The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States

Astonishing . . . Lewis deftly intertwines real-world reports with a fictional narrative that extends some of the president's worst flaws to logical conclusions.- The Daily Beast Terrifyingly plausible . . . A horrific imagined future based on a quite plausible extrapolation of the present . . . In its efforts to tug at the sleeve of a blithe nation, Lewis's book follows in the post-apocalyptic footsteps of Nevil Shute's On the Beach or the 1983 film The Day After . In its black comedy, which surfaces in the deadpan prose of the report, it is a Dr Strangelove for our time. Trump is as flamboyantly grotesque a character as any cooked up by Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers.- The Guardian Terrifying . . . the warning we need right now . . . [The 2020 Commission Report] aims to do what The Day After did, and spur us to action . . . It shows us an entirely plausible path from today's tense geopolitics to atomic annihilation and beyond, to what comes after nuclear fire.- VICE Motherboard Lewis's cautionary tale is a reminder of the grave risks at stake if diplomatic talks with Pyongyang fail, and the dangerous consequences that could follow if Washington returns to military brinkmanship and threatening rhetoric in a renewed attempt to pressure North Korea to unilaterally disarm.- Voice of America A book with a ferocious pace and more black humor than one could imagine.- Evening Standard (London) Jeffrey Lewis has taken one of our most serious security crises and imagined how it could erupt into a catastrophic nuclear war. The result is a book that is entertaining-it grips the reader with its dramatic story-but also educational: it informs the reader what an unprecedented catastrophe even a 'small' nuclear war would be, and how easy it would be for us to blunder into one. This lesson must be learned by more of us if we are to take the actions that could lower the probability of such a catastrophe. -William J. Perry, former US Secretary of Defense The plot of this novel is so absurd and implausible-a nuclear war prompted by a presidential tweet-that it feels devastatingly true. The 2020 Commission Report is a brilliantly conceived page-turner. Let's hope it isn't prophetic. -Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and Command and Control