The Sum of All Fears
Peace may finally be at hand in the Middle East -- as Jack Ryan lays the groundwork for a plan that could end centuries of conflict. But ruthless terrorists have a final, desperate card to play; with one terrible act, distrust mounts, forces collide, and the floundering U.S. president seems unable to cope with the crisis. With the world on the verge of nuclear disaster, Ryan must frantically seek a solution -- before the chiefs of state lose control of themselves and the world.
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What Hacker News says
- Might consider checking Tom Clancy's sources from The Sum of All Fears (which centers on a terrorist plot to detonate a nuclear device)
Also a fun 80s movie called The Manhattan Project (John Lithgow was in it)
Or the late-90s movie The Peacemaker (starring Clooney & Kidman)
I'm not a nuclear scientist. I haven;'even played on on TV, but your story could be pretty fun :)
- The last 10 minutes of The Sum of All Fears.
- > I expect (ok, I WORRY) a major US city to have a nuke set off in it by Iran within the next 5 years.
It's strange how this "Sum of All Fears" scenario is dismissed out of hand, or doesn't even occur, to the tankie-types on HN and reddit rooting for the Ayatollah to cross the nuclear finish line--the same Supreme Leader who, three days ago, permitted large protests in Tehran where crowds chanted "Death to America" and burned US flags.
Even weirder is that many (most?) of them are urban types who live, or aspire to live, in big cities like NYC or LA so they can enjoy the large LGBTQ communities, the ethnic restaurants, the bars serving craft IPAs, and the reduced commute times to and from protests. Hasan Piker, a prominent tankiefluencer, lives in LA, for example. So you would think they especially would have misgivings about Iran's enrichment program, even if they don't support intervention against it. And yet most of them dismiss any concern over it, or even outright state Iran should have nuclear weapons.
- IIRC from a Tom Clancy novel that dealt with that (Sum of All Fears?) the precise mix of isotopes in the fallout can pinpoint exactly where the material was refined, which can help pinpoint where it might've been lost
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43736805 is one example. Another is the Highway of Death, which inspired a Call of Duty level, but swapped the perpetrators from US to Russians [1]. Yet another might be A Time to Kill [2], based on a novel [3], inspired by a true event. Again, perpetrator and victim were swapped - in the novel and film, there are two white attackers, and the victim is black. In the real event that inspired it, the attacker was black, and the two victims were white. The subway killing of the three scoundrels in the Joker film was likewise inspired by a real event [4], but again, the antagonists were changed from black to white. Or how Dr. Who deliberately alters historical settings [5]. Especially amusing is the case of The Sum of All Fears - in the film, the villains trying to construct a nuclear bomb are neo-nazis. In the book it is based on, the villains were Palestinian terrorists. Finally, in the real event the book was inspired by [6], the uranium was stolen by Israel.
A more straightforward example is the many times that the New York Times 'mistakenly' claimed Iraq had expelled nuclear weapons inspectors, in the run up to the Iraq invasion [7]. This is more obviously false/a lie, while the prior examples use the cover of fiction to mislead.
'Small' changes, but pervasive, like water, mostly cut only one way, and they add up.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_of_Death#In_popular_cu...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_to_Kill_(1996_film)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_to_Kill_(Grisham_novel)...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_New_York_City_Subway_shoo...
[5] “And we’ve kind of got to tell a lie: we’ll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn’t have been, and we won’t dwell on that. We’ll say, ‘To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we’ll summon it forth.’ - https://www.doctorwhotv.co.uk/moffat-on-diversity-in-doctor-...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_affair
[7] https://theintercept.com/2023/03/30/new-york-times-iraq-war-...
- > Because every nuclear power developed their own enrichment processes and bomb technology, their bombs have different isotope ratios in the fallout. It's possible to analyze the fallout to determine where the bomb came from. That might not tell you who is responsible (as the weapon may have been stolen), but it would at least tell you which country's nuke it was.
A major plot point of Tom Clancy's A Sum of All Fears is exactly this.
A bomb gets lost by the Israelis and acquired by terrorists (Arab nationalists in the book, neo-Nazis in the film) and detonated in Baltimore with the intention of starting a nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union. It turns out the fissile material was made at Oak Ridge, crisis averted, tea^Wcoffee and medals in Washington.
