Kim Jong Un wasn’t going to just sit in a basement, waiting to die. As he saw it, he had the upper hand. His missile units had delivered a terrible blow against US forces throughout South Korea and Japan, leaving Seoul, Tokyo, and Busan in flames. The launch units had almost immediately relocated, reloaded, then begun launching missiles armed with high-explosive warheads into the areas they had just struck with nuclear weapons. North Korea’s artillery force had also opened up on Seoul. South Korean forces returned fire to suppress the artillery strikes, but for most of the day it was North Korea that was on the offense, delivering one punishing blow after another.
Now Kim intended to press his advantage. Immediately after giving the order to launch the attacks on South Korea and Japan, he changed locations and then spent the day waiting for the United States, reeling from the shock of the attack, to seek some sort of settlement. He believed that as soon as the American public saw the horror unfolding in South Korea and Japan, they would collectively demand a cease-fire to save their own cities from the same fates.
Kim was hardly the first world leader to misjudge an opponent. While he waited throughout the day for word that his diplomats in New York had reached a cease-fire, an American military commander was putting in place the pieces of the campaign to topple Kim.
The supreme leader was expecting a response. It would come when night fell.
As soon as Kim had ordered his missile units to repel the invaders massing in South Korea and Japan, he had decided to move to safety. He was in the middle of the country, but his wife and children were in Wonsan, a port city on the coast. As they sat in the basement in Kusong, Kim’s aide Choe Ryong Hae had suggested that the family compound in Wonsan would surely be a target. They should all move to safety. But where?
Kim had choices. There was no shortage of palaces throughout North Korea, almost all of which were equipped to allow him to wait out a conflict in relative comfort. There was a large palace complex along the border with China, with tunnels leading into the mountains around Mount Baekdu. Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, had overseen the construction of a massive underground complex there over the course of many years. This was where the elder Kim had always planned to evacuate in case of an emergency.
To Kim Jong Il, the residence near Mount Baekdu had represented North Korea’s strategic depth. Even in 1950, during the Korean War, when United Nations forces drove northward and were on the verge of capturing the entire peninsula, they were still nearly forty miles from this strategic spot when Chinese troops poured across the border and saved Kim Jong Il’s father, Kim Il Sung, and with him the Kim family dynasty. For Kim Jong Il, then, the residence near Mount Baekdu was as far as possible from the threat posed by South Koreans and their American masters. He was certain that if American forces approached this location, China would intervene again. And in the worst case, he could simply slip across the border and into a comfortable exile. After all, Kim Jong Il had been born in the Soviet Union, at a Soviet military camp where his father was training as a guerrilla. Kim Jong Il knew that his life might end as it had begun—outside Korea. He had prepared carefully for this eventuality, hiding assets abroad to ensure that any exile was far more comfortable than his childhood in that Soviet military camp.
Kim Jong Un was a different man from his father and grandfather. He had been raised amid incredible wealth and privilege. He could not have imagined life as a normal person if he tried—and there is no evidence that he ever did. There was not going to be any comfortable exile for Kim Jong Un. China, looming just over the border, looked nearly as threatening as South Korea. Kim had ordered the execution of his uncle and the assassination of his half-brother because he believed both were conspiring with Beijing to overthrow him. He was careful to manage the relationship with China, but he wasn’t going to just show up on China’s doorstep and plead for mercy.
Instead, Kim Jong Un decided that he would head to the interior of the country, to the Myohyang Mountains. Kim’s grandfather had kept a large lakeside palace there, surrounded by steep and fog-shrouded mountains. It was a beautiful and historic location, but it had other advantages as well.
Kim Il Sung had died in a residence near the lake—suddenly, of a heart attack—in 1994. Kim Jong Il, disliking any place associated with death, had avoided it in the following years. Kim Jong Un, the grandson, knocked it down. He then ordered the construction of a new airstrip nearby. The airstrip was placed right next to the train station built by his father, who was afraid to fly. The runway was at the mouth of a valley dotted by large and luxurious hotels meant to lure foreign visitors. The lakeside villa was all the way up the valley, and over the hill. In 2019, Kim ordered the construction of a magnificent new palace at the site. The high peaks were beautiful to look at, but they also provided protection. North Korean workers had dug tunnels deep into the shelter of the soaring mountains.
