The Sum of All Fears


The Sum of All Fears is a political thriller novel, written by Tom Clancy and released on August 14, 1991. Serving as the sequel to Clear and Present Danger, main character Jack Ryan, who is now the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, tries to stop a crisis concerning the Middle East peace process where Palestinian and former East German terrorists conspire to bring the United States and Soviet Union into nuclear war. It debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. A film adaptation, which is a reboot of the Jack Ryan film series and starring Ben Affleck as the younger iteration of the CIA analyst, was released on May 31, 2002.

Plot

During the first day of the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli Defense Force prepares to conduct a tactical nuclear strike to stave off defeat. The necessity for the strike is averted, but an Israeli copy of a Mark 12 nuclear bomb is accidentally left on an A-4 Skyhawk attack aircraft flown by Captain Mutti Zadin, which is subsequently shot down over Syria near Kafr Shams. The nuclear weapon is lost, buried in the field of a Druze farmer. Eighteen years later, an Israeli police captain converts to a fundamentalist sect of Hasidic Judaism after discovering his wife had an extramarital affair and attempts to instigate a violent demonstration of Palestinians at the Temple Mount. When the demonstrators unexpectedly conduct a peaceful protest, Zadin orders the police to fire tear gas and rubber bullets at the protesters anyway, and kills the leader of the demonstration by shooting him point-blank. The United States finds itself unable to diplomatically defend Israel, yet knows it cannot withdraw its support without risk of destabilizing the Middle East.
Following the advice of Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Jack Ryan, National Security Advisor Dr. Charles Alden enacts a plan to accelerate the peace process by converting Jerusalem into a Vatican-like independent city-state to be administered by a tribunal of Jewish, Muslim, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox religious leaders, and secured by an independent contingent of the Swiss Guards. As a nod to Israel, the U.S. Army supplies the IDF with more sophisticated equipment and agrees to construct a training base in the Negev Desert run by the U.S. Army's tank warfare specialists and the revived 10th Cavalry Division. To everyone's surprise, Ryan's plan seems to work, in large part due to Ryan's meetings with officials in Israel and Saudi Arabia and the acquiescence of the reformist President Andrey Narmonov in the democratized Soviet Union. With their religious contentions appeased, the factions in the Middle East find it much easier to negotiate their disputes.
However, the foreign affairs advisor Elizabeth Elliot holds a grudge against Ryan and Alden and maneuvers against them. She first takes Alden's job as National Security Advisor by using advantage of a sex scandal involving a child fathered by Alden out of wedlock, with the stress contributing to Alden's death in a severe stroke that causes a blowout fracture. She next begins a sexual relationship with the widowed President J. Robert Fowler, and manipulates him to publicly omit Ryan's role in the peace settlement and take credit for himself. After Ryan accuses her of wishing to silence an American opponent of the deal, Elliot engineers a smear campaign accusing Ryan of engaging in an extramarital affair, fathering a child with a young widow. Jack's friends, agents John Clark and Domingo Chavez, convince Ryan's wife Cathy that the allegations are false. Ryan later decides to retire from the CIA, but not before he puts together a covert operation to uncover corrupt dealings between Japanese and Mexican government officials.
Meanwhile, a small group of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorists, enraged at the looming failure of their jihad against Israel, come across the lost Israeli bomb and use it to construct their own weapon, using the bomb's plutonium as fissile material. The terrorists enlist the help of disaffected East German physicist Manfred Fromm, who agrees to the plot to exact revenge for his former communist country's reunification as a capitalist democratic state. With Fromm's expertise, the terrorists enhance the weapon and turn it into a thermonuclear device. The terrorists agree to detonate the weapon during the Super Bowl in Denver, Colorado, which is planned to coincide with a false flag attack on U.S. forces in Berlin by East Germans disguised as Soviet soldiers, aiming to begin a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The East Germans hope that the war will eliminate both superpowers and punish the Soviets for betraying World Socialism, while the Palestinians hope the attack will destroy the Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and end U.S. aid to Israel.
Thinking his work is done, the Palestinians kill Fromm. However, Fromm had not yet told them that some of the material he planned to use needed to be purified first. The Palestinians finish the bomb assembly and when it is used, the impure material causes the weapon to fizzle. However, almost everyone at the Super Bowl is killed, including the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and the commander of NORAD. With the corresponding attacks in Berlin, the United States briefly assumes DEFCON-1 status as Fowler and Elliott prepare for a nuclear war. The crisis is averted by Ryan, who learns of the domestic origin for the bomb's plutonium, gains access to the hot line, and convinces the Soviet President to stand down his country's military.
When the terrorists are captured and interrogated by Clark in Mexico City, they implicate the Iranian ayatollah in the attack. President Fowler orders the Ayatollah's residence in the holy city of Qom to be destroyed by a nuclear strike. After Ryan averts the attack by enforcing the two-man rule, Ryan lies and claims that Qom was destroyed. The terrorists then reveal that Iran was not involved, and that their deceit was meant to discredit the United States and destroy the peace process, allowing the campaign against Israel to continue. Elliot is hospitalized after suffering a nervous breakdown, while Fowler leaves office and is succeeded by his Vice President, Roger Durling.
The terrorists are executed by beheading in Riyadh by the commander of the Saudi Arabian special forces using an ancient sword owned by the Saudi royal family. Later, the sword is presented to Ryan as a gift. In the sequels, the gift inspires Ryan's Secret Service codename of "Swordsman".

