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The Sum Of All Fears




An interesting note is that this book was released just days before the Moscow uprising in 1991, which finally signaled the dissolving of the Soviet Union (in the book, Russian politics in the aftermath of the destruction of the Berlin Wall is a main element of the book).


NOVEL


The book begins during the Yom Kippur War ; at its height the Israel is opt for a tactical nuclear strike, but this was changed at the last minute. Unfortunately, one nuclear weapon had not been removed yet from an Israeli attack aircraft and that aircraft crashed into a mountain, creating a " Broken Arrow ".

The plot then moves to the present day. A small group of Muslim extremist terrorists recover the bomb and convert it from a Nuclear Fission device to a Thermonuclear device. The terrorists decide to use the weapon at the Super Bowl in Denver . Since The U.S. and Russia beleived that terrorists were incapable of making a thermonuclear device, the U.S. assumes that Russia did it. Fortuantly, the tritium used was impure which caused the fusion part of the bomb to fail to go off. Jack Ryan, at the time DDCI ( Deputy Director Of Central Intelligence ), must prevent a nuclear exchange between Russia and the USA .

The goal in the book may have been for the terrorists to let themselves get caught and frame the Iranian president for the attack in order to provoke the American president into launching a nuclear strike on the city of Qom , which would kill scores of innocents and thus shame the US in the eyes of the world. Much more likely, it was to start a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. If the bomb had worked, then the U.S. would have assumed it was Russia and gone to war. Also they started a battle in germany between some east german and west german tanks.

The book begins with this quote:

"Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together - what do you get? The sum of their fears."



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