A commercial airliner strays off course into the airspace of North Korea, which promptly shoots it down. The hundreds of deaths include a large group of small schoolchildren from South Korea, which retaliates by blowing up Kim Jong Un’s family palace and a few other sites with limited tactical strikes. But they attacked without conferring with the United States, who falls unwittingly into a nuclear war killing millions in mere hours.
The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks on the United States is a speculative novel that came out a few months back. One reviewer called it “the gut punch everyone needs,” considering the uneasy state of foreign affairs over the last two years, and the complacency that continues to simmer a quarter-century after the Cold War ostensibly ended.
It warrants a recommendation on this front, the book as warning and prophecy. But in truth, it works more as a cautionary geopolitical simulation than as a work of fiction.
It’s horrifying, to be sure. The reason the North Korean military launches its dozens of nukes at Guam and Florida and San Diego and Manhattan? Because of a misunderstanding: a vague threat tweeted out by President Donald J. Trump, right before the South Korean retaliatory attack. The president also crassly mocks the dictator’s beloved sister, adding fuel to the rage-filled fire.
The entire thing is strikingly plausible, even down to the individual tweets by Trump and the actions taken and words spoken by such real-life figures Jim Mattis and Nikki Haley.
It’s just too hyper-realistic and bleak – even for my sometimes-deranged palette. There’s little to no fictional license taken on virtually any of the pages.
But I have hope that something even-better could emerge from the book – because it reminds me of an epochal work of art from fifty years ago.
Stanley Kubrick, the legendary director, had set his sights on writing a Cold War nuclear disaster thriller in the early 1960s, just as things were getting as dicey as they ever would be between the Soviet Union and the United States. He acquired the rights to Red Alert, a deadly-serious speculative novel about how World War III could be triggered by a paranoid delusional American general. But as Kubrick and a producer sat up entire nights plotting the screen treatment of the Peter George novel, their own delirious and rambling minds found the comedy in the utterly insane chess game of mutual assured destruction.
The madness of humanity could only be appropriately tackled with the bleakest and blackest gallows humor of all. Indeed, some things in life are so horrible, they can’t be taken seriously.
Kubrick took his hunch and then hired the wild man Terry Southern, and they produced a manic Tale of the End Times: a mad General Jack D. Ripper rambling about his “precious bodily fluids” and the Communist scheme of fluoridation of tap water; the ex-Nazi scientist whose black-gloved hand keeps choking its owner; choice lines such as “Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”; and of course, cowboy Slim Pickens riding a big phallic bomb down to doom like a bucking thermonuclear bronco.
Of course, I’m talking about Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. It’s one of my favorite movies, and I would argue it may be the best film of all time.
So I hope someone can take The 2020 Commission Report and make their own Strangelove, complete with childish tweetstorms, poofy-coifed dictators, and an apocalypse triggered by men posturing over whose nuclear “button” is bigger.
All in good fun, you know.
Hell, maybe I’ll do it – right after my novel Project 137 comes out. (Just a short while now until my debut emerges through Pandamoon Publishing!)