Now, trapped in a basement, Kim was certain that an American invasion was gathering steam. And he knew that he must act quickly if North Korean forces were to have any hope of stopping that invasion.
Still, it is one thing to have a plan on paper. It is quite another thing to go through with that plan, particularly when everything hangs in the balance. It would have been understandable if Kim had hesitated. No one, not even Kim Jong Un, would have started a nuclear war with the United States of America unless he was certain that there was no other option, no other way out. Above all, Kim wanted to live—he wanted “regime survival,” in the peculiar language of intelligence assessments. But everything he knew about surviving told him that he had to act decisively when the moment came. He could wait—but he could not wait too long. He still had intermittent cell-phone service. How long would that last? Once his cell phone stopped working, it would be too late.
In the end, Kim’s cell phone provided the final confirmation he needed. An aide showed him a tweet sent by the American president, time-stamped early in the evening at 7:03 PM Seoul time—nearly an hour before the missiles had been launched. The message was in the president’s own distinctive voice. It read:
Donald J. Trump @tehDonaldJTrump
LITTLE ROCKET MAN WON’T BE BOTHERING US MUCH LONGER!
Kim’s English, picked up in boarding school, was passable—certainly passable enough to understand what Trump meant. It was clear evidence, at least to Kim, that Trump knew about the strike in advance. Still, he showed the phone to his sister, who showed it to Choe. Everyone agreed that the tweet’s meaning was plain.
It was time to give the order. Waiting would be fatal.
At approximately 2:00 AM Pyongyang time, Kim Jong Un gave the order to launch a nuclear strike. The targets: American and South Korean forces on and around the Korean Peninsula.
When Kim Jong Un’s order reached North Korea’s missile units, commanders roused the troops sleeping in their bunks. Almost immediately, teams of North Korean technicians began driving out to specially prepared launch sites, each carefully selected in advance. Every one of these sites had been cleared of any trees or bushes, then paved with gravel.
The distinctive shapes along the side of the road were unmistakable: each clearing looked exactly like the others. The North Korean troops who had built the sites called them 눈표—literally, an “eye mark” that a Korean reader might add in the margin of a page, but figuratively an idiom for anyone or anything that stands out.
At each of these sites, a truck pulled up and unloaded its crew of six, who began running hoses out to a decoy. As it inflated, the decoy gradually took the shape of a Scud missile. These decoys had been purchased abroad; sometimes the North Koreans used them as targets in training. With special metallic fabric, they looked almost exactly like the real thing to both human beings and radars.
The decoy crews finished their work quickly—within twenty minutes—and then returned to their bases. By the time they got back, another, more deadly phase of the operation was under way.
At the same time the crews had been inflating the decoys, North Korea began to launch the first wave of its attack—a swarm of drones aimed at missile defenses located throughout South Korea and Japan.
Using drones to attack missile defenses was hardly a novel idea. Iran had, for many years, trained its proxies to attack American-made Patriot defenses by sending cheap drones that used GPS to navigate along waypoints, before diving down on the radar and exploding. Without the radar, the entire battery was useless. And often the missile defense battery would be forced to shoot at the drones, wasting valuable interceptors. After an Israeli battery shot down a $200 quadcopter with a $3 million Patriot missile, there was a lot of talk about defense against drones—but that talk never translated into defenses for the missile defenses sitting in South Korea. At the same time, North Korea released images of drones being used in combat and paraded them through Pyongyang.
Striking American missile defenses was straightforward enough. South Korean and American soldiers routinely took pictures of their bases and uploaded them to Facebook. Soldiers on runs would log their route with a FitBit and upload that to a social media site. The only security measure that South Korea took was placing trees over sensitive military facilities in Naver and Daum—the South Korean equivalent of Google Maps. But since those same facilities were not censored in Google Maps, the ruse merely had the effect of confirming which sites were sensitive.
The single terminal high-altitude area defense (THAAD) system, an antiballistic missile system that US forces had placed in South Korea, was an especially easy target. It had attracted considerable attention in 2017 after being deployed on a golf course in Seongju, South Korea, and the North Koreans knew exactly what it looked like; in fact, a North Korean drone had crashed while taking pictures of the site. The system—and especially its crucial radar—also was visible in satellite images, sitting out in the open. The THAAD system had a radar that could only look forward. It never saw the three North Korean drones that navigated south over the ocean and along the Korean coastline before turning inland and striking it from behind.
Meanwhile, as North Korean units inflated decoys and sent drones to attack missile defenses in South Korea and Japan, Kim Jong Un’s missile units had also begun their phase of the operation.
The attack on March 21 largely used North Korea’s arsenal of Scud and Nodong ballistic missiles. The Scud was a Soviet missile, although the North Koreans had gotten their first Scuds from Egypt. The Nodong was a larger, even longer-range longer-range version of the Scud developed by the North Koreans, who extended its range to nearly 1,000 miles.
Launching a Scud or Nodong missile requires a period of preparation—soldiers have to use a crane to lift the missile up and place it on the truck that will carry it and then bolt a warhead to it. The most dangerous part of the whole operation is fueling the missile—filling it with toxic propellants that are designed to explode. The safest approach is to erect the missile and then fuel it, but crews can fuel the missile first and then drive to the launch site. Few units will transport a missile filled with explosive fuel and an armed nuclear warhead except in the most urgent circumstances.
These circumstances were certainly urgent. So, with their missiles armed and fueled, the truck drivers and the rest of their crews climbed into the cabins of their vehicles and put on their headsets. The heavy trucks were so loud that the crews inside the cabins could only communicate with one another over radio.
The units themselves had a specific schedule on which they needed to launch their missiles; North Korean military planners knew that in any attack, and especially a preemptive nuclear strike, timing and coordination were crucial. And so the North Korean missile units all went to staging areas where they could hide until it was time to come out.