Choe’s comment, he explained, was a reference to something Kim Jong Il had said—a reference that Kim Jong Un would have understood all too well. Choe pointed out that the statement was little more than a repackaging of a quotation by China’s Mao Zedong, who had dismissed the threat of nuclear attacks on China with a similar statement. It was nothing more than a Leninist idea that war is decided not by weapons but by the will of the soldiers and their leaders. “If war is a test of weapons, then you Americans would always win,” Choe explained. “But you lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s because war is a test of will. Capitalists aren’t willing to blow up the earth, because you care only about money. The supreme leader understood what I meant: with his strength of will, surely we would prevail.”
According to Choe, Kim continued to see the conflict as a personal struggle with Donald Trump. One of them would have to back down and accept defeat. For Kim, it was clear that Trump the “property developer” would back down. After all, for Kim Jong Un defeat would mean the loss of everything—his rule, his family, his life. Donald Trump, on the other hand, could simply stop and walk away, suffering nothing more than the same short-lived sting of embarrassment that had befallen many other defeated imperial powers.
Kim’s plan was to respond to every American escalation with an escalation of his own, until the price was simply too high for Trump. The news that the first attack had not produced the expected public pressure on Trump to stop the attacks was disappointing, but not unexpected. This was a struggle to death, and Kim believed that the winner would be the one who had the will to carry on to the bitter end.
The transcripts give no record of Kim giving an order to use long-range nuclear weapons against the United States. Choe said simply that, after the conversation, he understood what Kim wanted. When Kim had ordered the strikes against South Korea and Japan, he had also ordered that the long-range missile forces be dispersed. Their orders were clear: if North Korea came under attack, they could retaliate against their targets in the United States. Still, Choe said, he managed to contact the Strategic Rocket Force Command on his cell phone to convey the order.
He recalled being somewhat evasive, unsure whether his calls were being intercepted.
“The medicine doesn’t seem to have cured the patient of his madness,” Choe recalled telling the Strategic Rocket Force commander. “Trump is a big man. The supreme leader wants to give him a stronger dose.”
Then Choe accompanied Kim’s children as they made their way back over the hill to a hotel at the mouth of the valley.
The Great Missile Chase
Davidson had tasked the Air Force with hunting down North Korea’s long-range missiles. The priority during the first day of the air war was to find and somehow disable the small number of big missiles that could reach the United States with their massive thermonuclear weapons—and to do so before Kim had a chance to launch them. Davidson knew he had a narrow window of time, but he hoped that Kim would hesitate—and that his hesitation would be fatal.
The analysts working at the CIA and in other corners of the intelligence community had a good idea where North Korea stored most of the missiles that threatened the United States. On March 21, 2020, the US Air Force struck these sites heavily, with cruise missiles launched from ships and aircraft. But North Korea had stored many of these missiles in tunnels, which made them difficult to reach with a single air strike. Destroying a deeply buried target often required striking it over and over, in the same spot, with each successive explosion digging a bit deeper. What’s more, the intelligence provided to the US aircrews participating in these missions, while impressive, was far from perfect. It was impossible to know where every last missile had been stored or even how many there were. As one senior Defense Intelligence Agency official admitted, “There was no accurate accounting of mobile launchers or where they were based or hiding.” US intelligence analysts are supremely talented, but they are not omniscient—and no one should have expected them to be.
North Korea’s long-range ballistic missiles, including the massive Hwasong-15, were mobile—that is to say, they could be transported by massive trucks. These vehicles were slow and cumbersome, but the North Koreans had been able to disperse them at the same time Kim gave the order for its short- and medium-range missiles to attack targets in South Korea and Japan. Some of these missiles were moved to secondary tunnels a safe distance away from the primary tunnels where they were regularly stored. Others were hidden under highway overpasses, in road tunnels, or in caves.
As a result, the massive series of air strikes that targeted North Korea’s known missile bases destroyed few, if any, of Kim’s intercontinental ballistic missiles. This illuminates one of the reasons that OPLAN 5015 was premised as a preemptive strike: Air Force officials believed that it was essential to destroy these ICBMs before North Korea could disperse them. Their concern was sometimes shrouded in euphemisms like “left of launch” and “pre-boost phase intercept,” but the jargon all meant the same thing: destroy the missiles before they could be launched. And the best time to do that was when the missiles were still sitting on the trucks in garages at known locations.
But with North Korea’s preemptive nuclear strike against US forces in South Korea, Japan, and Guam, the United States had lost the element of surprise. North Korea’s remaining missiles were already on the move, the truck drivers heading for secure places to hide from the retaliatory strikes that might be coming. Thus, the Air Force was forced to play catch-up and chase after Kim Jong Un’s missiles just as it had scrambled to find Saddam’s Scuds in the 1991 Gulf War. In that war, allied war planners had neglected to target Saddam’s small force of Scud missiles, judging it to be militarily insignificant. But what they did not anticipate was that Saddam would lob missiles at Israel, creating a political crisis. Allied commanders threw large numbers of aircraft and special forces at the mission of “Scud hunting,” only to fail miserably.
