In the first year of the Trump presidency, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis would sleep in his gym clothes to save critical minutes in the event that he was awakened to news of an incoming missile from North Korea.
President Trump had delegated to Mattis the authority to shoot down any missile that threatened the United States.
But it would be up to Trump to decide whether to retaliate with nuclear weapons, a threat implicit in his public rhetoric about the U.S. being “locked and loaded” to meet any North Korean provocation with “fire and fury.”
As tensions steady rose over the spring and summer and into the fall and winter of 2017, Mattis lived “on permanent alert,” according to new behind-the-scenes details from investigative reporter Bob Woodward’s latest book, Rage, published this month.
“It was a nonstop crucible, personal and hellish. There were no holidays or weekends off, no dead time,” Woodward writes.
Mattis’s thoughts, which likely could have come only from Mattis himself, reveal the battle-hardened Marine commander was burdened by the possibility that the escalating test of wills might result in the unthinkable: the use of nuclear weapons.
“What do you do if you’ve got to do it?” Mattis asked himself, according to Woodward. “You’re going to incinerate a couple million people.”
“No person has the right to kill a million people as far as I’m concerned, yet that’s what I have to confront,” Mattis reportedly thought.
After he met with President Barack Obama at the White House in November 2016, Trump said Obama told him North Korea’s nuclear ambitions would be the biggest national security problem he would face.
Later, Trump began telling audiences that Obama was “so close to starting a big war with North Korea,” a war Trump insists he averted with his personal outreach to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
“If I had not been elected president of the United States, we would right now, in my opinion, be in a major war with North Korea with potentially millions of people killed,” Trump said in last year’s State of the Union address.
Under Obama, the U.S. had pursued a strategy of “strategic patience.”
The U.S. would isolate North Korea until it showed a willingness to give up its growing nuclear arsenal.
Trump embraced a more muscular policy of “maximum pressure and engagement” intended essentially to force Kim into capitulation.
Trump imposed crippling economic sanctions, ramped up military pressure, and employed his unique style of belittling taunts, including references to Kim as “Little Rocket Man” and “short and fat.”
Neither Trump’s nor Obama’s strategy resulted in North Korea giving up a single nuclear warhead.
Under Trump, the U.S. came closer to war with North Korea than any time since 1994, when President Bill Clinton was on the verge of considering an option to take out the North’s nuclear reactor at Yongbyon with a strike by F-117 stealth planes and cruise missiles.
Only a last-minute diplomatic foray to Pyongyang by former President Jimmy Carter took the military option off the table, avoiding a possible war that the Pentagon warned at the time could have resulted in 1 million casualties on both sides.
But in 2017, more than two decades later, tensions were increasing by the week, and the horrific prospect of all-out war on the Korean peninsula again seeming alarmingly plausible.
By the summer, Kim was marching inexorably toward his dream of building a viable nuclear arsenal — a goal the U.S. intelligence community had advised Trump that Kim would never forsake because he saw it as the best guarantee for the survival of his regime.
The U.S. Strategic Command, which controls America’s nuclear weapons, dusted off two standing war plans for North Korea: OPLAN 5027, usually described as the plan to defeat a North Korean attack on the South that also included an option for regime change, and OPLAN 5015, which was designed specifically to take out Kim.
One scenario involved the option for the use of up to 80 nuclear weapons, according to Woodward’s book.
By the end of July, North Korea had tested two long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs — one with an estimated range of more than 6,000 miles, which in theory could put Los Angeles, Denver, and Chicago in the crosshairs, something Trump had vowed seven months earlier “won’t happen.”
The increasingly bellicose rhetoric from Pyongyang prompted Trump’s famous Aug. 8 warning: “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
In response, North Korea accused the U.S. of “nuclear war hysteria” and announced plans to fire four intermediate-range ballistic missiles over Japan and into waters about 25 miles off the coast of Guam, the site of a major U.S. military base.
Trump then told reporters that maybe his “fire and fury” threat was not “tough enough,” and the next day, he tweeted, “Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded.”
Kim said, though state media, that after reviewing the Guam strike plans, he’d hold his fire while awaiting Washington’s next move.
Then, in early September, North Korea conducted its sixth nuclear test of what it claimed was a hydrogen bomb and declared it a “perfect success.”
Experts estimated the underground explosion had a yield of more than 100 kilotons, roughly 6 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
A week later, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford gathered senior military leaders in the Pentagon’s secure conference room known as “the Tank” to review military options intended to send a stronger message to Kim, and according to Woodward, Dunford expressed the worry that the U.S. “was heading straight into war.”
Two weeks later, in his first address to the U.N. General Assembly, Trump threatened to “destroy North Korea” if it attacked the U.S. or its allies, adding that “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”
In a New Year’s address the following January, Kim declared success in creating “a mighty sword” in the form of nuclear forces “capable of thwarting and countering any nuclear threats from the United States.”
Now, Kim was ready to engage with both the U.S. and South Korea from a position of strength.
Trump would meet with Kim three times: the first historic meeting in Singapore in June of 2018, a second summit in Hanoi in February of 2019, plus a final brief encounter in the DMZ four months later.
Denuclearization talks broke down over Kim’s demands for sanctions relief and the U.S.’s instance that the North completely and verifiably dismantle its weapons and missile programs.
While failing to achieve any significant progress on denuclearization during his first term, Trump did succeed in lowering the temperature on the Korean peninsula and winning a yearlong moratorium on the North’s missile and nuclear tests that held through 2019.
And in return for Trump canceling U.S.-South Korea war games in 2018, Kim also released three American prisoners and repatriated the remains of 55 U.S. service members who died during the Korean War.
In one of his 17 interviews with Woodward, Trump said Kim was “totally prepared” to go to war with the U.S.
“Did he tell you that?” Woodward asked.
“Ah, yes, he did,” Trump said.
“He did?”
“He was totally prepared to go,” Trump replied. “And he expected to go. But we met.”
While criticized by the foreign policy establishment for elevating Kim on the world stage, Trump told Woodward it was worth it.
“I met. Big f******g deal. It takes me two days. I met. I gave up nothing. I didn’t give up sanctions. I didn’t give him anything. Okay? Didn’t give him anything,” he said.
It’s a refrain he repeats, albeit in a more polite version, at his campaign events.
“By the way, what happened to the war? I thought we were going to war with Kim Jong Un?” Trump said this month at a rally in Minden, Nevada. “Where’s the war? Where’s the war? Oh, I see. Oh, I see. It never happened, did it? Never happened, did it? Well, maybe someday — it could happen.”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