Characters

The United States government

Written under the working title The Field of Camlan, which was based on King Arthur's final battle, The Sum of All Fears explores nuclear fears that humans endured during the Cold War, with Clancy warning that complacency regarding such threats is dangerous. Published months after the first Gulf War, Clancy also envisioned a fictional “next great step” toward lasting peace in the Middle East. The book was said to be inspired by the 1977 thriller film Black Sunday, which depicts a blimp being used as a weapon to blow up on a football stadium during the Super Bowl; the movie was referenced three times.
The novel also explores the danger of "electing someone who covets power for all the wrong reasons and who is totally inept at managing it", according to Marc Cerasini's essay on the book. President Fowler and Elliot were compared to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Etymology

The title is a reference to nuclear war and to the plot by the novel's antagonists to reconstruct a lost nuclear weapon. It comes from a Winston Churchill quote serving as the first of the novel's two epigraphs:

Jerusalem background

The Vatican-like solution for Jerusalem, which was implemented in the book, is ultimately derived from the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, which indeed provided for making Jerusalem such a "Corpus separatum". The course which the 1948 Palestine war took prevented implementation of this plan. In later years, various peace plans and diplomatic initiatives sought to revive the idea, but in reality it has never come close to implementation. The plan is known for being popular outside the Middle East, but unpopular among the actual residents of Jerusalem, who would prefer that their "side" should rule entirely rather than submit to a neutral administration.

''Rainbow Six (video game)|Rainbow Six]]'' reference

A database file with certain limited details about John Clark is included as background information within the first Rainbow Six game, and moreover, the same database entry is also found in many of the sequels. That entry mentions in passing that “the Denver, Colorado atomic detonation in 1989”. That information might not be canonical, since the book is set after both the fall of the Berlin Wall and possibly the First Persian Gulf War. If it is canonical, though, this means that the book is not set in the same year it was published. A second inference is that 1989 was likely the year in which President Fowler's administration ended.

Development

Clancy started working on the novel in 1979, setting the first chapter during the Yom Kippur War. Then he abandoned his idea for other novels until he wrote The Cardinal of the Kremlin, where Ryan first meets Russian premier Narmonov. After figuring out the resolution to The Sum of All Fears, Clancy then used his next novel Clear and Present Danger as a way to introduce future President Fowler. Speaking of the consistency, Clancy said: "The whole series really is a logical and connected network of plot lines which would continue to diverge and converge throughout the body of the work." The novel was notable for detailing the process in making a bomb; however, certain technical details were altered, and Clancy made clear in the novel's afterword that a lot of information in his book can be found in the public domain.
Whilst the Israelians used both the A-4 single-seat single-engine subsonic light attack jet and F-4 two-seat twin-engined all-weather supersonic fighter-bomber during the Yom Kippur War, use of the A-4's nuclear capability was never envisaged. Nuclear warheads were assembled at the Tel Nof Airbase, but for deployment on F-4 rather than A-4 as told in the novel. This was done on October 8 in such a way that the U.S. got to know of it by the next morning, prompting President Nixon to initiate the same day an immediate air-lifted re-supply to Israel of conventional arms, including tanks and planes to replace losses, in Operation Nickel Grass. Whether any of these nuclear bombs were actually carried during a sortie has never been documented.
At least one real-world buried nuclear warhead has actually been documented however, but American and in the U.S., rather than Israeli in Syria. The plutonium pit of a Mark 39 nuclear bomb warhead remains buried 33m deep in a North Carolina field, now fenced-off, following the fatal 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash. Many B-52 Stratofortresses crashed while carrying live nuclear warheads on training flights, mostly inside the U.S., between 1961 and 1968, but many have been recovered.

Reception

The book received positive reviews. Publishers Weekly praised the novel as "a nonstop roller-coaster ride to a nail-biting finish", adding: "Fundamentally, Clancy is writing about a vital and elusive quality: grace under pressure. Whether terrorists or statesmen, Clancy's characters face a common challenge--situations that break down pretensions of rank, power and ideology. Their responses, carefully and empathetically constructed, make this book compelling instead of merely ingenious." Kirkus Reviews hailed it as "hair-raising" and "quite a rouser".

Film adaptation

The book was adapted as a feature film, which was released on May 31, 2002. Jack Ryan was played by Ben Affleck while John Clark was played by Liev Schreiber; additionally, CIA director Marcus Cabot, whose first name was changed into William, was played by Morgan Freeman. The film is a reboot that departs from all previous Ryan films, and as a result, there were significant changes from the book, such as the antagonists being neo-Nazis instead of Palestinian terrorists, Ryan becoming a low-level CIA analyst, and the time period changed to 2002. Clancy served as executive producer on the film, and regarding the changes from his book, jokingly introduced himself in the commentary track on the DVD release as “the author of the book that he ignored”. Nevertheless, he complained about technical inaccuracies throughout the film in the commentary.
The Sum of All Fears was a major financial success, grossing a total of $193 million in box office. However, it received mixed reviews from critics; Rotten Tomatoes reported that 59% of critics gave the film positive reviews and that the average rating was 6/10 based on a total of 171 reviews counted.
In turn, the film had its video game adaptation, which is a tactical first-person shooter game that is similar to the Rainbow Six series of games. It was developed by Red Storm Entertainment and released by Ubisoft in 2002.