Looks like I need to do some editing on the Sunset Rising prologue. Apparently I was feeling a little complacent when I set February 2024 as the beginning of my fictional global nuclear war. But back in 2012 when I was writing Sunset Rising, North Korea’s new supreme leader, Kim Jong Un, was new on the international stage. Nobody took his baby-face taunts of toppling the US from its superpower status so the tiny hermit kingdom of North Korea could claim the throne seriously, even though Kim was playing with rocket launchers.
For one thing, it was negligible if he possessed a missile capable of reaching US soil. For another thing, the USA’s nuclear arsenal was way bigger than Kim’s because thanks to The Cold War, the US and Russian collectively hold about 93% of the known 15,000 nuclear weapons on the planet. So the US wasn’t about to be distracted by this little tyrant when they had bigger things to deal with, like ridding the world of terrorists and going through their own leadership growing pains. No, they left it to China to bring North Korea to heel because after all, China and North Korea share more than just a border; they were comrades in the Korean War and have since become inextricably linked.
Fast forward to 2017, five years after I wrote the prologue for Sunset Rising and four years after I wrote the second book, Worlds Collide, and even I’m shook about how much I got right. Donald Trump as POTUS has opened the door for Nazis and white supremacists to come out of the closet (whether he intended for that to happen or not), and Kim Jong Un is now playing with the bigger, more devastating hydrogen bomb.
Hydrogen-freaking-bombs 1,000x more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
The World War II déjà vu the current US Administration is stirring up is alarming enough, but the fact that an insane dictator from a small impoverished country has weapons of massive destruction is absolutely terrifying. How the hell did that come to pass just five years after Kim assumed power? Did the United Nations, an organization set up by the international community to ensure the atrocities of WWII never happened again, forget that the world didn’t take Hitler seriously when he wanted to make Germany great again by getting rid of the Jews (and then later the Catholics, and then later everyone else). Because if they had remembered, they would not have ignored Kim playing around with rocket
launchers back in 2012. They would’ve slapped that errant child into his place and took away his nuclear toys, his nuclear experts and his marmalade jars of plutonium and uranium.
But they didn’t. And now it would appear that we are on the brink of a nuclear war. So I’m thinking I not only need to change the date of my fictional global war for the Sunset Rising Trilogy, I need to write a prequel. What do you think? Leave your comments below because I’d love to get a discussion going. We should all be outraged that no one has done anything to stop North Korea.
Peace,
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