[Name withheld], Alexandria, VA: I was pushed into the river with many other people. And since I thought it would be dangerous to stay on this side, I swam over to the other side. It was so frightening.
[Name withheld], Alexandria, VA: An awful thing happened when I reached the other side, and was relieved. I was suddenly spun around by the current. And then large pieces of hail begin to fall, and my face started hurting. So I plunged my face back into the water over and over again. I was spun around again and again. It just didn’t stop.
[Name withheld], Alexandria, VA: The water was swirling around me, and later I learned that was a tornado. And my friends somehow managed to survive it. [Interviewer: Did you think you were going to die?] Yes. The faces of my family came to my mind one after another. And I really thought I was dying because I swallowed a lot of water too.
[Name withheld], Alexandria, VA: Later on in the evening, when we were sitting around without having much to do, most of the people had already fled and the city was still burning. We could hear voices calling “Help!” or “It’s burning. Help us!” The voices, they weren’t from nearby but from far away. We didn’t know just where those voices came from, but it became quiet by midnight.
Evasive Action
While Air Force One was loitering out over the Atlantic Ocean, air traffic controllers in Jacksonville, Florida, detected an unidentified aircraft heading toward the president’s plane. The controllers radioed the pilot. “When controllers asked if we were aware of an unidentified plane bearing down on us, we didn’t have a clue,” he recalled. “I kept thinking that the sky is huge and the chances of one aircraft finding another are just infinitesimal. But I worried that maybe we were followed as we took off.”
The pilot had few options. “Air Force One has defenses to protect against attack,” he explained, “but no offensive capability. So I changed course. As we veered west, the other plane did not follow: it was simply an airliner with a malfunctioning transponder.”
The passengers aboard the aircraft recall that the report from Jacksonville, although it turned out to be a non-issue, changed the mood aboard Air Force One. The president had grown increasingly agitated that he was unable to reach Melania or Ivanka. He had been in the air for two hours, and there were now television reports of nuclear explosions in New York City and Washington, DC. He did not know if his wife and daughter were dead or alive. Staff members could see quite clearly that Trump Tower had been near the epicenter of the blast. Some thought the president could see that too. Still, no one said anything.
Trump now insisted that they were no safer in the air than on the ground. The president began to demand that the pilot land the plane. But where? Florida, Washington, and New York were clearly not safe. And Barksdale Air Force Base, George Bush’s first stop after leaving Florida on 9/11, had been clearly marked on Kim’s map of nuclear targets—it could be attacked at any time.
There was brief discussion about attempting to get the president to Camp David, largely because it was close to both Washington and Site R. But in the end, the pilot proposed flying to the US Strategic Command Underground Command Center—the underground bunker in Omaha designed to allow the United States to fight and win a nuclear war.
No one objected.
Radiation Sickness
Those who survived the blast—the intense heat of the fireball and the hailstorm of broken glass and debris—now faced dealing with severe radiation burns and the onset of radiation sickness. The scale of the casualties completely overwhelmed local medical services, many of which had seen their facilities destroyed in the explosions and their doctors and nurses killed. The suffering was especially difficult in suburban areas that were densely populated but relied heavily on road networks to move people around. The accounts of burns and radiation sickness made for some of the most difficult testimony that this commission heard, and are equally challenging to read.
[Name withheld], Honolulu, HI: It was very, very hot. I touched my skin and it just peeled right off.
[Name withheld], Arlington, VA: There was a sticky yellowish pus, a white watery liquid coming out of my daughter’s wounds. Her skin was just peeling right off. And nine hours later, she died. [Interviewer: You were holding her in your arms all that time?] Yes, on my lap. I held her in my arms. When I held her on my lap, she said, “I don’t want to die.” I told her, “Hang on, hang on.” She said, “I won’t die before my brother comes home.” But she was in pain and she kept crying.
The surviving doctors, nurses, and volunteers were quickly overwhelmed. There was often no power or water, and medical supplies were soon exhausted. Of the tens of thousands of individuals who attempted to walk out of the affected areas, many were attempting to head home, although many others were descending on hospitals or even doctor’s offices, seeking help. Over the course of the day, many people suffering symptoms of fatal radiation sickness attempted to walk to safety but fell and died along the way.
Most of the survivors who managed to reach hospitals or other places where they hoped to find medical assistance were disappointed to encounter tens of thousands of other sick and dying people and only a handful of doctors and nurses, many of them seriously wounded themselves.
[Name withheld], Arlington, VA: There were too many people. We took care of the people around us by using the clothes of dead people as bandages, especially for those who were terribly wounded. By that time, we somehow became insensible [to] all those awful things.