Although the conflicts were separated by nearly thirty years, technology had not changed quite as dramatically as might be imagined. Some of the F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets used in the air strikes on North Korea were the same aircraft that had hunted the Scuds in 1991 in Iraq, although these aircraft were now joined by the F-35, a stealth fighter with far greater capabilities. Crucially for this nighttime raid, both aircraft had much improved targeting pods that allowed the pilots to see better in the dark.
While the planes’ better new sensors allowed the pilots—and the controllers communicating with them—to see far more than ever before, they did not tell the pilots and controllers where to look. The Air Force was quickly forced to develop a strategy similar to how it handled Scuds during the 1991 Gulf War: identifying “launch baskets” from which North Korean missiles might be expected to be fired, and then sending aircraft to patrol in figure-eight patterns over these areas, dropping bombs at preset intervals on possible launch sites. The idea was to harass the launch units, using the aircraft like artillery to force the missile crews to stay hidden and to keep them from launching. Of course, if a pilot saw a vehicle moving into the launch basket or preparing for a launch, then her priority immediately changed to destroying it.
This approach had worked poorly during the 1991 Gulf War. Afterward, the United States could not confirm that even a single one of Saddam’s Scuds had been destroyed prior to its launch. Pentagon officials had hoped that improvements in technology might see them through during another such conflict—that the next time would be different. But North Korea was different in other ways that complicated the missile chase.
North Korea was a more challenging environment than Iraq, particularly since many of its launch sites were located in remote and mountainous regions. In Iraq, the launch baskets were easy to identify because Iraq’s missiles were short-range: if the Iraqis wanted to launch a missile at Israel, there was only a small area of the Iraqi desert close enough to Israel for the missile to reach its target. But against North Korea, the Air Force
was looking for missiles that could fly all the way to the United States. All of North Korea essentially was a launch basket.
This made the criteria for where the Air Force should send its fighters to patrol more nebulous. In telling the pilots where to look, military intelligence analysts were often forced simply to guess. These guesses were educated, of course; the analysts had some idea of where the missiles were stored, approximately when they were told to disperse, and how fast the launcher trucks could drive. North Korea’s poor road network helped narrow down the trucks’ possible locations: for instance, the big trucks were far too heavy to travel off-road.
US analysts were largely correct in drawing their launch baskets, although a few missiles were launched from outside these areas. But the analysts had created these accurate launch baskets by making them very, very large, and thus a large number of aircraft were required to patrol them.
The approach, whatever sense it made on paper, was simply not effective enough to protect the United States. About a dozen Hwasong-14 and Hwasong-15 missiles were successfully launched against the nation during the early-morning hours of Sunday, March 22.
Air Force officials have argued that their efforts did, in fact, suppress the number of launches. “From the perspective of limiting damage to the United States,” an Air Force history argues, “it is important to remember how many missiles were not launched because missile crews were evading detection by the air campaign.” Still, there is no evidence that the air campaign was effective in destroying any mobile missiles, of any range. “In the end,” the history concludes, “the best one can say is that some mobile launchers may have been destroyed [prior to firing their missiles].”
The pilots simply could not find the missiles prior to launch. Instead, once a launch was detected, controllers ordered aircraft to fly to the launch location to destroy the launcher before it could escape to reload and fire again. North Korean missile units, like the Iraqis in 1991, practiced a tactic that America military officials called “shoot-and-scoot”: firing their missile and then moving the large vehicle to safety. “Those guys were like cockroaches who disappear when the kitchen light goes on,” observed Captain Tom McIntyre, an American pilot.
The North Koreans adopted a slightly different shoot-and-scoot strategy. They built huge trucks that could erect the missile on a massive metal firing table and then “scoot” before the projectile was even fired. The truck simply brought the missile to the site and erected it. By the time the crew fired the missile, the precious launcher was long gone to pick up another payload. American pilots reported their frustration in arriving on the scene, only to see little more than a hunk of metal and a burn mark on the ground. “We started calling the trucks ‘deadbeat dads,’” another US pilot recalled, “because there was an erection, but they would split town before we could make ’em pay up.”
In many cases, the first that pilots saw of the ICBMs were the massive flashes of the huge missiles as the crews launched them toward the United States. “It’s a huge flame and your first reaction is that it’s a SAM and you want to make a defensive reaction,” recalled McIntyre. “Then you see that it is going straight up. So AWACS [the Airborne Warning and Control System, an aircraft that functions as an air-based traffic control system] is yelling and hollering for us to get on it and we’re heading for the coordinates as fast as we could go. It was about twenty-five miles away from us, but when we got there, we went up and down the road and all I could find in the targeting pod was a hotspot on the ground.”
Even when the pilots saw a launch, it was usually from a great distance, and there was nothing they could do to stop it. It simply isn’t possible for aircraft to engage enemy missiles as they lift off.
Many pilots recalled the helpless feeling of watching the huge missiles powering up into space, carrying huge nuclear weapons that the pilots knew were headed toward the United States. “You just think, I hope those guys in Alaska have a shot,” one pilot recalled. “Then you go try to find the son of a bitch that did it.”