This new palace complex at Myohyang would be Kim Jong Un’s final redoubt: in the middle of the country, surrounded by more than a million North Korean soldiers under arms, and shielded beneath a thousand feet of granite. Invaders from the south, or the north, would have to fight their way through hundreds of kilometers to reach him. In the meantime, Kim would be safe from air strikes and even the largest American nuclear weapons—if it came to that. Kim’s calculation was simple: He would hold out as long as possible. Once Trump realized that there was no easy victory, no quick decapitation, the American president would have to face an ugly reality. If the Americans did not cease their provocations, the horror Kim Jong Un had inflicted on South Korea and Japan would arrive on Trump’s doorstep.
And so Kim Jong Un flew fifty miles toward the interior of the country, to the site of his grandfather’s death, with the confidence of a man who had been born to rule. When his plane touched down, he climbed into a car that followed a winding road up to the magnificent palace. The car parked in front of what looked like the mouth of a cave, but with a pair of heavy steel doors just ever so slightly ajar. Kim slipped between the massive steel doors and disappeared beneath the mountain.
While Kim hid beneath a mountain, the man responsible for finding and killing him sat in a large, comfortable office with a commanding view of Pearl Harbor. Admiral Philip Davidson was the commander of US Pacific Command. It would be his responsibility more than anyone else’s to rid the earth of North Korea and Kim Jong Un. He had about twelve hours to figure out how to do it.
Davidson had found himself commanding US forces throughout the Pacific with almost no background in Asia. In his previous job, Davidson had the unenviable task of sifting through hundreds of disciplinary cases arising from a bribery scandal. He had to dole out punishments to officers who were implicated in the scandal but had escaped federal prosecution. This wasn’t the sort of job that makes a man many friends. But it did require making unpopular decisions and seeing them through to the end.
By contrast, Davidson’s predecessor, Harry Harris, was a celebrity—popular with the press and fawning politicians for his blunt remarks, which made perfect headlines. At times, Harris had ruffled feathers. The Chinese government in particular reportedly had sought Harris’s removal after a number of remarks that Beijing viewed as inflammatory. (Both the Chinese embassy and the Trump administration officials deny that any specific request had been made for Harris’s removal.) Although some found Harris undiplomatic, Trump did not: he eventually nominated Harris as the US ambassador to Australia, before changing his mind and sending him to South Korea.
One of Harris’s favorite chestnuts had been that Pacific Command was ready to “fight tonight.” Harris had repeated the mantra often in speeches; it appeared in press releases and was popular on social media. In one case, the phrase caused a minor panic when, after a North Korean missile test, Trump retweeted a tweet from Pacific Command with #FightTonight and briefly caused reporters to think the United States might be about to strike North Korea. Davidson wasn’t flashy like that. He lacked Harris’s showmanship. But now Davidson was tasked with making “fight tonight” more than a hashtag.
Davidson understood that it was not possible to plan an air campaign from scratch in so little time. He would have to work from existing plans for contingencies on the Korean Peninsula. If the Pentagon does one thing, it develops and continuously updates plans, including rapid reaction plans in the event of a surprise attack. Still, every plan rests on certain assumptions, and North Korea’s nuclear strike was invalidating many of those assumptions. As Davidson recalled to the members of the commission, “There is an old adage: no plan survives first contact with the enemy.” Davidson was now leading an effort to review these plans, decide what was still possible and what was not, and figure out how it might all fit together.
Davidson counted himself lucky on two counts. First, the United States had an unusual number of aircraft and naval assets in the region already, thanks to the ongoing war game. These assets included three aircraft carrier groups that contained all the forces called for in the various war plans he was weighing against each other.
