For millions of people in South Korea and Japan, dawn broke early on Sunday, March 22. More than thirty-one North Korean nuclear weapons, lifted into space on ballistic missiles, now fell silently back to earth through the night sky before suddenly igniting the day—first with flashes, each brighter than a thousand suns, and then with spontaneous fires that in some cases grew into firestorms. These conflagrations swept through the cities and towns of South Korea and Japan, burning brightly enough to keep the darkness at bay for days.
It is not possible, with mere words, to fully convey the scale or the horror of the suffering to those who did not live through those difficult days. But some accounting of the destruction is necessary in this report. Thus, we have chosen to share the stories of three survivors. It cannot be said that the experiences of these individuals were typical, for there was no typical experience for the millions of survivors, each of whom has endured their own private horror. But perhaps these three stories can begin to explain the struggle for life that followed North Korea’s nuclear attack on its neighbors.
Survivors are, by definition, an unusual group. To this day, each wonders why he or she lived when so many others perished. They count and count again the many small items of chance or caprice—a decision to stay at work in one case, a decision to stay home in another—that spared their lives. For observers, however, there is neither rhyme nor reason for who lived and who died. Instead, there is only chance, or perhaps luck—although more than one survivor objected to our investigators’ use of that term.
For many of the people who survived, and who saw more death in those two days than they might have expected to see in a dozen lives, the luckiest ones were those for whom morning never came.
After delivering his television address announcing the missile strike against North Korea, President Moon Jae-in and his aides faced a long night. None of them believed that they were on the threshold of a nuclear war, although they did worry—indeed, they were certain—that Kim Jong Un would retaliate in some form. More than anything, they were anxious that the tit-for-tat should remain under control. “We were definitely worried that Kim might punch back,” according to Im Jong-seok, Moon’s aide, “but our mind-set was all about keeping things from getting too crazy.”
At the same time, there was not much for the South Koreans to do. There were no survivors from BX 411, and the missiles had been launched. When Moon and his advisers reconvened in the bunker, they found themselves just sitting there, silently, waiting to learn whether the strike had been a success and checking their phones. Kang Kyung-wha, the foreign minister, noticed Trump’s tweet first. She read it aloud, first in English and then translated into Korean.
Kang had studied in the United States, and her English was excellent. But she was never really sure how to translate the taunt implied in “Rocketman”—Mr. Rocket? Rocket Boy? The others around the table quizzed her about the rest of her translation. Did Trump really just suggest that he was about to kill Kim Jong Un? It was ambiguous. “He’s really a fool, isn’t he?” she said, to no one in particular.
Eventually, a preliminary damage assessment arrived—a few sheets of paper in a folder marked “SECRET,” carried by a military aide in a smart uniform. The aide handed the folder to General Jeong, who opened the folder, scanned the contents, then distributed them to the rest of the group in the bunker.
The damage assessment was a single page, but General Jeong nonetheless provided an impromptu briefing. South Korea’s intelligence assets were not as extensive as those of the Americans, and they would need to wait for daylight to take clear satellite pictures of the damage. But it seemed that the missiles had reached the targets. There were six large explosions. And based on intercepted cell-phone conversations, it seemed the big building at the Air Force headquarters had fallen down and that there were casualties at the Kim family residence. He also noted that, despite the strike, North Korea’s military—already on alert for the duration of the US–South Korean war games—was acting normally, although he cautioned that it was too early to know exactly how the North would respond.
Moon asked a few questions. “General Jeong felt obligated to brief the president, and in turn, Moon felt obligated to ask at least one question to show he was listening,” Im recalled. “But there was really no point. We all had copies of the same piece of paper.”
They waited in the bunker for at least another hour before General Jeong pointed out that it might be several days before North Korea responded. After all, he said, it would probably take until the morning for the North Koreans to give Kim Jong Un a full and accurate picture of what had happened, and they would likely need a day or so to plan a calibrated response. “I know the president felt some responsibility to see the strike through,” Im recalled, “but there really wasn’t anything to do in that bunker. General Jeong was doing us a favor, hinting that we could all go home.”
