Jeffrey Lewis’s new novel...is the gut punch everyone needs ... Reading the entirely believable language of bureaucracy unnerved me and, at points, left me physically ill ... As someone who has covered devastation, albeit natural ones such as earthquake disasters, I found Lewis’s descriptions jarringly recognizable ... His accounts also recall John Hersey’s stories in Hiroshima, and that is deliberate ... This is fiction, but it is grounded in wonky detail ... What Lewis does so well is show the geopolitical impact of human judgment and error, made by men who just happened to end up in the offices of national decision-makers ... This is a book as much about nuclear disaster as it is about the temperament of President Trump. Lewis’s commentary is unsparing on the latter ... As mercurial as President Trump is, he is also oddly predictable, and Lewis builds a believable man with his ego, irritability, and carelessness ... This book is a warning for us, in a climate where life too frequently imitates art.

The commission, interviewing survivors and poring over the official records in a Virginia bunker in the aftermath of the 2020 cataclysm, describes the relentless unravelling of the situation ... As the events accelerate, Lewis deftly relaxes the constraints he has imposed on his story by telling it through the words of an official report, allowing the narrative to take on the pace of a thriller without breaking with the form. He transposes eyewitness accounts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, putting them in the mouths of the survivors from New York and the Washington suburbs who come to tell their story to the commission ... In its efforts to tug at the sleeve of a blithe nation, Lewis’s book follows in the post-apocalyptic footsteps of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach or the 1983 film The Day After. In its black comedy, which surfaces in the deadpan prose of the report, it is a Dr Strangelove for our time. Trump is as flamboyantly grotesque a character as any cooked up by Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers ... It is a measure of the insanity of the past 18 months that this seems entirely believable.

A string of poorly calculated decisions—some made to appease a stubborn leader, some made with good intentions, and some made out of fear, a desire for self-preservation, or lack of accurate information—is a theme throughout the book ... Lewis deftly intertwines real-world reports with a fictional narrative that extends some of the president’s worst flaws to logical conclusions ... The threat of nuclear war is real, the book warns, and the palace intrigue and power struggles and policy jargon shouldn’t keep us from remembering that.

Despite the book’s largely consistent tone of academic detachment, there are comic moments, such as when Trump is rushed to safety in a commandeered golf cart, and when Air Force One escapes Florida minutes before Armageddon, a grotesquely childlike Trump refuses to lower his window blind despite the risk of nuclear flash. It would not have been a surprise to read of him kicking the seat in front and demanding juice. There are also implausible aspects, such as the president’s failure to respond with 'fire and fury,' even when Trump Tower is vaporised, taking poor Melania with it. Most implausible is the relative lack of nuclear horror. The book offers vacuum-packed descriptions of ruined America, supplemented with quotes from the Hibakusha, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some of which are remarkably tame ... if he has given himself the freedom of a novel, then why stick with 'stilted' quotes? Invent some. Yet there is stern value in this novel. While not beautifully written, it is a bold warning of how easily the nightmare could occur: via a series of mistakes, assumptions and a CAPS LOCK tweet sent from a sunny golf course.

Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on arms control and disarmament at the Middlebury Institute in Monterey, California, is a keen exponent of this craft. In The 2020 Commission Report he applies it to the near future ... The imaginary sequence of errors—in software, communication, tactics, intelligence and politics—that leads to the spasm of mass murder is chillingly plausible. This is largely because, as the book’s notes make clear, most of them have already happened in real life ... Fans of Arms Control Wonk, Mr Lewis’s podcast, will expect notes of absurdist and scornful humour; they will not be disappointed. More surprising is that, in a sense, the book is optimistic about American democracy. The devastating blow that it envisages might undo even the sturdiest polity ... Mr Lewis’s premise depends on America’s institutions continuing to function in recognisable form. That implies a bedrock faith in the resilience of the republic—more, perhaps, than soberly assessed open-source intelligence might warrant.