Open-source intelligence is the art of learning things by procuring and analysing unclassified (if not always very accessible) evidence. Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on arms control and disarmament at the Middlebury Institute in Monterey, California, is a keen exponent of this craft. In “The 2020 Commission Report” he applies it to the near future.
The fiction is framed as an American government report, published in 2023, into the loss of 3m lives—1.4m of them Americans—to North Korean nuclear weapons in March 2020. Like the reports of the Roberts Commission on Pearl Harbour and the 9/11 Commission, it finds that the disaster could have been avoided, but that the evidence of the escalating threat was missed—because the people in charge were misreading the world they lived in. Mr Lewis's message is that anyone who believes that either supine summitry or threats of a “bloody nose” are good responses to North Korea's nuclear programme is guilty of just such a misreading today.
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