Eventually, at 11:24 PM, after sitting in the bunker for nearly three hours, Moon relented and suggested that they all go home and try to get a good night’s sleep. He asked his aides to inform him immediately if the military detected any unusual movements in North Korea, such as preparations for a missile test or an artillery barrage. They all agreed that, in that case, they would reconvene immediately. If not, Moon told them, they were to treat the next day like any other Sunday. General Jeong asked for all the copies of the damage assessment, counted them, and slid them back into the folder before locking it in his briefcase.
Moon retired to his residence. Im Jong-seok, the president’s aide, telephoned his wife to say that he would stay overnight in a guest room at the Blue House. Im later recalled that he was uneasy, convinced that he was in for a sleepless night. “I decided not to go home,” he said later. “I didn’t think I was going to sleep much anyway. I don’t know why, but I knew the phone would wake me.”
The call came at 2:16 AM, when General Jeong woke Im Jong-seok to inform him that the military had intercepted an unusual pattern of communications in North Korea. The communications were mostly encrypted, but the pattern was still unusual enough that General Jeong thought the president should know. South Korean military intelligence had intercepted a great many communications since North Korea’s military went on alert at the beginning of the US–South Korean war games a month earlier. But this order looked different. General Jeong said that they had never seen anything like it before. He suggested that some North Korean units, such as the country’s missile units, might be moving to a higher state of readiness. Im said that he would wake President Moon.
Moon’s residence was only a short walk from the guesthouse where Im was staying. He walked across the courtyard, then asked the household staff to wake the president. Moon emerged from his quarters after a short delay. “I suggested that he call General Jeong,” Im recalled later. “Moon said it was enough to reconvene.”
Moon and Im briefly discussed where the security council should gather. The Crisis Room was secure, but it was also small and cramped. Moreover, it was cut off from the rest of the government now housed in the Central Government Complex, which was in downtown Seoul and separated from the Blue House by an ancient palace complex. Moon decided that it was better that they meet downtown. They could evacuate back to the bunker if things got out of hand. “Then he said I looked terrible, like I had not slept at all,” according to Im. “I told him about my premonition about the phone call. [Moon] Jae-in looked at me a long time, and I got the sense he worried that the stress was starting to get to me. He suggested that I go back to bed for a few more hours.”
Im recalled weighing the president’s offer before acquiescing, telling himself that it was unlikely that he would have another chance to rest in the next twenty-four hours. “I didn’t know that was the last time I would see him,” he explained to investigators.
Moon arranged for a motorcade to take him to the Central Government Complex, about a mile away. He was still downtown, with most of his national security team, when, at 5:48 AM, a single nuclear weapon exploded over the city center.
The explosion reduced the Central Government Complex to rubble. President Moon and all of the advisers who had gathered with him apparently were killed in the blast. Like more than one million people in Seoul that day, they simply disappeared—incinerated in the fireball or ground into nothing as the massive government building collapsed.
Despite its proximity to the downtown government complex, the Blue House sustained only what is called “light damage.” The explosion shattered all the windows, sending shards of flying glass through the buildings. Although Im, lying in his bed, suffered lacerations on the side of his body facing the window, he was not seriously injured. The guesthouse did not collapse on him. A few of the buildings were seriously damaged when the blast wave pushed past them, then reflected off the massive hillside and hit them again from behind. The effect was like a riptide, straining the buildings in one direction, then pulling their foundations out from under them in the other.
Im was able to stumble outside, although he was in a daze. He initially thought it was snowing. “Only after a few moments did I realize that it wasn’t snow, but that there were pieces of paper floating everywhere. I picked up one. It was the damage assessment that General Jeong had tucked under his arm.”
After the blast knocked down the massive towers in central Seoul and the heavy steel-and-concrete structures fell, millions of sheets of paper from the office buildings now turned to rubble drifted up and wafted through what remained of the shattered city. Many survivors remembered the pieces of paper as a snowfall. Many others found a sort of solace in tracing the pieces of paper that they picked up that day and, for some strange reason they said, could not throw away. Each scrap of paper seemed to help connect many of the survivors to those others with whom they shared that terrible day.
