Major General Lee selected two units to conduct the attack, one based in central Korea near Wonju and the other on the far western edge of Baengnyeong Island. He ordered his staff to prepare an attack plan that would be ready to execute within about six hours—at 8:00 PM. This launch time would enable the missile launch units to conduct their launch preparations under the cover of darkness—and also give the president a chance to change his mind.
President Moon had no intention of changing his mind. Nor did he have any intention of informing the Americans, let alone asking for permission. When Moon learned that the attack would be ready at 8:00 PM, he asked his aides to schedule an address to the nation from the press hall, known as the Chunchugwan, located on the Blue House grounds. He also instructed them to not take any calls from the Americans. “[Moon] thought American officials might try to restrain us,” Chief of Staff Im explained. “Trump could learn about the strike the same way that everyone else did—when it was announced on television.”
Moon’s remarks that night were brief enough. He stated simply that North Korea had shot down a civilian airliner, one filled largely with children. He said that the attack “crossed all lines of human decency” and described North Korea’s claim that the aircraft was on a reconnaissance mission as a “pathetic lie.” He expressed his profound grief over the loss of so many innocent lives, over the pain their families were suffering, and over the senselessness of North Korea’s crime. And then he announced that military operations had begun:
“As I speak, Republic of Korea armed forces are responding to this cruel and unjust act. Our grief at this moment knows no bounds. But our response does, as it has been carefully limited to those responsible for perpetrating this horrible crime. The armed forces also stand ready to expand our operations if North Korea persists in attacking our citizens.”
When his remarks were finished and the television cameras were turned off, Moon walked back down to the Crisis Room and asked his staff to place a call to the White House. Now that the strike was under way, Moon wanted his national security adviser to smooth things over. At this point, Moon and his advisers were mainly worried about the American reaction, not the North Korean one. They worried that the Trump administration would be angry about not having been consulted, but they also assumed that US leaders would fall into line now that the counterstrike, a limited operation, was a fait accompli. None of Moon’s surviving aides appear to have believed that the strike would escalate into a general war. The targets had been carefully selected, the number of missiles was small, and Moon’s speech had made clear that he was holding the full strike in reserve.
“We were so worried that the Americans might try to stop us,” Im explained, “that it never occurred to us they might make things worse. I don’t even use Twitter.”
Launching a ballistic missile strike is not as easy as simply pressing a button.
Each missile is carried by a massive truck. Those trucks are parked within massive earthen bunkers with a curious shape. They are called “drive-through” bunkers because they have an entrance on one side and an exit on the other so that the massive vehicle can drive in one side and out the other without having to turn around.
The bunkers in South Korea had the same distinctive shape as the ones that the United States built in Europe during the Cold War. The American bunkers, abandoned at the end of the Cold War, now sit empty—although one of the locations was used as a set for a Star Wars movie. A space ship sat in the same spot once occupied by a ground-launched cruise missile armed with a 100-kiloton nuclear warhead.
The bunkers in South Korea, by contrast, were neither abandoned nor empty.
After the teleconference between President Moon and the Army Missile Command, Major General Lee placed two missile units on alert, one located near the South Korean city of Wonju, the other sitting on the far edge of Baengnyeong Island. Both units received the same order: to fire three ballistic missiles at targets in North Korea, for a total of six missiles. The crews waited through the day until the sun set—first over Wonju and then, nine minutes later, at 6:52 PM, over Baengnyeong Island.
The order, called a “fire mission assignment,” contained three kinds of information. It told the crew where to go (the “fire point”), specified when the unit should launch (the “method of control”), and then told the crew where to go after the launch.
The crews did not have to go far to reach their fire points. Major General Lee’s order specified that the trucks should park on a series of pre-surveyed concrete pads just outside the massive earthen bunkers and launch their missiles from there.
The orders also gave the missile crew instructions as to the method of control. A missile commander can give a crew the freedom to “fire when ready,” but in this case Major General Lee told both the crew and the commander to launch “at my command.” That would give him one last opportunity to call off the strike before the missiles were airborne.
Finally, Major General Lee ordered the units to move to new positions several miles from each base once they had completed their fire missions. While his surviving aides all testified that they did not expect North Korea to retaliate, this final precaution makes sense in light of the fact that North Korea almost certainly knew the location of many of South Korea’s missile bases; prudence dictated that the launch vehicles move to safety and reload. “If things did get out of control,” Lee’s deputy explained, “we wanted to be prepared.” Had Major General Lee not given this final order, it is unlikely that the commission would have had the opportunity to interview the launch crews.
One by one, each truck drove out into the night and parked on a concrete square. Each vehicle was aligned along a heading specified in the fire order, pointing toward Pyongyang or Chunghwa. Each crew parked its vehicle in the darkness, with no lights, set the brake, and then extended the hydraulic jacks that would lift the vehicle just off its tires and ensure that it was perfectly horizontal.
Once the trucks were in place, the crews turned on their fire control systems. They did not have to type in the target coordinates themselves. Once the fire control computer was turned on, it automatically downloaded the target locations sent by radio and began to compute a firing solution—essentially aiming the missile. The computer also checked to ensure that the vehicle was level and aligned correctly, adjusting for any deviation that might otherwise put the missile off course, even by a few meters.
When the trucks’ computers had completed their firing solutions, the display inside one of the vehicles provided a different message than the others. It read:
The vehicle had been aligned incorrectly, forcing the crew to stop what they were doing and repark the vehicle, a process that took several tense minutes. “I was really embarrassed,” recalled the driver of the vehicle that had been misaligned. “I felt very ashamed that I was holding up the entire mission.” Eventually, all the vehicles were correctly aligned and a firing solution had been found for each missile.
As the computer in each vehicle found a firing solution, the display inside the cab alerted the crew. One by one, in each of the vehicles, a crew member pressed a key marked LAY that confirmed to the unit commander that the vehicle was in the correct position. The computer completed the aiming process by telling the truck to raise the canister containing the missile into a vertical position. Soon, all three canisters were pointing upward into the night sky at Wonju. On Baengnyeong Island, three more did the same.