Second, neither Okinawa nor Guam had been seriously damaged in the North Korean attack, despite the fact that Kim had fired two nuclear-armed missiles at each base. The major hubs for American military effort were still in action.
Even with these advantages, however, it didn’t seem like enough—but then again, no commander, Davidson explained to us, ever thinks he has enough. And while he wished that his force was bigger, it was nevertheless a formidable assemblage that could and would bring the fight to Kim Jong Un. “Fight tonight” was for real.
Davidson’s first task would be to use his aircraft to destroy North Korea’s surface-to-air missiles. Without these missiles, Kim Jong Un would be naked, with no way to defend himself against air attacks. North Korea’s fighter aircraft would be easy enough to shoot down; the country’s Air Force, American pilots used to joke, was one of the finest aviation museums in the world.
Kim Jong Un might have a million soldiers, but once his air defenses were down, those units would be pinned down by heavy bombardment that would destroy their morale. Davidson expected American soldiers to march across the border with almost no resistance, encountering only North Korean troops exhausted from heavy bombing. After all, that was what happened in 1991 when the United States entered southern Iraq. After the First Gulf War, military analysts were confused by a strange inconsistency. Although bombardment had destroyed enormous amounts of equipment, like tanks, the number of people killed was surprisingly low. It turned out that Iraqi units, facing heavy bombardment, had simply deserted their equipment, leaving it to be destroyed. Davidson was hoping that when South Korean and eventually American ground troops moved into North Korea, they would find burning tanks and surrendering crews.
Davidson designed a second set of strikes, using smart bombs, to destroy so-called high-value targets in North Korea. These would include communications, infrastructure to produce nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, and—if the Americans were lucky—the highest-value target of them all: Kim Jong Un himself. But Davidson knew that killing Kim or catching some of the ballistic missiles would be like winning the lottery. A man or a missile can move around and hide. What airpower was really good at was pinning these targets down and cutting them off from communications. Then ground forces could sweep in and finish the job.
The Americans would need to move fast. The longer the war dragged on, the greater the chance that Kim Jong Un would use his nuclear-armed missiles against the United States. Everything depended on speed.
Just before the first missiles struck Seoul, the North Korean Foreign Ministry finally had sent instructions to their chief diplomat in New York, Ambassador Ja Song Nam. The supreme leader demanded an immediate cessation of hostilities from the United States. Moreover, the instructions contained a clear threat that Ja was to deliver: if the United States did not cease its attacks on the DPRK, the supreme leader would “reduce the US mainland into ashes and darkness.”
Ja had read the instructions with some discomfort. They implied that Pyongyang believed that South Korea’s missile strikes on Pyongyang and Chunghwa were the beginning of a larger American military operation. He had dutifully cabled back home reports covering both President Moon’s speech, which clearly described the strikes as limited, and US envoy Sydney Seiler’s assurance that Seoul had not informed Washington before launching the attack.
The North Korean ambassador received no immediate reply. He remembered wondering if he should send the cables again when he saw the first reports of massive explosions in Seoul and Tokyo on television. “My heart sank when I saw what happened,” Ja recalled. “I wondered how anyone could make such a mistake.”
Ja had his instructions, and he intended to fulfill his responsibilities. But first, he decided, he needed to leave New York City immediately. He was worried for his own safety, and that of his staff. The North Korean mission was a small, nondescript office in a drab building on the East Side of Manhattan with a greeting card shop on the first floor. It was hardly a well-defended embassy compound in the event that outraged local citizens decided to avenge Seoul or Tokyo. And of course, New York City was certainly one of the places Kim Jong Un would target for “ashes and darkness” if things continued to get out of hand.
Ja announced to his staff that they needed to leave immediately. He told them to quickly “secure” the office, and they obliged—shredding the most sensitive documents, destroying computers, and smashing their phones. He then brought the entire delegation downstairs and crowded them into a few embassy cars. He told his driver to wait a moment, then stepped into the card shop.