It is not possible, however, that Im picked up a copy of the damage assessment distributed the night before. When the blast hit, General Jeong was in a car driving from the Central Government Complex to South Korea’s military headquarters—the blast wave flipped his car, then buried it beneath ten feet of rubble from the buildings it pushed over. When the general’s body was recovered, all six copies of the damage assessment were still locked in his briefcase. Im’s shock and confusion, it seems, had simply gotten the better of him.
Im then attempted to make his way on foot to the Central Government Complex a mile away, not realizing that it was totally destroyed. There was so much dust and ash in the air that he could barely see or breathe. As he picked his way through the wreckage, his progress slowed to a crawl as his coughing and choking got the better of him. A seemingly endless number of crushed or overturned cars littered the vast, indistinguishable landscape of rubble.
After a nuclear explosion in or near an urban area, collapsed buildings spread a debris field of rubble almost evenly across the blast zone. In Seoul, a modern city with towering skyscrapers, the debris field was more than twenty feet high in some places. Im found that he could not go more than a few hundred yards before he had to turn back.
When Im arrived back at the Blue House, he found it completely deserted. There were no security guards at any of the checkpoints. He was able to walk through the grounds, into the main building, and then down into the bunker without stopping once to show anyone a badge or let them inspect his briefcase. That’s convenient, he thought: in his haste after the blast, he had neglected to even dress himself, much less pick up his badge and briefcase. He was wearing nothing but the T-shirt and briefs in which he had fallen asleep. Both were soaked with his blood from the wounds he had sustained in the blast.
As Im entered the bunker, he found Admiral Um, sitting alone. Um had also attempted to go downtown after the blast, but he too had found his way blocked. When that failed, he thought perhaps he should make his way to the Crisis Room. The two of them sat there, alone in the bunker, with all the television screens off and the telephones dead.
Im asked if they could go someplace else, but the admiral had already considered that. “No car,” he told Im. His driver had fled after dropping him off. The two continued to sit there, with the admiral in his splendid uniform and the civilian in his bloodied underwear. “It was really quiet, and then I heard thunder,” Im recalled. “Admiral Um listened for a moment, then shook his head. He just said, ‘Artillery.’”
Kenichi Murakami was the chief of the Tokyo Fire Department. He was very proud of that fact. Of course, all around the world, young boys and girls dream of growing up to be firefighters. But in Japanese culture, firefighters are more romantic bandit than simple hero. The traditional ladder-wielding fireman depicted in Kabuki theater or in a woodblock print is more likely to be found brawling with sumo wrestlers than putting out fires.
The firemen of Edo—as Tokyo was called during the early nineteenth century—certainly had plenty of fires to fight. Traditional Japanese homes were built of wood and paper, and they were packed close together. Great fires ripped through the city on a regular basis—so often that people began to call the conflagrations edo no hana (“the flowers of Edo”). The cultural difference between firefighters in other parts of the world and the tobi (firefighters) of Edo can be explained by the simple fact that the latter did not fight fires with water; they had no water trucks or water pumps, just a few buckets and ladders. The primary method of controlling fires at the time was to knock down houses to make a firebreak, which allowed the fire to burn itself out without spreading. Thus, the fire brigades weren’t there to fight the fire but to fight any homeowner who might—understandably—resist seeing his home demolished.
A sort of protection racket arose around the firefighters. After all, it was far better if the tobi sacrificed a neighbor’s house to the firebreak rather than your own. Naturally, the Edo firemen became a tough lot—drinking, brawling, and covered in tattoos. Indeed, the distinctive tattoos that mark the Yakuza, today’s Japanese gangsters, are a relic of the Edo fire brigades.
Modern firefighters in Japan, of course, are a more professional group. The only real links between modern firefighters and the Edo firemen are the acrobatic teams that each department keeps; these are groups of skilled firemen who perform dangerous stunts atop ladders to thrill children. They are well educated and professional, respected for their bravery in the face of great danger. There are a number of women in their ranks. The model for the modern Japanese firefighter is less the Edo fire brigades than the professional firemen who helped battle the firebombing of Tokyo in the final months of World War II. On a single night in 1945, nearly sixteen square miles of the city burned in what was then the largest firestorm in history, and larger than the fire that would engulf Hiroshima a few months later.
