How a Peninsula resident – and one of the world’s leading experts on nuclear policy – came to write a novel about a nuclear war in the time of Trump.

On Dec. 8, 2017, the Washington Post published an op-ed with the headline: “This is how nuclear war with North Korea would unfold.”

It was written by Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, who is – according to his Washington D.C-based colleague Joe Cirincione – “probably the most-quoted nuclear policy expert in the field today.”

Lewis’ op-ed weaves a fictional scenario of how America could stumble into nuclear war with North Korea. When Alexander Littlefield, an editor with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in New York City, read Lewis’ piece, he saw something special – and, perhaps, a book.

Littlefield didn’t know Lewis, and sent him an email – cold – to pitch a book based on that premise. When Lewis, who was keen, called Littlefield back, Lewis suggested perhaps writing it in the style of the 9/11 Commission Report but as a novel. Littlefield loved the idea.

It should be noted that Lewis, along with being a leading nuclear policy expert, was already a seasoned and clearly gifted writer: In 2004, he launched the first blog on nonproliferation – armscontrolwonk.com – that’s since become a go-to resource for those in the field. He writes regular columns for Foreign Policy, and has published stories in the Washington Post and theNew York Times.

And while Lewis had never written a novel, he had an advantage over most first-time novelists: He could already see all the chess moves.

“There was no concern about plotting,” Lewis says. “I knew how the plot would shake out, and I found that when I was writing it, it was very easy to write scenes,” Lewis says. “I understood how things would generally go. And then there were fun ones I discovered.”

Lewis’ novel, The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against The United States, was published in August. “We really broke every record in my book,” Littlefield says about how fast they were able to get the book to print. It took Lewis just four months to create, writing on weekends and about two hours every weekday morning.

The most memorable scene of the “fun ones” Lewis dreamed up involves President Donald Trump taking shelter in a bunker beneath the second tee at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida.

In Lewis’ research for the book – he read a lot of articles about Trump – he discovered there was a bomb shelter beneath that tee because Trump had offhandedly bragged about it to a reporter. But in that shelter – in Lewis’ novel, at least – there is no cell coverage, which becomes problematic when a crisis unfolds.

Everything in the novel that takes place before Aug. 7, 2018 is factual. Thereafter, it’s all Lewis’ imagination, based on the facts that he knows. And while some characters in the book have departed Trump’s White House before the novel foresees – like Gen. Jim Mattis, the former Secretary of Defense – he was smart in anticipating that former chief of staff, retired Gen. John Kelly, was on the outs.

Lewis’ novel somehow succeeds in pulling off the improbable combination being edifying, fun and deeply disturbing, and perhaps what’s most remarkable is how possible the scenario is that he portrays.

And that’s precisely the point.

Trump’s unpredictability and inflammatory tweets are a factor. Combined with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s inherent insecurity about the future of his regime, it all proves catastrophic, despite neither of them ever thinking they were stumbling into nuclear war.

“Look at the insanity of the system itself,” Cirincione says. “It’s not Trump’s fault.”

That said, Lewis’ portrayal of Trump is spot-on, and the tweets in the novel are all authentic, except the names have often been changed.

“A lot of the tweets about Kim Jong Un were really about [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer,” Lewis says, adding, “Generally speaking, I did not take the most incendiary tweets.”

And having lived in Washington, D.C. for more than a decade in his early 20s into his mid-30s, Lewis says it was easy to portray characters like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former congressman from Kansas.

“There are a lot of congressmen like Mike Pompeo,” Lewis says. “They’re not real smart, and they got where they want to be by knowing who their friends are.”

Lewis says he’s stewing on an idea for another speculative novel, but he hasn’t played all the chess moves yet.

Littlefield, who says he barely had to edit Lewis’ writing, is enthusiastic. “I can’t wait to see what he comes up with,” he says.

Hopefully, it has a happier ending than the 2020 Commission.