W H Allen rushes to publish North Korea book following auction

W H Allen is rush-publishing a work of “speculative history” that explores what could happen if US efforts to engage with North Korea fail and result in a devastating nuclear attack in the year 2020.

The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States by Jeffrey Lewis was acquired by the Ebury imprint at auction. It will be published in paperback on 7th August, retailing at £9.99.

A global expert on arms control, Lewis has based his book on real and imagined interviews and documents, “imagining how talks between the US and North Korea could fail like those before it, but this time could plunge the two into conflict”.

As experts debate the outcome of the recent summit in Singapore, Lewis outlines the stakes – offering a cautionary tale of what happens if the process collapses and the two parties return to the taunting and nuclear threats of 2017.  “The stakes could not be higher,” Lewis says.  “If we fail to build a different relationship with North Korea, the results could be catastrophic. This is the story of that catastrophe.”

Joel Rickett, deputy publisher at Ebury, bought UK and Commonwealth rights excluding Canada from Gillian MacKenzie at MacKenzie Wolf at auction.  The US publisher is Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Lewis is a columnist for Foreign Policy, a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, and a non-resident research affiliate at the Stanford University Center for Security and International Cooperation. He has worked at New America Foundation, at the Harvard University’s Kennedy School and worked in the Department of Defense.  He is the founding publisher of ArmsControlWonk.com, and co-hosts the “Arms Control Wonk” podcast.