[Name withheld], Honolulu, HI: I felt someone touch my leg. It was a pregnant woman. She said that she was about to die. She said, “I know that I am going to die. But I can feel that my baby is moving inside. I don’t mind if I die. But if the baby is delivered now, it does not have to die with me. Please help my baby live.” There were no obstetricians. There was no delivery room. There was no time to take care of her baby. All I could do was to tell her that I would come back later when everything was ready for her and her baby. This cheered her up. She looked so happy. So I went back to work taking care of the injured, one by one. There were so many patients. But the image of that pregnant woman never left my mind. Later, I went to the place where I had found her before. She was still there, lying in the same place. I patted her on the shoulder, but she said nothing. The person lying next to her said that a short while ago, she had fallen silent.
Despite being overwhelmed, many doctors and nurses worked tirelessly to aid people, even as their own condition deteriorated from fatigue or radiation poisoning. For many survivors, the heroism of ordinary people like these is a recurring memory of those horrible days.
Moreover, despite claims to the contrary by some people—including former president Trump—we have found no evidence of widespread looting or violence. Specifically, a systematic investigation into the activities of the National Guard and Army units deployed to maintain order reveals no evidence at all that there was organized criminal activity, much less widespread executions to combat it. Despite this, Trump has repeatedly referred to such events, saying, “It was on television. I saw it. It was well covered at the time. Now, I know they don’t like to talk about it, but it was well covered at the time.”
The commission believes that these rumors stemmed from conspiracies spread on the internet claiming to show military vehicles transporting the bodies of executed looters. These images, many of which are hosted on sites maintained by the Russian Federation, in fact show the vehicles that were required to recover and bury the more than one million people killed in the attack whose bodies were not pulverized or vaporized. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the initial explosions, and tens of thousands more died by the hour. The Army and the National Guard had to organize the enormous logistical effort associated with removing these bodies as quickly as possible. For many, the presence of large numbers of such vehicles, filled with bodies—the “death cabs”—is a stark memory of the days following the attack.
[Name withheld], Honolulu, HI: As military trucks came into the city,
they started loading bodies into truck beds. I saw three soldiers try to lift a burned body, but they dropped it to the ground, losing their grip when the skin sloughed off.
[Name withheld], Arlington, VA: When I came to, it was about seven in the evening. . . . I found myself lying on the floor. A soldier was looking in my face. He gave me a light slap on the cheek, and he said, “You are a lucky boy.” He told me that he had gone with one of the few trucks left to collect the dead bodies. . . . They were loading bodies, treating them like sacks. They picked me up from the riverbank and then threw me on top of the pile. My body slid off, and when they grabbed me by the arm to put me back onto the truck, they felt that my pulse was still beating, so they reloaded me onto the truck, carrying the survivors. I was really lucky.
It was this heroic effort to retrieve and bury the dead, we believe, that gave rise to the rumors and internet conspiracies.
For many survivors, the overwhelming horror of that day, and the days that followed, is not a story of looting and violence, but a tragic tale of complete strangers desperately trying to help one another in hopeless circumstances. Gillian Mackenzie, a book editor in Manhattan, was close enough to the blast that she was buried in ash and debris. Workers at a McDonald’s in Lower Manhattan pulled her out of the ash and gave her water, saving her life. Far from former president Trump’s claims of mass looting and violence, she said, it was a day when “ordinary people saved each other.”
The Mole Hole
Air Force One landed at Offut Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska. As soon as the president stepped off the plane, he was taken to the gleaming headquarters of Strategic Command—the military entity responsible for waging and winning nuclear wars. But instead of entering through the front door, Trump was taken beneath the concrete plaza near the building’s entrance to the Operations Center. Officially called US Strategic Command Underground Command Center, it was better known as the “Mole Hole.”
Down inside the Mole Hole, President Trump was escorted to an empty office. Despite the spartan accommodations, STRATCOM was in perfect communication with the other underground facilities maintained by the Department of Defense, as well as with the bunkers beneath the White House and Mar-a-Lago.
For many Americans, even in the months leading up to March 2020, the prospect of nuclear war had seemed remote. For the Pentagon, however, nuclear war was an ever-present possibility, and it had drawn up “continuity of government” plans that would ensure the survival of the government even in the event that American society itself completely collapsed. Over the past decade, Congress had authorized billions of dollars in funding to build secure underground facilities where US leaders could be safe from a nuclear attack. The construction of a new command center at Offut alone had cost $1.2 billion, and it was only one of six underground complexes that were now involved in coordinating the response.
These complexes included Site R, the alternate Pentagon where the secretary of defense was now organizing the attack on North Korea; Mount Weather in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where most government functions had relocated once the first nuclear weapon struck northern Virginia; NORAD’s alternate communications site at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado; and the underground bunkers beneath the White House and Mar-a-Lago. In addition to these sites, which were now central to the federal government’s disaster management effort, members of Congress were huddled in yet another bunker underneath Fort Leslie McNair in Washington, DC. The Trump administration did not, however, attempt to establish contact with members of Congress in their bunker. “One of the awkward questions we faced [in planning for this sort of scenario] was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack,” recalled one official present with the president in Omaha. “It was decided that no, it would be easier to operate without them.” Congress would remain in session, but the Trump administration did not make contact with them for six days.