9
Wheels Up
North Korea fired thirteen nuclear-armed long-range missiles against the United States of America. The first missile was fired at 1:02 AM Pyongyang time on March 22—midday on March 21 on the East Coast of the United States. It would take approximately forty-five minutes to reach its target in the United States.
A number of questions have been raised about why the United States was not able to defend against these missiles, and about the conduct of the president in the forty-five minutes between the launch of the first missile and its impact in the United States. In particular, many citizens have wondered whether the government might have done more to protect its citizens or, at the very least, to warn them of the coming danger.
Mainland Firepower Strike Plan
The American targets that Kim Jong Un ordered North Korea’s Strategic Rocket Force to destroy with nuclear weapons did not come as a surprise. The targets had been chosen far in advance and clearly identified in North Korean propaganda.
In 2013, Kim Jong Un had even gone so far as to pose for a picture as he sat at his desk, approving the list of targets in the United States. Behind him, his aides had erected a world map labeled “Mainland Firepower Strike Plan.” They carefully drew lines from North Korea toward four different locations in the United States.
Let us reiterate: Kim Jong Un’s nuclear war plan was not a suicide note. It was a strategy to win the war, although it was a desperate gambit taken as a last resort. Still, there was a grim logic to the four places shown on the map. Two of the targets were military in nature—the naval bases in Pearl Harbor and San Diego that housed the American fleet. These strikes were intended to interdict the supply lines that would stretch from the United States to sustain military operations on the Korean Peninsula.
Modern warfare requires immense support. For the invasion of Iraq, the Navy moved more than 56 million square feet of cargo and 4.8 billion gallons of fuel. To visualize these amounts, imagine you are standing in Washington, DC. The cargo that you need to ship to the Middle East to supply the attack looks like a line of cars stretching past Denver and into the Rocky Mountains. And the fuel is enough to fill a train stretching all the way to Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The invasion of North Korea would require a similarly massive naval operation, but North Korea would not let that happen without a fight. Kim Jong Un had ordered the Strategic Rocket Force to use its nuclear weapons to break these supply lines, leaving US troops in Asia hungry and out of ammunition, tanks sitting idle, and planes grounded from lack of gas.
The other two targets on Kim’s map were chosen to make clear that the United States could not prosecute a war against Kim with impunity. If the president of the United States was going to try to kill Kim Jong Un and his family, Kim wanted to make sure the president knew that he and his family were at risk too.
Washington, DC, was Kim’s third target, and an obvious one. But the fourth place on the map had been a bit of a mystery, partly because the precise location was obscured in the picture that North Korea released in 2013. One of the generals was wearing a hat, and his head was in the way. Where was the fourth location? A few people estimated that the target was someplace in Texas, perhaps Austin. At the time the governor of Texas had claimed that North Korea was targeting Texas because of its excellent business climate. Others joked that Kim’s real grievance involved Texas barbecue, or maybe not being invited to South-by-Southwest.
But Kim wasn’t joking. Intelligence analysts realized the target was something altogether different—and it wasn’t in Texas at all.
The fourth place on the map was Barksdale Air Force Base, near Shreveport, Louisiana. The choice of Barksdale puzzled American analysts for some time, until the reason dawned on them. On September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush had been evacuated on Air Force One from an appearance in Florida. With Washington under attack, the crew decided that they could not return to the Capitol, so Air Force One had lan
ded at Barksdale Air Force Base instead.
The message from Kim Jong Un to the US president was: you can run, but you can’t hide.
Alert
American satellites detected each of the thirteen nuclear-armed intercontinental-range ballistic missiles that North Korea fired toward the United States, just as those same satellites had detected all of the other, shorter-range missiles that North Korea had launched over the previous days.
The missiles that Kim fired on March 22, however, were different. Short-range missiles popped up and fell back down, captured by the satellites for only a few moments. But these missiles—the big ones—kept climbing as their engines pushed them higher into space before burning out and lofting their heavy nuclear warheads toward their targets.
The list of locations that Kim now targeted was importantly different too from the list that he had released in 2013. As threatened, North Korea fired missiles at the fleet in Pearl Harbor and San Diego, as well as at the White House in Washington, DC. But it also launched ICBMs at New York City, which, owing to its landmark Trump Tower, had edged Barksdale off the targeting list. Each of these four cities was targeted with three thermonuclear weapons. North Korea also fired a single nuclear-armed missile at Mar-a-Lago.
The first missile launch at 1:02 AM in Korea set off a grim race between the missile and the satellite warning system. Each missile, once launched, would take between thirty-eight and forty-one minutes to reach its target in the United States. The lone exception was the very first missile fired, which was targeted at Mar-a-Lago. Since its destination was much farther away from North Korea than the others (more than 7,500 kilometers), the missile would take nearly forty-five minutes to arrive. This meant that before it struck Mar-a-Lago at 12:47 PM, there would be forty-five minutes to detect the launch, warn the president, and move him to safety—ideally the safety of Air Force One, which, once in the air, would be virtually invulnerable to attack.
The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States Page 17