Today Japanese people expect a lot from firefighters. And Murakami expected a lot of himself. Ordinarily, he might have been on his way to the office at 6:02 AM, even on a Sunday. After all, he had so many preparations to plan for overseeing the 2020 Summer Olympics, which were set to open in Tokyo in just 124 days. There was much to do. But he was tired. He simply needed a day off, one day when he was not headed into the office while everyone else slept.
Murakami was still in bed, then, when his cell phone buzzed.
⚠
Emergency Alert
Missile Launch
2020/03/22 06:02
A missile was reportedly fired from North Korea. Please stay inside your building or evacuate to the basement.
(Ministry of Disaster Management)
Five minutes later, at 6:07, a nuclear weapon exploded with the force of 30 kilotons high above Japan’s Defense Ministry. This was twice the size of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. A few minutes later, a second weapon exploded a mile to the north.
Murakami saw both flashes. He called his office, but got no answer.
If Murakami had been on his way to work, he probably would have perished while sitting in his car at an intersection. And had he survived the car journey, he probably would have been killed by the second blast, which severely damaged the Tokyo Fire Department headquarters less than two miles from ground zero. He was very lucky.
He got dressed in a hurry and went outside. As he tried to start his car, he briefly remembered someone telling him that an electromagnetic pulse—one of the side effects of a nuclear explosion—could damage a car’s electronics. But the car started. Murakami soon realized that the problem wasn’t going to be a dead car; rather, it was going to be the tens of thousands of working ones.
When Murakami got to the highway, he saw a massive traffic jam caused by people trying to flee Tokyo. He got out of his car. His phone was working, but there was still no answer at the Fire Department headquarters. He started to wonder whether there still was an office. He started calling around to other headquarters within the Fire Department. Murakami soon realized that no one in central Tokyo was answering.
He needed to set up a temporary command post. The Olympic Security Command Center (OSCC) was now largely functional and outside of central Tokyo, far from the blast zone. But it was still quite a distance away. Fortunately, the Tokyo Fire Department had a few helicopters to rescue people from burning buildings. The fire chief managed to get in touch with one of his fire stations where a helicopter was based and asked for a ride.
In the helicopter, Murakami had a commanding view of Tokyo. He looked over the endless city and saw that the center of Tokyo around where the Defense Ministry had been was completely leveled. The blasts had knocked down all the buildings for more than a mile, and further out it had stripped others to their bare steel frames. Those bare frames stood like skeletons around the blast zone, keeping watch over the smoldering ruins. And then Murakami noticed what worried him most: fires were breaking out all around the city.
Nuclear explosions release an enormous amount of heat, setting fires that, in many cases, can do far more damage than the blast from the explosion. But fires are hard to predict. Murakami’s fire department had trained for all kinds of disasters, including a nuclear explosion. He was prepared for fires to break out in residential areas and at low-rise public buildings constructed of wood. Most of the technical literature works from the assumption that modern cities, built of steel and concrete, are relatively resistant to fire. But the reality can be far more complicated—as Murakami learned when he arrived at the OSCC.
In recent years, Murakami now recalled, there had been a spate of high-rise fires, many of which resulted from the flammable cladding on the outside of the buildings that has become popular because it both improves the appearance of a building and increases its energy efficiency. The Grenfell Tower in London that killed seventy-one people in 2017 was the most famous case, but there had been similar fires in Australia and South Korea. One survey of Melbourne concluded that more than half of the 170 buildings surveyed were a fire risk. In energy-conscious Japan, such cladding was also commonplace.
Now Murakami was witnessing the same effect across his own city: many tall buildings were on fire. These structures might well have been perfectly safe in normal conditions, but the towers were simply not designed to withstand the intense heat of a nuclear explosion. To make matters worse, the widespread loss of power had led to sharply reduced water pressure throughout Tokyo, disabling many sprinkler systems. Fighting fires in high-rise buildings is one of the most demanding tasks any firefighter will ever face. Murakami was facing dozens of fires in tall buildings spread around the disaster area.
Inside the OSCC, Murakami worked hard to coordinate the groups of firefighters throughout the city, but the fires erupted so quickly that he found it impossible to keep up. Told that a building was on fire one moment, he was often informed the next that it was hopeless and out of control—all before he could assign firefighters to deal with the problem.
