Korean Journal of Policy Studies

Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University

Korean J. Policy Stud. 2019; 34(3):123-130

pISSN: 1225-5017, eISSN: 2765-2807

Article

Missiles and Miscalculation

Lea-Henry Jed¹

¹Lewis, J. (2018) “The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States: A Speculative Novel”. Mariner Books: New York

Â© Copyright 2019 Graduate School of Public Administration, Seoul National University. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Received: Sep 29, 2019; Revised: Oct 13, 2019; Revised: Dec 16, 2019; Accepted: Dec 16, 2019

Published Online: Dec 31, 2019

Abstract

Jeffrey Lewis’s new book is a story of academic and policy lament. The finer details of the North Korean nuclear crisis – the things that should really matter to people concerned by the issue, and those people driving government responses –are too often glossed over or simply never understood. The small circle of people who ‘are’ concerned tend to have very little sway. Jeffrey Lewis is one of those fringe people, and ‘The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States: A Speculative Novel’ is his attempt to bundle academic substance into a more accessible, narrative format; a place where fundamental questions play out in a different light: “did America’s leaders have the opportunity to avert the greatest calamity in the history of our nation?”