Posted on 09/02/2018 4:15:09 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Works of fiction that purport to be collections of documents—let’s call them “assemblage novels”—are hard to pull off. The Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet succeeded in 2015—and ended up on the Booker Prize shortlist—with His Bloody Project, a novel that was supposedly a collection of documents relating to a 19th-century murder. Max Brooks’s Zombie Survival Guide, a clever fake manual for enduring the zombie apocalypse, is another recent entry in the genre.
Now comes Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and a prolific tweeter (he’s @armscontrolwonk), and his 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States. The book is conceived as a 9/11 Commission-style report, issued in 2023, examining the causes of North Korean nuclear strikes on New York, Northern Virginia, Hawaii, and South Florida that occurred in March 2020. The book is a mixture of nonfiction and speculation: Every event that occurs before the book’s publication this August actually happened. The rest is the work of Lewis’s imagination.
As a piece of literature, Lewis’s book fails. The key to a successful assemblage novel is maintaining utter fealty to the tone of the documents you purport to be presenting. In other words, you can’t break character. As such, The 2020 Commission Report should be written in the dispassionate, wooden, bureaucratic tone that characterized not only the 9/11 Commission Report, but also the 1946 Barkley investigation that looked into the causes of the attack on Pearl Harbor. And at times, Lewis affects this tone. But all too often, he veers into more a novelistic, expressionist style that would never show up in a document we’re to believe was written by a group of public servants....
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
Who Did the NorKors collaborate with in order to bring the devices to their destinations?
>>Manhattan, Northern Virginia, Honolulu, and South Florida are pulverized.
Acceptable losses.
I think the author assumes they’ll soon pair warheads with ICBMs.
Well...as a practical matter the strikes would probably all be on Hawaii. Maybe the West Coast if he can squeeze another couple thousand miles out of what he’s been building.
Why would anyone pick east coast targets? Take the West and let the weather do the rest.
He might be able to get near Hawaii.
But I do say... no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops. Depending on the breaks.
Nuke the Norks if they left on San Francisco.
Just put them on rust bucket freighters. Fill the ships with Muzzi “refugees” and send them to “Sanctuary Cities”. The democrats would welcome the boats with open arms. Big boom.
Beat me to it.
LOL.
“Manhattan, Northern Virginia, Honolulu, and South Florida are pulverized.”
I’d be toast and I’d miss all the post-apocalypse FR comments!! Bummer.
Max Brooks’s Zombie Survival Guide is just a hoot!
When during this did the NORKs master the guidance issues to hit a target close enough with somewhat small warheads?
WOW.
At least twelve missiles that actually launch AND a 30% hit ratio?
That really is a work of fiction...
.
Is there a chapter for Harbin being a deep water port?
Completely unbelievable.
The U.S. responds to nuclear strike against its allies with a non-nuclear bombing campaign?!!
The author shreds any attempt at believability simply to attack President Trump.
What a farce.
I imagine nuclear war with north korea would not last very long. less than 30 to 60 min.
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