The “continuity of government” efforts on March 21 went largely according to plan. Once he was in Omaha, the president was in regular communication with the secretary of defense at Site R and Jack Francis at Mar-a-Lago. (Aides recalled that Francis told everyone that he had volunteered to remain behind at Mar-a-Lago to assist those suffering in Jupiter.) Thanks to these communication links, the president was now receiving a steady stream of reports on both the attacks under way against the United States and the progress of the air war against North Korea.
With the reestablishment of communications, however, the scope of North Korea’s nuclear attack was now clear and President Trump’s anxiety about his family was growing. He was increasingly insistent that staff put him in contact with members of his family, particularly his wife Melania and his daughter Ivanka. Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner had been in Washington. The Secret Service had whisked them to safety at the White House and escorted them down into the Presidential Emergency Operations Center beneath the White House. They were soon put in contact with the president.
There was, however, a delicate task remaining. After the president spoke with Ivanka, he continued to ask why he had not been able to speak with Melania. For the staff around the president, the grim reality was plain enough: Manhattan had been hit directly with a 200-kiloton nuclear weapon, and Trump Tower was almost directly beneath the centerpoint of the massive explosion. The president’s son Barron had spent the day outside the city, visiting a friend in Connecticut. He was unharmed. Melania Trump, however, had been home in their penthouse atop Trump Tower at the time of the attack. News helicopters were now showing the enormous devastation throughout the country. In the images from Manhattan, block after city block had been leveled. Trump Tower had simply vanished.
None of the staff pointed out this obvious reason for their inability to make contact with Melania. After all, President Trump was known as a person who did not take bad news well. Moreover, the staff around the president were relatively junior people who had been able to get aboard Air Force One because they were staying at the Hilton next to the airport; the more senior staff who had been at Mar-a-Lago or the Colony Hotel were still in Palm Beach. They simply did not have the kind of personal relationship with the president that was now needed.
Who would tell the president? After a teleconference between Francis and Ivanka, the two decided that they needed to find Hope Hicks.
Hope Hicks was, in many ways, a surrogate daughter for Trump. Staff had sometimes joked that Hicks was the “real daughter,” making Ivanka the “real wife.” She was also well known as someone who could deliver bad news to Trump. “When a bad story would come up, she would volunteer,” explained a former Trump aide, “saying, ‘I’ll just go and tell him; I got it.’ We all had to do it, she was just better at it.” “She’s like a security blanket for the boss,” said another.
Hicks had left the White House in 2018 and was now living in Los Angeles, having started a boutique public relations firm specializing in crisis management. Summoned by telephone, she was entrusted with delivering the worst possible news to the president, who was surrounded by virtual strangers in Omaha, and she had to do it from her office in Los Angeles, using an unsecured line.
When Hicks was connected by phone with Trump, she gave it to him gentle but direct. Trump Tower, she explained, had been completely destroyed. Melania had been there. No, she told him, there was no chance that Melania had survived. No, she admitted, no one had seen her body. But, she felt compelled to add, it was not likely that her body would ever be recovered. She cried a bit. The president thanked her for calling and hung up.
“He was silent for a long time,” said one of the staff members present, “and then he said something to the effect that losing Melania was such a waste of a talented life.” Another staffer recalled the president’s comment differently, but declined to repeat his precise language, citing the need for decorum. Yet another staff member recalled the president’s comment verbatim: “What he mumbled was, ‘There was nothing in the world like her.’”
Conclusion
The l
egacy of the North Korean nuclear attacks is complex and challenging even now, over three years later, as the United States attempts to recover from the devastation of March 2020.
The number of people killed was enormous. In South Korea and Japan, the first wave of strikes killed more than 1.4 million people, while seriously wounding over five million others. The second wave, which struck the United States, killed another 1.4 million people and seriously wounded 2.8 million more. All told, nearly three million people died in the span of about forty-eight hours, and almost eight million people were left in desperate need of medical assistance.
For our country, Saturday, March 21, was only the beginning of what has been an unparalleled period of challenge and recovery. In particular, government authorities were slow to understand the scale of the unprecedented public health emergency that unfolded in the wake of the attacks. There were suddenly millions of people with serious injuries requiring immediate medical care. These demands overwhelmed a public health infrastructure that was itself severely damaged in the nuclear attacks. Nearly half of the nine million people who were seriously injured on March 21 slowly succumbed in the days and weeks after the attack. For many survivors, the grief that accumulated as friends and relatives died day after day was a much greater emotional burden than the sheer terror of the first day.
Within the United States, we continue to struggle with this challenging public health legacy. Even now, three years later, our public health situation has yet to fully stabilize, as evidenced by the frequent outbreaks of deadly diseases such as cholera and typhoid since the attacks. These outbreaks have had complex causes, but nearly all the factors that have contributed to them trace back, in one form or another, to the events of March 2020.
The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States Page 20