Back inside the car, he gave the driver an address and then he called Sydney Seiler. “I was worried,” Ja later recalled, “but as a diplomat I knew how to play a role. I told him that since the supreme leader would soon totally destroy New York City and the other imperialist outposts throughout the country, he would need to drive to Haskell if he wanted to meet with us.” Ja gave Seiler the address of a Holiday Inn Express in Haskell, New Jersey.
Seiler was caught off guard. He recalled confirming that Ja was on his way to Haskell by asking, “Like Eddie?”
Ambassador Ja had picked the site because it was as far from New York City as North Korean diplomats were legally allowed to travel—almost exactly twenty-five miles from the center of Columbus Circle. He also liked the fact that the hotel was sandwiched between two large hills. Even if a North Korean nuclear-armed ICBM missed New York City by many, many miles, the hotel would be safe.
Seiler and Ambassador Haley argued about whether they should take the meeting. Seiler felt that it was his obligation to hear the North Koreans out. The situation, he said, was spiraling out of control. Haley, on the other hand, thought there was nothing further to discuss. She was needed in New York, moreover, to channel the international outrage over the nuclear strikes into a concrete plan to remove Kim Jong Un from power.
They agreed that Seiler would be the one to drive to meet Ja. Haley declined to allow him to take any of her staffers to serve as a note-taker. “She said that she wasn’t going to send anyone on a fool’s errand,” Seiler recalled, “and that everyone wanted to stay in New York—where the action was.”
As Seiler crossed the George Washington Bridge on the way to New Jersey, he noted that traffic was extremely heavy for a Saturday evening. The news of nuclear explosions in South Korea and Japan had not produced a full-blown panic in American cities, but clearly plenty of people were beginning to leave New York all the same. On a normal day, the drive to Haskell might take forty-five minutes, but it took Seiler that long just to get across the river and into the Garden State.
As Seiler sat in traffic, he recalled, he felt a growing sense of anger about the North Korea attack. It would be hard, he worried, not to hold the ambassador personally responsible. “As a diplomat, you have to sort of learn to mentally separate the person from the policy,” Seiler said. “But this was really hard. I had lived in Seoul and was so sick and angry about what had happened. I was trying to keep my composure. I am not at all a violent person, but I worried I might punch him.”
When Seiler finally arrived at the Holiday Inn Express in Haskell, a clerk at the front desk smiled at him and asked if he was looking for “Mr. Eddie.” Ja had been confused by Seiler’s question. When Seiler said yes, the clerk directed him to the hotel’s meeting room. Seiler wandered around a bit before he found the “Twin Lakes Meeting Room.” There was a small sign on the door, left over from a law enforcement seminar.
“I just thought having the meeting in the ‘Twin Lakes Room’ was going to sound a heck of a lot better in the inevitable State Department history than the ‘Holiday Inn Express Summit,’” Seiler remembered. “And then I laughed out loud. I mean, what were the chances that we’d even live to write a history? Why was I worrying about that? I guess everyone reacts to stress differently.”
Seiler recalled that he knocked once, just as a courtesy, then opened the door. The entire North Korean mission to the United Nations was in the room, milling around. Ambassador Ja stepped up to him and, without a word, handed him a card. It said, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MOM.”
Seiler was very confused. “I was experiencing a lot of emotions: anger, sadness, black humor,” Seiler recalled. “And then that card. What could I do? I opened it.”
The ambassador’s handwriting was messy, and the message had been scribbled in haste. It read:
“I would like to seek asylum for myself and my staff. This is my decision alone. No one else knows this yet.”
Seiler was stunned. In retrospect, he later admitted, the ambassador’s decision was an obvious possibility, but one that he had neglected to consider in the rush of emotions. Defection simply had not occurred to him. “Initially, I had no idea how to react. I just thanked him for the card and asked where the restroom was,” Seiler explained. “Then I stepped outside and called the State Department Ops Center.”
The mass defection of the Korean mission surprised not only Seiler but also the State Department and the US intelligence community. From time to time, of course, North Korean diplomats had defected. But never in a large group. In fact, there had been only a single mass defection of North Koreans—a group of thirteen restaurant workers in Ningbo, China, who fled to South Korea in 2016.
