With President Trump’s decision not to seek reelection in November 2020, it is important to look forward, not backward. The president set an example for the nation when he announced that he would not run for reelection, sparing the country what would likely have been an extraordinarily divisive election following his impeachment and subsequent acquittal in the Senate on a party-line vote.
With President Pence’s election, the commission believes we now have an opportunity to turn the page on this terrible moment in our nation’s history. During the public hearings that this commission held throughout the country as part of our inquiry, all of us were astonished by the partisan animosity and recrimination on display. We were struck in particular by the lack of civility characterizing many of these discussions, and we found reprehensible the continuing assertions by many media figures and political partisans that the attacks were, in fact, conducted by federal government officials, such as the intelligence community, to discredit President Trump and his presidency. Though it should be plain enough, we feel compelled to say directly that there was no “deep state” conspiracy to explode nuclear weapons throughout the United States. There were no mass executions by Army and Army National Guard troops keeping order. There is no evidence that large numbers of Jews evacuated New York before the attacks. Kim Jong Un is not alive, nor is he living in Russia. And as their wounds and burns attest, the millions of survivors are not “crisis actors.” It is shocking to us to see that these opinions appear widespread and persistent online, as well as in many parts of the United States not directly affected by the attacks. They are false.
As noted at the beginning of this report, the members of this commission have been surprised by how many times they were asked one question in particular at these public hearings. While the answer to this question has been elusive, they feel it is important enough to mention it again in closing.
Should the United States seek the elimination of nuclear weapons? Some people believe that the large-scale destruction experienced by the United States is a powerful demonstration of the danger of nuclear weapons and that, as a society, we should commit ourselves to their elimination. These people believe that the United States should abandon its nuclear arms and join international legal agreements prohibiting the development, possession, and use of such weapons.
Others, however, disagree. They believe that North Korea’s large-scale use of nuclear weapons demonstrates that warfare, including nuclear warfare, remains a significant threat to the United States of America. Far from prohibiting nuclear weapons, these people believe that the United States must maintain a robust nuclear force to deter the sort of attacks launched by Kim Jong Un on the nation and its allies. The task of deterring another nuclear war, these skeptics argue, should take precedence over unrealistic efforts to prohibit these weapons.
This is an important and challenging policy question. There are many strong and differing opinions, even among the commissioners. Ultimately, however, they agreed that it lay beyond the scope of their mandate. The commission’s task was to understand how the nuclear war came about and to provide the American public with the facts of the situation in the most objective way possible. They have done this. To go further and ask what implications those facts might have for issues such as nuclear strategy or foreign policy would be to engage in speculation. Such speculation, in the current partisan environment, they felt, would only serve to further inflame passions and undermine the fragile national unity upon which our recovery depends. This commission of politicians and other distinguished public servants was asked to answer the simple question of what happened. Now that they have completed their task, they return to their lives as private citizens who each possess one vote in our great Republic—one vote that counts exactly the same as every other American citizen’s.
THE 2020 COMMISSION REPORT
STATEMENT BY FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES DONALD J. TRUMP
April 2, 2023
The so-called 2020 Commission is a total Witch Hunt and just more Deep State FAKE NEWS.
The Democrats will NEVER accept that I defeated Crooked Hilary even though 3 million illegals voted for her.
They can’t stand that I won the Republican nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party, and then beat their candidate.
Now the Democrats want to blame me for the Nuclear War (which was very terrible) and that they caused. The SAME nuclear war that killed Melania who was so beautiful.
The Democrats like Lyin’ Chuck Schumer will never admit that I almost made a deal with Rocketman. It would have been a very good deal for the world. And the Phony media says negotiations “collapsed” but never admit that it was the Democrats that didn’t want a deal and said that it was terrible (although they did and very often). Crooked Hilary, Lyin’ Chuck and the Democrats did every thing to kill the deal because they can’t stand me winning. VERY DISHONEST.
Fortunately, we have many great Americans who remain very supportive of our Great President Mike Pence and the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to take our Country back and build it up much better than it was before, rather than trying to burn it all down.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am deeply indebted to Hidehiko Yuzaki, the governor of Hiroshima prefecture, for inviting me to be a member of his roundtable on disarmament. Visiting Hiroshima each August is a profoundly moving experience. Every time I visit Hiroshima, I find myself wondering how to persuade more people to listen to the stories of the Hibakusha—the Japanese people who survived the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. I made the decision to use their real testimonies to describe the horror of the fictional nuclear war in these pages. I did this because it is easy, as Americans, to let the slightly stilted grammar of a translation create a false sense of distance between ourselves and the very real people who suffered and died. But they were and are people, just like we are, and our fate might well turn out to be the same. The testimonies presented in Chapter 10 are largely drawn from interviews presented in the television program Hiroshima Witness, produced by the Hiroshima Peace Cultural Center and NHK, Japan’s national public broadcaster. These interviews were translated into English by the college students Yumi Kodama, Junko Kato, Junko Kawamoto, Masako Kubota, Chiharu Kimura, and Kumi Komatsu, who were advised by Laurence Wiig, and they are now posted at the Atomic Archive. I want people to read the stories of the survivors. I hope that I did right by them.
Along the same lines, John Hersey’s 1946 book Hiroshima is probably more responsible than anything else for my interest in nuclear weapons. While there really is a South Korean television drama with a doctor named Oh Soo-hyun, the Dr. Oh depicted in Chapter 6 is a fictional homage to the very real Dr. Terafumi Sasaki, who was profiled in Hersey’s Hiroshima. Everyone who cares about the fate of this world and the danger posed by nuclear weapons should read Hersey’s book and the stories of the Hibakusha, and then visit the city of Hiroshima. Do it and you will understand.