In the midst of this maelstrom, he received another text:
⚠
Emergency Alert
Missile Launch
2020/03/22 07:23
A missile was reportedly fired from North Korea. Please stay inside your building or evacuate to the basement.
(Ministry of Disaster Management)
Mildly surprised to see that the emergency alert system was still functioning, Murakami felt his spirits lift a bit, before the weight of his situation settled over him once more. He had a responsibility to do his part, even if his efforts seemed to be futile. He decided not to seek shelter, but to keep working. How can I hide underground when my firefighters are out there? he later recalled thinking.
The next missile fired was not a nuclear one. North Korea had a small stockpile of nuclear weapons, most of which had been fired in the opening attack. Over the next twenty-four hours, Murakami’s phone would continue to receive missile alerts. Eventually, he remembered something he had read about World War II. During the war, after Allied bombers dropped incendiaries to set fire to German and Japanese cities, the Allies would launch a second wave of bombers with explosives—to kill the firefighters attempting to put out the fires. In Syria, the same kind of strikes were called “double taps”—one strike against a target, then a second strike to kill the first responders. As his firefighters were trying desperately to extinguish the blazes breaking out all over Tokyo, Murakami realized that the North Koreans were trying to stop them. They were trying to kill his firefighters so that Tokyo would burn.
These follow-on missiles, armed with conventional explosives, were frightening, but far too inaccurate to really hamper the firefighters. Soon enough, the strikes dwindled. Over the course of the first day, the firefighters responded to warnings of incoming missiles by calling the warheads sumo-tori—a sly reference to the sumo wrestlers who had brawled with their predecessors of yesteryear.
As the day dragged on, the fires burning throughout Tokyo began to draw air in toward the city center. March is the windiest month in Tokyo, and so, at first, Murakami merely worried that the stiff breeze might fan the flames at the individual fire sites, making the job tougher and more dangerous. But as the force of the winds continued to climb, his heart sank. It wasn’t a March wind at all. In fact, the morning had been perfectly calm.
The fires were growing in strength and starting to make their own weather. This was the beginning of a firestorm.
Not every nuclear explosion unleashes a firestorm. In August 1945, Hiroshima burned in one, but Nagasaki, nestled among the mountains, did not. Predicting whether a firestorm will or will not develop is nearly impossible—it’s so difficult, in fact, that the US military has never even attempted to calculate deaths or damage from fire in its models of nuclear war. Fire is simply too unpredictable, too wild, for neat and tidy calculations.
As the wind speed topped 70 miles per hour—the same as a typhoon—Murakami realized that the unthinkable was happening. Tokyo was now a city of metal and glass, not wood and paper. But it would burn just as it did during the Second World War when the Allies dropped incendiary bombs on it.
Modern firefighters, even with all their equipment and technology, are as helpless in the face of a firestorm as an Edo fireman with his buckets and ladders. Murakami understood that he could not put out a fire of this size and scale. He would have to treat it like a wildfire, containing it until it burned itself out.
What he needed to make this tactic work were firebreaks. But how to make firebreaks in a city? The firemen of Edo might knock down a house made of wood and paper with their hands, but modern steel-and-concrete structures? Murakami took out a map and began to locate the natural firebreaks—rivers, open spaces, hillsides—throughout Tokyo. He began to order the crews to retreat to these points, leaving much of central Tokyo to burn. “I thought about those old guys, the ones who fought fires with not much more than their ladders,” he said later. “I felt totally helpless. Maybe firefighting today isn’t so different after all.”
Oh Soo-hyun shared a name with a doctor in a Korean soap opera. She was a doctor too, though beyond that single point of comparison, she was completely different from her fictional counterpart. The television Oh was rich and sheltered. The emergency room doctor in Busan, South Korea, was competent and thoroughly middle-class. The television Oh had a father who ran the hospital. The doctor in Busan had only her mother, who lived in a small hamlet two hours outside the city.
