How nuclear war could unfold

By Jeffrey Lewis
Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey

MARCH 2019 ... nobody grasped how quickly accidental violence could take on its own urgent logic ... When a South Korean airliner strayed into North Korean airspace, a Northern air defense crew .. mistook it for an American bomber. The crew fired a surface-to-air missile .. killing all 250 .. on board ... Within hours, Moon ordered South Korean missile units to strike the air defense battery, as well as select leadership targets throughout North Korea ... But .. surviving members of the Moon administration insist that things would have been fine had President Trump not picked up his smartphone: "LITTLE ROCKET MAN WON’T BE AROUND MUCH LONGER!" It was an idle Twitter threat — Trump hadn't yet been briefed about the missile strike, and it hadn't yet been discussed on “Fox & Friends.” But how would Kim Jong Un know that? ... And so, facing what he believed was a massive American military invasion, Kim gave the order ... Many North Korean missiles did miss their targets in South Korea and Japan ... But ... the bombs that fell off target still inflicted massive damage on urban areas ... Kim had misread the American mood ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/this-is-how-nuclear-war-with-north-korea-would-unfold/2017/12/08/4e298a28-db07-11e7-a841-2066faf731ef_story.html?utm_term=.be2b9335c110