Ja had read about this defection, and its details had informed his planning. In organizing the defection, the restaurant manager had not told the twelve young women working as waitresses the purpose of their exciting trip abroad until the very last moment. Some probably guessed what was happening, but his ruse was designed to protect them as well as their families back in North Korea, who could plausibly claim that their sisters and daughters had been tricked into following him. “I probably didn’t need to be so cautious in this circumstance,” Ja told interrogators, “but I had carefully planned how I might leave for a long time. In fact, the only detail I didn’t plan was which card to buy. With so much stress, I couldn’t choose! I said to myself, ‘Ja, don’t be stupid, it doesn’t matter, just pick any one.’”
North Korea had traditionally combated defections with the carrot-and-stick approach of choosing loyal people with strong ties to the regime, while threatening retribution against family members as a deterrent. Ja and his family had done very well for themselves under Kim Jong Un, far better than the vast majority of North Korean citizens. But all that was over now, Ja reasoned. To Ja, Kim was finished. Dead men offer no inducements and threaten no punishment. Defunct countries don’t need ambassadors, and they can’t kill defectors. His main concern was whether his family would survive the coming war. Ja was certain that the United States would prevail, but he wasn’t so sure about what would come next. In particular, he was concerned that his surviving family members might be targeted by their neighbors.
More than anything else, Ja was motivated by a strong desire to resettle his family abroad, ideally in the United States. “I was a big shot in Pyongyang,” Ja explained. “Not everybody likes a big shot, especially one from the big city.”
Some critics have charged that the loss of the DPRK mission eliminated an important channel for diplomacy. Some press reports even speculated that the Central Intelligence Agency continued to run the mission in the hours that followed, in an effort to deceive North Korea. There is no evidence to support these notions. By the time Seiler reported the defection, the president and his advisers had already settled on an air campaign to remove Kim Jong Un from power. Moreover, the North Korean diplomats had already destroyed the communications equipment in their Manhattan office, so there was no way for US intelligence to pretend that the mission was still operational. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) did not plan to secure the North Korean office space until early the next morning. They never got the chance.
When night fell on North Korea, the United States began striking targets throughout the country. High on the list were the palaces where Kim Jong Un might be hiding.
Throughout the course of the war, the United States never had an accurate fix on Kim Jong Un’s location. The Myohyang complex was deemed a secondary target; US planners had assumed that Kim Jong Un would most likely do what his father would have done: flee to the complex near Mount Baekdu.
Still, US military planners covered their bases, drawing up plans to heavily strike multiple palace complexes, including Myohyang. In doing so, they were guided by a single analytic insight. Kim Jong Il had been deathly afraid of flying and took trains everywhere, but Kim Jong Un was an avid fan of aviation, having even learned to fly his own plane. Kim had ordered the construction of runways at his most important palaces—in Pyongyang, Wonsan, and, of course, Myohyang. The North Koreans had laughed at how careless the South Korean military officers had been when they revealed the location of so many missile bases on social media. No one told Kim that his runways, often set next to the train stations built for his father, would be used to guide American missiles and bombs to him and his family.
At 6:48 PM Pyongyang time, only a few minutes after sunset, explosions began to rip through the newly constructed palace complex at Myohyang. The site was struck with no less than a dozen cruise missiles. They targeted not only the palace’s buildings but also the systems that provided electricity and ventilation to Kim’s bunker beneath the mountain. Although he was far too deep for American missiles or bombs to reach directly, there was another possibility—what the military calls “functional defeat,” or effectively turning the bunker into a tomb. At the very least, the bombs would make life very unpleasant for those inside by striking the entrances and the life support systems. With no electricity, it would be dark in the bunker. The increasingly foul air would be hard to breathe. Food would spoil, and toilets would not flush. Kim would be cut off from communications. The explosions might also trigger avalanches that would send rocks cascading over the entrance of the bunker, blocking the door.
