“Twitter could get us into a war.”

That sentence, which appears in Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear, about the Trump Administration, has shocked a lot of people. Not me. Because I just wrote a novel in which precisely that same thing happens. And let me tell you: It’s not far-fetched.

Of course, we knew that Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, and his predecessor, Reince Priebus, both have tried to get the president’s tweeting under control. Woodward just adds some wonderful color, explaining that Priebus took to calling Trump’s bedroom, where many of the tweets originated, “the devil’s workshop” and called the president’s favorite time for tweeting “the witching hour.” (The prediction that Twitter could get us into a war was reportedly made by an unnamed national security official.)

About the Author Jeffrey Lewis is a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey and the author of The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States.

It is unsettling, the idea that the president could spark a nuclear war with the same carelessness that he picks fights with D-list celebrities. But he could. In fact, Trump’s tweets are central plot devices in my novel, The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States.

The novel, as the title suggests, purports to be the report of a government commission, like the 9/11 Commission, charged with asking how the United States and North Korea blundered into a nuclear war that killed several million people. And the answer is, at least in two crucial moments, Twitter.

Tweets are, after all, presidential statements. No matter how odd it might seem, foreign governments have little choice but to read and consider what President Trump says, no matter where he says it. North Korea is no exception.

On any given day, this is hardly the end of the world. Trump’s tweets might be appalling—but they are not dangerous, not usually. After all, Trump openly mused about assassinating Kim Jong Un at a campaign stop. In The 2020 Commission, Trump unleashes a series of spectacularly misogynistic and ugly tweets about Kim Jong Un’s sister. Those tweets don’t start a war, although they are part of the prelude, a few more drunken steps off the path that was supposed to lead to the denuclearization of North Korea.

The problem is what happens in crisis. In the novel, North Korea shoots down a South Korean airliner by mistake and South Korea responds with a very small, almost symbolic, missile strike. It is at this point that Trump, with one spectacularly ill-timed tweet, sets into motion a chain of events that neither he nor any of his staff can control. And it is all done innocently enough.

Trump hasn’t even been fully briefed about the crisis. He is about to descend the narrow set of stairs that lead into the basement at Mar-a-Lago and to the secure conference room. Trump is famously afraid of stairs—one of those things that an author can’t make up—and reaches for his phone as a kind of comfort. His tweet is a throwaway comment, a repetition of a bit of banter he had tried out a few minutes earlier in a phone call with his John Kelly-like chief of staff.

LITTLE ROCKET MAN WON’T BE BOTHERING US MUCH LONGER.

Oh, but how different that tweet looks to Kim Jong Un! In Florida, where Trump sends the tweet, it’s a sunny spring morning. But it's the middle of the night in North Korea and still winter. Kim is sitting on an uncomfortable chair, smoking in a dark and cold basement, trying to understand how serious this crisis is.

His cell phone is working only intermittently because the North Korean cell phone network is overwhelmed with calls, just like the US network on 9/11. Kim can’t quite tell how big the South Korean strike is and doesn't think Moon Jae-in would do it by himself. He starts to suspect that the strike is the beginning of an American invasion. And when he sees Trump’s tweet, he knows.

Hard to believe? Hardly. I teach a class on decision-making at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. And here is the truth: Leaders think the darndest things. Saddam Hussein, for example, did not believe the US would march all the way to Baghdad in 2003. His life depended on making the right call—and he blew it.