathered in the basement that the Air Force headquarters had been destroyed. That explained why the Air Force was not in contact with air defense units around the country and was unable to say whether a general attack was under way or not. “The cyber-attack on our communications, the destruction of our air defenses—isn’t that how Americans always start wars?” Jo said to his interrogators.

  Then, a few minutes later, word reached Kim’s sister that the family residence had been hit by another strike. This time Kim’s staff in Pyongyang had succeeded in placing a call to Kim Yo Jong in the bunker. She informed her brother that the residence had been targeted and that a small number of staff had been killed or injured. This news marked an important turning point for Kim. “In Kim’s mind, there wasn’t really any difference between an attack on his house and an attack on him,” explained one of Kim’s aides in a postwar debriefing.“You have to remember, back then, in North Korea, it was treason to even deface a poster with his picture on it. And you went and blew up his house with a missile!”

  South Korea’s strike on the Kim residence created one final impression that was a most unfortunate coincidence. North Korean strategists had closely examined Operation Iraqi Freedom, the US military invasion of Iraq in 2003, to understand what a military operation against North Korea might look like. In doing so, they seized on what is generally thought of as a minor footnote in the war. The day before the invasion was set to begin, the United States received intelligence indicating that Saddam Hussein would be at a location known as Dora Farm. The Bush administration raced to design a small strike using cruise missiles in a dawn raid, hoping to kill Saddam as he slept and end the war before it could begin. After reports indicated that Dora Farm had a hardened bunker, two aircraft with four guided bombs were added to the strike package. However, while daring, the strike was a spectacular failure. Like so much of the Iraq War, it was based on flawed intelligence. Saddam had not visited Dora Farm in years. There wasn’t even a bunker at the site.

  Within the United States, the strike on Dora Farm is largely forgotten—dismissed as a fool’s errand, an inconsequential, last-minute improvisation. It received little attention in after-action reports or books about the Iraq War. But in North Korea, military strategists saw something different. They saw a page in the American playbook. They believed that any invasion of North Korea would begin with an effort to isolate Kim Jong Un from his nuclear forces and, in all probability, to kill him. “How did you start your invasion of Iraq? You tried to kill Saddam in his bed and end the war before it started!” Jo reminded his interrogators. “We studied your approach very closely!”

  From Kim Jong Un’s point of view, the strike on his residence outside Pyongyang was the opening gambit of an invasion. The air defenses that protected him from American bombers were under attack, and he had only intermittent communications by cell phone with what remained of his military. There was every reason to believe that American forces would follow. If Kim Jong Un was going to avoid the grisly end that had met Saddam Hussein, he concluded, he must act decisively to blunt the coming American attack.

  “Deter and Repel”

  North Korea had a single, well-developed war plan. It was based on the realistic understanding that North Korea could not hold out for long against the combined military power of South Korea and the United States.

  North Korea’s military leaders were rational and competent. They understood that just as the American military had defeated Iraq and just as NATO airpower had toppled Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, the United States could beat North Korea in a conventional war. American military forces were, they knew, far superior to anything that North Korea could field. There was no level of ideological fervor that could blind the North Koreans to this obvious gap between their military and those of their enemies.

  The goal of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program was to close that gap. Nuclear weapons, the North Koreans believed, would deter any attempt at regime change by the United States. And in the event that deterrence failed, North Korea’s military was counting on nuclear weapons to seriously damage the American invasion force and give North Korea the best shot at victory—or at least survival.

  Kim Jong Un’s grandfather Kim Il Sung had believed that North Korea might be able to use nuclear weapons to destroy American forces in South Korea and Japan, thus preventing an invasion. The United States had, after all, refused to use nuclear weapons against North Korea in the 1950s, in no small part because American military officials believed that the US forces were far more vulnerable to Soviet nuclear weapons if fighting escalated. “Right now we present ideal targets for atomic weapons in Pusan and Inchon,” General Joseph “Lightning Joe” Collins had argued in a 1953 meeting. “An atomic weapon in Pusan harbor could do serious damage to our military position in Korea. We would again present an ideal target if we should undertake a major amphibious operation. An amphibious landing fleet would be a perfect target for an atomic weapon at the time when it was putting the troops ashore.”

  Kim Il Sung and his generals keenly understood that American forces had an Achilles’ heel. They would be most vulnerable when they were concentrated, whether in ports or beachheads. As early as the 1960s, Kim Il Sung had told anyone who would listen that North Korea needed atomic weapons to defend itself, for the same reasons that Lightning Joe outlined.