Korean dramas about doctors typically feature the archetype of the “genius” doctor—a person with something resembling the magical power that most cultures attribute to healers. Oh knew that the only genius when it came to practicing medicine was working hard and paying attention. Still, she cherished little moments of, if not genius, then ingenuity—fitting an extra patient into her schedule, for instance, or bending a rule to help someone. This was especially true for patients from her hometown, who came to the city only when they had a serious problem. If she thought a patient didn’t have a lot of money, she might do a test herself rather than make a referral to one of her specialist colleagues. If it proved unnecessary, she wouldn’t charge the patient for the test.
Lately, her supervisor had cautioned her about bending such rules. The warning was a mild one, but Oh took things seriously. She’d started to have a recurring nightmare in which her bosses discovered every single bent rule or infraction and then insisted that she pay them back for all the hospital resources she’d wasted. On the morning of March 22, she was tired, having spent another night wrestling with that unwelcome dream.
Still, Oh didn’t exactly stop bending rules. At 6:02 that morning, she was doing it again—walking down a hallway and carrying a blood sample she’d drawn herself, quite against the regulations, from a patient who was now seated in one of the examining rooms at the end of the hall. She was just one step from the giant window that looked out over the courtyard when there was a giant flash—“like someone taking a picture in an old-time movie,” she remembered later.
She dropped to her knees just as the blast ripped through the hospital, slapping the glasses off her face and smashing the blood sample against the wall. She shouted for the chief resident. He was in his office, badly cut by debris. The entire hospital was in chaos. The windows were blown out, beds were overturned, and parts of the ceiling had collapsed. There was blood and glass all over. Patients were screaming. Others were lying motionless. At the end of the hallway, Oh’s patient was dead. So too were the technicians in the laboratory she’d been heading to with the blood sample. In fact, Dr. Oh was the only doctor on staff who was not seriously injured—but without her glasses.
She quickly grabbed as many bandages as she could and began treating the injured, cleaning their wounds and dressing them one after another. Working steadily on the wounded patients and doctors inside the hospital, she was so focused on her work that she did not realize that thousands of maimed and dying residents of Busan were gathering outside.
Busan had billed itself as the “medical hub” of Asia. In the developing world, there are usually about six hospital beds for every 1,000 people. In South Korea, that number was nine beds for every 1,000 people, and in Busan it was nearly twenty-one. With more than 72,000 hospital beds, Busan was as well equipped to handle a massive humanitarian crisis as any city in the world.
But the scope of the humanitarian crisis now facing Busan was extraordinary. Two 20-kiloton nuclear weapons had detonated over the docks in the city’s harbor. The explosions killed almost 100,000 people and seriously injured more than 400,000, many of whom were too injured to move. Those who could move—or those whose friends or family members were able to carry them—were now descending on the city’s hospitals by the tens of thousands.
The nuclear weapons that had killed and injured so many did not discriminate among their victims. The bomb does not spare doctors or nurses. Many hospitals in Busan were ravaged by the explosions and their aftereffects. St. Mary’s, less than a mile from one of the detonation points, was totally destroyed. And Pusan National University, where Dr. Oh was working, had a direct line of sight to the other explosion. With nothing to shield it from the blast, it had suffered terrible damage, although so far it had not collapsed. Thankfully, Busan is nestled in the mountains. So although the port district and its medical facilities had been partially leveled, the surrounding areas were somewhat shielded. Other hospitals, nestled in Busan’s mountains, had been largely spared—but now they, not to mention the surviving doctors, nurses, and orderlies at the stricken hospitals, were overwhelmed.
As Dr. Oh began to treat the wounded, she noticed that, in addition to abrasions and lacerations, patients began appearing with terrible burns. Quickly she realized that she was running out of supplies, from medications to treat the burns to simple bandages. She kept treating one person after another. By this time, she recalled, that spark in her personality that had led her to try to see each patient as a person who deserved a bit of special treatment had disappeared entirely. She moved mechanically from one patient to the next, treating the same problems over and over again. She worked for seventeen hours straight, desperately trying to care for the wounded. When she attempted to sneak off to sleep, just for a few minutes, a group of wounded people found her and excoriated her for sleeping while they suffered, left untreated.