The strike on the Myohyang HDBT (“hard and deeply buried target”) was only partially successful. The explosions did not bury Kim in his bunker. They did, however, knock out the bunker’s electrical systems. Without power, there was no heat and the air filtration system stopped working. Personnel on-site opened up doors and vents to let in fresh air. Kim could breathe and was still in contact with his forces, but over the course of the night the temperature in the bunker dropped. His children in particular found the extreme cold of the March night difficult to endure.
The strikes, according to transcripts of the meeting recovered from the Myohyang bunker after the war, caught Kim and his family off guard. They had believed that a diplomatic effort was under way in New York. They expected the Americans to try to reason with the supreme leader, not kill him—not when he still had so many ICBMs up his sleeve.
KIM JO YONG [KIM JONG UN’S SISTER]: Do we have an answer from New York?
CHOE RYONG HAE [KIM’S AIDE]: I think this is the answer. It is fairly clear to me.
KIM JO YONG: [inaudible]
KIM JONG UN: They were just stalling. Trump doesn’t care about South Korea or Japan. He said so himself.*
KIM JO YONG: [inaudible]
KIM JONG UN: He needs to know Americans will die too. We have to show him we have the will to see this through.
CHOE RYONG HAE: What good is a world without [North] Korea!
The last statement is one that we find elsewhere in the historical record as well. Several North Korean prisoners of war made it when asked why Kim Jong Un had been willing to use nuclear weapons or to escalate the conflict at crucial moments. The phrase came up again and again in interrogations, much to the confusion of the interrogators. “What good is a world without North Korea?” Former regime officials would simply repeat this rhetorical question, as though its meaning was obvious. “You think it sounds crazy, but you are totally wrong,” Choe Ryong Hae later explained to this commission’s investigators from his holding cell at [REDACTED]. “You don’t understand anything about war. How many people did you kill just because you don’t want to understand?”
Choe’s comment, he explained, was a reference to something Kim Jong Il had said—a reference that Kim Jong Un would have understood all too well. Choe pointed out that the statement was little more than a repackaging of a quotation by China’s Mao Zedong, who had dismissed the threat of nuclear attacks on China with a similar statement. It was nothing more than a Leninist idea that war is decided not by weapons but by the will of the soldiers and their leaders. “If war is a test of weapons, then you Americans would always win,” Choe explained. “But you lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s because war is a test of will. Capitalists aren’t willing to blow up the earth, because you care only about money. The supreme leader understood what I meant: with his strength of will, surely we would prevail.”
According to Choe, Kim continued to see the conflict as a personal struggle with Donald Trump. One of them would have to back down and accept defeat. For Kim, it was clear that Trump the “property developer” would back down. After all, for Kim Jong Un defeat would mean the loss of everything—his rule, his family, his life. Donald Trump, on the other hand, could simply stop and walk away, suffering nothing more than the same short-lived sting of embarrassment that had befallen many other defeated imperial powers.
Kim’s plan was to respond to every American escalation with an escalation of his own, until the price was simply too high for Trump. The news that the first attack had not produced the expected public pressure on Trump to stop the attacks was disappointing, but not unexpected. This was a struggle to death, and Kim believed that the winner would be the one who had the will to carry on to the bitter end.
The transcripts give no record of Kim giving an order to use long-range nuclear weapons against the United States. Choe said simply that, after the conversation, he understood what Kim wanted. When Kim had ordered the strikes against South Korea and Japan, he had also ordered that the long-range missile forces be dispersed. Their orders were clear: if North Korea came under attack, they could retaliate against their targets in the United States. Still, Choe said, he managed to contact the Strategic Rocket Force Command on his cell phone to convey the order.
He recalled being somewhat evasive, unsure whether his calls were being intercepted.
“The medicine doesn’t seem to have cured the patient of his madness,” Choe recalled telling the Strategic Rocket Force commander. “Trump is a big man. The supreme leader wants to give him a stronger dose.”
Then Choe accompanied Kim’s children as they made their way back over the hill to a hotel at the mouth of the valley.