  Kim also believed that the horrific casualties arising from the use of nuclear weapons would cause the United States to stop an invasion. “As early as 1965, Kim Il-sung had said that North Korea should develop rockets and missiles to hit US forces inside Japan,” according to Ko Young-hwan, a former North Korean diplomat who defected to the United States. Such a strike would produce “casualties of somewhere between 10,000 to 20,000 . . . in order to have anti-war sentiments rise inside the United States and cause the withdrawal of US forces in the time of war.” According to Ko, Kim Jong Il believed the same thing: “Kim Jong Il believes that if North Korea creates more than 20,000 American casualties in the region, the US will roll back and North Korea will win the war.” Like Saddam, members of the Kim family believed that the United States was casualty-averse and unable to sustain public support for military operations that involved substantial loss of American lives.

  Unlike Saddam, however, North Korean military officials would never allow the United States to build up a massive invasion force immediately outside their borders. After carefully analyzing US military operations against Saddam in Iraq and Gaddafi in Libya, North Korean military officials reached the same conclusion as General Norman Schwarzkopf, who commanded US forces during the first Gulf War and who famously admitted that he would have struggled to liberate Kuwait had Saddam continued his offensive into Saudi Arabia. As one commentary that appeared in North Korean state media explained, North Korea was “well aware of [the] foolishness of Saddam Hussein who allowed the deployment of the world’s most powerful war forces just at its doorstep.” And the commentary made clear that, unlike Saddam, North Korea “would not miss an opportunity but mount an attack by mobilizing all possible forces under its possession in case there is a sign of deployment of armed forces.”

  Saddam had watched the United States build up a massive invasion force in 1991 and again in 2003. The North Koreans had concluded that was suicide. Saddam’s mistake—and Gaddafi’s too—was not possessing nuclear weapons that could stop the invasion before it started. “The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the Gaddafi regime in Libya could not escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations for nuclear development,” was how one North Korean statement put it.

  This was precisely why North Korea’s generals hated the annual American military exercises. Each war game included a large buildup of troops, ships, and aircraft—an agglomeration of military might that could easily be an invasion force hiding in plain sight. North Korea’s generals had to watch the exercises extremely carefully for the slightest indic
ation that this was no game. Pyongyang was constantly on guard for the day when the US military exercises turned out to be the real thing. On that day, the North Korean plan was to strike the invaders with nuclear weapons.

  All North Korea missile units were trained to execute this plan. They practiced striking US forces with nuclear weapons in port and in their barracks, and they practiced destroying US airbases where airplanes were kept. And to make sure that the United States clearly understood that Kim Jong Un would not sit idly by while the United States assembled his executioners, he posed with maps showing that the DPRK planned to strike US forces throughout the region. Invariably there would be a map, held down by weights and an ashtray, showing the point where the missile had landed in the ocean. And just as invariably, some North Korean military official had drawn an arc from the splash point down to the intended target—the port in Busan, South Korea, in one case, or the US airbase near Iwakuni in Japan in another. And just to make sure the United States understood all this, North Korea released statement after statement making clear that Kim Jong Un would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons against US forces in South Korea and Japan to stop any invasion by the United States.

  Now, trapped in a basement, Kim was certain that an American invasion was gathering steam. And he knew that he must act quickly if North Korean forces were to have any hope of stopping that invasion.

  Still, it is one thing to have a plan on paper. It is quite another thing to go through with that plan, particularly when everything hangs in the balance. It would have been understandable if Kim had hesitated. No one, not even Kim Jong Un, would have started a nuclear war with the United States of America unless he was certain that there was no other option, no other way out. Above all, Kim wanted to live—he wanted “regime survival,” in the peculiar language of intelligence assessments. But everything he knew about surviving told him that he had to act decisively when the moment came. He could wait—but he could not wait too long. He still had intermittent cell-phone service. How long would that last? Once his cell phone stopped working, it would be too late.

  In the end, Kim’s cell phone provided the final confirmation he needed. An aide showed him a tweet sent by the American president, time-stamped early in the evening at 7:03 PM Seoul time—nearly an hour before the missiles had been launched. The message was in the president’s own distinctive voice. It read:

  Donald J. Trump @tehDonaldJTrump

  LITTLE ROCKET MAN WON’T BE BOTHERING US MUCH LONGER!

  Kim’s English, picked up in boarding school, was passable—certainly passable enough to understand what Trump meant. It was clear evidence, at least to Kim, that Trump knew about the strike in advance. Still, he showed the phone to his sister, who showed it to Choe. Everyone agreed that the tweet’s meaning was plain.

  It was time to give the order. Waiting would be fatal.

  The Attack

  At approximately 2:00 AM Pyongyang time, Kim Jong Un gave the order to launch a nuclear strike. The targets: American and South Korean forces on and around the Korean Peninsula.

  When Kim Jong Un’s order reached North Korea’s missile units, commanders roused the troops sleeping in their bunks. Almost immediately, teams of North Korean technicians began driving out to specially prepared launch sites, each carefully selected in advance. Every one of these sites had been cleared of any trees or bushes, then paved with gravel.

  The distinctive shapes along the side of the road were unmistakable: each clearing looked exactly like the others. The North Korean troops who had built the sites called them 눈표—literally, an “eye mark” that a Korean reader might add in the margin of a page, but figuratively an idiom for anyone or anything that stands out.