As March 22 stretched on, Dr. Oh began to realize that there were simply too many patients to treat. She needed to make decisions. Which injuries were too light to bother with? Which were too severe to bother with? It was no use treating someone who was just going to die. And where were the other doctors and nurses? She remembered reading a study that said, after the Fukushima accident in Japan, many doctors, nurses, and clerical staff simply did not show up for work. Absentee rates were especially high among clerical staff. Where were they now that she needed help? She was angry—and then she felt a pang of guilt, as she wondered whether the absent colleagues she was cursing were among the dead or dying.
There were so many patients dying now. They were dying inside the hospital, and they were dying outside, in the parking structures and in the street. The worst part was that there was no one to take the bodies away, and no place to take them. The smell inside the hospital was unbearable. A colleague told her that she should eat, but the thought of food sickened her.
It was only at the end of the first day that she noticed new doctors and nurses had begun appearing.
Local authorities had been able to organize a relief effort: the surviving hospitals in the port district were being staffed up with doctors from the countryside, and the wounded were being evacuated to hospitals throughout the region. One of the first decisions made by the authorities was to shut down the operations at Pusan National. Severe damage had made it structurally unsound, and most of the staff were casualties themselves. As the new doctors arrived to organize the evacuation of the patients, they reassigned the doctors on the scene, mostly either sending them to another hospital to get care for wounds that had been neglected or just sending them home for some sleep.
Soon, one of the new doctors noticed Dr. Oh. She was past the point of exhaustion, having worked nonstop for more than twenty-four hours with neither food nor sleep. She was bandaging a patient who was long dead. The doctor stopped her, sat her down on a chair, and asked where she lived. Dr. Oh mentioned her mother’s address in the countryside. He walked her over to an evacuation point and sent her home.
In the early-morning darkness of March 22, North Korea had conducted a limited nuclear strike against US forces throughout South Korea and Japan. Kim had targeted US bases throughout the region as far as Okinawa and Guam. His forces fired nuclear-armed ballistic missiles at a total of twenty-one military targets, most of which were US bases. Overall, in the course of forty minutes, North Korean units at nine different locations all over the country fired fifty-four nuclear-armed ballistic missiles against targets in South Korea and Japan as well as eight more missiles at American forces stationed in Okinawa and Guam.
Fewer than half of North Korea’s missiles successfully delivered their nuclear payloads to their targets. Both the US military and the South Korean military claim that the missiles that did not arrive were probably stopped by their defenses. Other experts believe that the missiles simply broke up during flight, as some North Korean missiles have been known to do.
Of the nuclear warheads that struck South Korea, Japan, and Guam, most missed their intended target by a significant distance—up to a kilometer and sometimes more. In some cases, this resulted in significant casualties in neighboring communities. In other cases, the warheads detonated harmlessly at sea. Not one of the eight missiles fired at US bases in Okinawa and Guam struck its target. Some failed to arrive, while the remainder landed in the water off the coast. The only fatalities reported in Okinawa and Guam arose from traffic accidents when the bombs went off.
The metropolitan areas of Seoul, Pyongtaek, Daegu, and Busan in South Korea and Tokyo and Yokohama in Japan were the hardest hit. All told, about 1.4 million people died as a result of the attacks on March 22, 2020, while more than five million were severely wounded. Most of the casualties were in these urban centers.
Among the six million people killed or wounded in North Korea’s nuclear strikes that day were about half of the ninety thousand American troops stationed in the two countries, as well as nearly thirty thousand of their dependents. The American service men and women deployed in Korea and Japan, along with their families, paid a steep cost—often the ultimate cost—to fill that role. Their sacrifices and examples will not soon be forgotten.
And yet this was not to be the final sacrifice of March 2020. Although North Korea had expended a significant fraction of its nuclear arsenal in the March 22 strike, Kim Jong Un retained about a dozen high-yield thermonuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that could reach the United States.
Kim Jong Un hoped that the loss of US forces in the region and the horror of the casualties that day would cause the United States to halt what he believed was a coming invasion of North Korea. And if the bloodshed in Asia did not do the trick, Kim Jong Un hoped that the big missiles he was holding back, the ones that could strike the United States, would force Donald Trump to see sense. Tokyo was lost. Was Trump so eager for revenge that he was willing to risk Trump Tower as well?
Kim was now betting his life that, having suffered through the terrible day of March 22, the United States had had enough.