Davidson had tasked the Air Force with hunting down North Korea’s long-range missiles. The priority during the first day of the air war was to find and somehow disable the small number of big missiles that could reach the United States with their massive thermonuclear weapons—and to do so before Kim had a chance to launch them. Davidson knew he had a narrow window of time, but he hoped that Kim would hesitate—and that his hesitation would be fatal.
The analysts working at the CIA and in other corners of the intelligence community had a good idea where North Korea stored most of the missiles that threatened the United States. On March 21, 2020, the US Air Force struck these sites heavily, with cruise missiles launched from ships and aircraft. But North Korea had stored many of these missiles in tunnels, which made them difficult to reach with a single air strike. Destroying a deeply buried target often required striking it over and over, in the same spot, with each successive explosion digging a bit deeper. What’s more, the intelligence provided to the US aircrews participating in these missions, while impressive, was far from perfect. It was impossible to know where every last missile had been stored or even how many there were. As one senior Defense Intelligence Agency official admitted, “There was no accurate accounting of mobile launchers or where they were based or hiding.” US intelligence analysts are supremely talented, but they are not omniscient—and no one should have expected them to be.
North Korea’s long-range ballistic missiles, including the massive Hwasong-15, were mobile—that is to say, they could be transported by massive trucks. These vehicles were slow and cumbersome, but the North Koreans had been able to disperse them at the same time Kim gave the order for its short- and medium-range missiles to attack targets in South Korea and Japan. Some of these missiles were moved to secondary tunnels a safe distance away from the primary tunnels where they were regularly stored. Others were hidden under highway overpasses, in road tunnels, or in caves.
As a result, the massive series of air strikes that targeted North Korea’s known missile bases destroyed few, if any, of Kim’s intercontinental ballistic missiles. This illuminates one of the reasons that OPLAN 5015 was premised as a preemptive strike: Air Force officials believed that it was essential to destroy these ICBMs before North Korea could disperse them. Their concern was sometimes shrouded in euphemisms like “left of launch” and “pre-boost phase intercept,” but the jargon all meant the same thing: destroy the missiles before they could be launched. And the best time to do that was when the missiles were still sitting on the trucks in garages at known locations.
But with North Korea’s preemptive nuclear strike against US forces in South Korea, Japan, and Guam, the United States had lost the element of surprise. North Korea’s remaining missiles were already on the move, the truck drivers heading for secure places to hide from the retaliatory strikes that might be coming. Thus, the Air Force was forced to play catch-up and chase after Kim Jong Un’s missiles just as it had scrambled to find Saddam’s Scuds in the 1991 Gulf War. In that war, allied war planners had neglected to target Saddam’s small force of Scud missiles, judging it to be militarily insignificant. But what they did not anticipate was that Saddam would lob missiles at Israel, creating a political crisis. Allied commanders threw large numbers of aircraft and special forces at the mission of “Scud hunting,” only to fail miserably.
Although the conflicts were separated by nearly thirty years, technology had not changed quite as dramatically as might be imagined. Some of the F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jets used in the air strikes on North Korea were the same aircraft that had hunted the Scuds in 1991 in Iraq, although these aircraft were now joined by the F-35, a stealth fighter with far greater capabilities. Crucially for this nighttime raid, both aircraft had much improved targeting pods that allowed the pilots to see better in the dark.
While the planes’ better new sensors allowed the pilots—and the controllers communicating with them—to see far more than ever before, they did not tell the pilots and controllers where to look. The Air Force was quickly forced to develop a strategy similar to how it handled Scuds during the 1991 Gulf War: identifying “launch baskets” from which North Korean missiles might be expected to be fired, and then sending aircraft to patrol in figure-eight patterns over these areas, dropping bombs at preset intervals on possible launch sites. The idea was to harass the launch units, using the aircraft like artillery to force the missile crews to stay hidden and to keep them from launching. Of course, if a pilot saw a vehicle moving into the launch basket or preparing for a launch, then her priority immediately changed to destroying it.