  At each of these sites, a truck pulled up and unloaded its crew of six, who began running hoses out to a decoy. As it inflated, the decoy gradually took the shape of a Scud missile. These decoys had been purchased abroad; sometimes the North Koreans used them as targets in training. With special metallic fabric, they looked almost exactly like the real thing to both human beings and radars.

  The decoy crews finished their work quickly—within twenty minutes—and then returned to their bases. By the time they got back, another, more deadly phase of the operation was under way.

  At the same time the crews had been inflating the decoys, North Korea began to launch the first wave of its attack—a swarm of drones aimed at missile defenses located throughout South Korea and Japan.

  Using drones to attack missile defenses was hardly a novel idea. Iran had, for many years, trained its proxies to attack American-made Patriot defenses by sending cheap drones that used GPS to navigate along waypoints, before diving down on the radar and exploding. Without the radar, the entire battery was useless. And often the missile defense battery would be forced to shoot at the drones, wasting valuable interceptors. After an Israeli battery shot down a $200 quadcopter with a $3 million Patriot missile, there was a lot of talk about defense against drones—but that talk never translated into defenses for the missile defenses sitting in South Korea. At the same time, North Korea released images of drones being used in combat and paraded them through Pyongyang.

  Striking American missile defenses was straightforward enough. South Korean and American soldiers routinely took pictures of their bases and uploaded them to Facebook. Soldiers on runs would log their route with a FitBit and upload that to a social media site. The only security measure that South Korea took was placing trees over sensitive military facilities in Naver and Daum—the South Korean equivalent of Google Maps. But since those same facilities were not censored in Google Maps, the ruse merely had the effect of confirming which sites were sensitive.

  The single terminal high-altitude area defense (THAAD) system, an antiballistic missile system that US forces had placed in South Korea, was an especially easy target. It had attracted considerable attention in 2017 after being deployed on a golf course in Seongju, South Korea, and the North Koreans knew exactly what it looked like; in fact, a North Korean drone had crashed while taking pictures of the site. The system—and especially its crucial radar—also was visible in satellite images, sitting out in the open. The THAAD system had a radar that could only look forward. It never saw the three North Korean drones that navigated south over the ocean and along the Korean coastline before turning inland and striking it from behind.

  Meanwhile, as North Korean units inflated decoys and sent drones to attack missile defenses in South Korea and Japan, Kim Jong Un’s missile units had also begun their phase of the operation.

  The attack on March 21 largely used North Korea’s arsenal of Scud and Nodong ballistic missiles. The Scud was a Soviet missile, although the North Koreans had gotten their first Scuds from Egypt. The Nodong was a larger, even longer-range longer-range version of the Scud developed by the North Koreans, who extended its range to nearly 1,000 miles.

  Launching a Scud or Nodong missile requires a period of preparation—soldiers have to use a crane to lift the missile up and place it on the truck that will carry it and then bolt a warhead to it. The most dangerous part of the whole operation is fueling the missile—filling it with toxic propellants that are designed to explode. The safest approach is to erect the missile and then fuel it, but crews can fuel the missile first and then drive to the launch site. Few units will transport a missile filled with explosive fuel and an armed nuclear warhead except in the most urgent circumstances.

  These circumstances were certainly urgent. So, with their missiles armed and fueled, the truck drivers and the rest of their crews climbed into the cabins of their vehicles and put on their headsets. The heavy trucks were so loud that the crews inside the cabins could only communicate with one another over radio.

  The units themselves had a specific schedule on which they needed to launch their missiles; North Korean military planners knew that in any attack, and especially a preemptive nuclear strike, timing and coordination were crucial. And so the North Korean missile units all went to staging
areas where they could hide until it was time to come out.

  Like the Iraqis before them, the North Koreans had concluded that digging a tunnel for their missile launchers to hide in might well draw the suspicion of US spy satellites. When possible, therefore, the truck drivers parked underneath highway overpasses or inside road tunnels.

  During the Cold War, the Red Army had trained to launch Scud missiles within about ninety minutes of an order. But North Korean crews, like the Iraqis and others, knew that they had no such luxury when fighting the United States. They trained to reduce that launch time to about twenty minutes.

  Of course, the North Koreans need not have been so careful. There was no coming air attack. And the launch preparations were being conducted in the dead of night, underneath a thick blanket of clouds, which explains why they were not spotted by US satellites and aerial surveillance.

  As the designated launch window approached, the units drove out from their hiding places, parked in pre-surveyed launch spots with their trucks pointing in the direction of their designated targets, and raised their missiles.

  North Korean units at nine different locations all over the country fired fifty-four nuclear-armed ballistic missiles against targets in South Korea and Japan, as well as eight more missiles at American forces stationed in Okinawa and Guam. From the first launch to the last, the entire attack occurred in a span of about half an hour.