This approach had worked poorly during the 1991 Gulf War. Afterward, the United States could not confirm that even a single one of Saddam’s Scuds had been destroyed prior to its launch. Pentagon officials had hoped that improvements in technology might see them through during another such conflict—that the next time would be different. But North Korea was different in other ways that complicated the missile chase.
North Korea was a more challenging environment than Iraq, particularly since many of its launch sites were located in remote and mountainous regions. In Iraq, the launch baskets were easy to identify because Iraq’s missiles were short-range: if the Iraqis wanted to launch a missile at Israel, there was only a small area of the Iraqi desert close enough to Israel for the missile to reach its target. But against North Korea, the Air Force was looking for missiles that could fly all the way to the United States. All of North Korea essentially was a launch basket.
This made the criteria for where the Air Force should send its fighters to patrol more nebulous. In telling the pilots where to look, military intelligence analysts were often forced simply to guess. These guesses were educated, of course; the analysts had some idea of where the missiles were stored, approximately when they were told to disperse, and how fast the launcher trucks could drive. North Korea’s poor road network helped narrow down the trucks’ possible locations: for instance, the big trucks were far too heavy to travel off-road.
US analysts were largely correct in drawing their launch baskets, although a few missiles were launched from outside these areas. But the analysts had created these accurate launch baskets by making them very, very large, and thus a large number of aircraft were required to patrol them.
The approach, whatever sense it made on paper, was simply not effective enough to protect the United States. About a dozen Hwasong-14 and Hwasong-15 missiles were successfully launched against the nation during the early-morning hours of Sunday, March 22.
Air Force officials have argued that their efforts did, in fact, suppress the number of launches. “From the perspective of limiting damage to the United States,” an Air Force history argues, “it is important to remember how many missiles were not launched because missile crews were evading detection by the air campaign.” Still, there is no evidence that the air campaign was effective in destroying any mobile missiles, of any range. “In the end,” the history concludes, “the best one can say is that some mobile launchers may have been destroyed [prior to firing their missiles].”
The pilots simply could not find the missiles prior to launch. Instead, once a launch was detected, controllers ordered aircraft to fly to the launch location to destroy the launcher before it could escape to reload and fire again. North Korean missile units, like the Iraqis in 1991, practiced a tactic that America military officials called “shoot-and-scoot”: firing their missile and then moving the large vehicle to safety. “Those guys were like cockroaches who disappear when the kitchen light goes on,” observed Captain Tom McIntyre, an American pilot.
The North Koreans adopted a slightly different shoot-and-scoot strategy. They built huge trucks that could erect the missile on a massive metal firing table and then “scoot” before the projectile was even fired. The truck simply brought the missile to the site and erected it. By the time the crew fired the missile, the precious launcher was long gone to pick up another payload. American pilots reported their frustration in arriving on the scene, only to see little more than a hunk of metal and a burn mark on the ground. “We started calling the trucks ‘deadbeat dads,’” another US pilot recalled, “because there was an erection, but they would split town before we could make ’em pay up.”
In many cases, the first that pilots saw of the ICBMs were the massive flashes of the huge missiles as the crews launched them toward the United States. “It’s a huge flame and your first reaction is that it’s a SAM and you want to make a defensive reaction,” recalled McIntyre. “Then you see that it is going straight up. So AWACS [the Airborne Warning and Control System, an aircraft that functions as an air-based traffic control system] is yelling and hollering for us to get on it and we’re heading for the coordinates as fast as we could go. It was about twenty-five miles away from us, but when we got there, we went up and down the road and all I could find in the targeting pod was a hotspot on the ground.”
Even when the pilots saw a launch, it was usually from a great distance, and there was nothing they could do to stop it. It simply isn’t possible for aircraft to engage enemy missiles as they lift off.
Many pilots recalled the helpless feeling of watching the huge missiles powering up into space, carrying huge nuclear weapons that the pilots knew were headed toward the United States. “You just think, I hope those guys in Alaska have a shot,” one pilot recalled. “Then you go try to find the son of a bitch that did it.”