Debt of honor
It begins with the murder of an American woman in the back streets of Tokyo. It ends in war... Number-one bestselling author Tom Clancy takes a bold, incisive look at what our nation's leaders are calling "the new world order." The time and place: a world at peace, where yesterday's enemies are tomorrow's allies. The players: Jack Ryan as the new U.S. President's National Security Advisor, and his CIA colleagues, John Clark and Domingo Chavez. The crisis: a shocking chain of events in which the wages of peace are as fully complex—and devastating—as those of war.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
13mentions
13people
2008–2025years
8% recommend92% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- To me, Tom Clancy was a visionary. He predicted 9/11 seven years before it happened. He did this by writing a fictional story (Debt of Honor) about a pilot that uses his plane as a weapon to attack a joint session of Congress. This warned us about the risk of passenger jets being used as giant missiles. It's not his fault we didn't pay attention.
- The album for "Party Music" from Boots Riley's band "The Coup" was scheduled to be released in September and they had to delay it due to the cover having a picture of the WTC exploding [1]
Tom Clancy's book "Debt of Honor" is very similar in a spooky way as well. Including the hesitation to shoot down commercial airliners being used as weapons. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_Music [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_of_Honor
- There are "continuity of operations" procedures to prevent a "decapitation" strike killing the President & VP, thus preventing the US from retaliating [0]. This was a plot point in Tom Clancy's novel Debt of Honor [1] (which I distinctly remember reading right before 911, as I had to commute via public transit and commutes were so long I read books).
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designated_survivor Since this person will be offsite in a secure facility/bunker, they'll have the backup nuclear football with them.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_of_Honor Which is how Jack Ryan gets "promoted" to President.
- Indeed - Tom Clancy wrote Debt of Honor long before 9/11, and Rainbow Six long before COVID.
- (Spoilers)
The end of Tom Clancy's 1994 book "Debt of Honor" featured a 747 being crashed into the Capital, which is about as close as fiction gets.
- Sure you can't do that exact thing but who would have thought of flying planes into skyscrapers before 9/11 except a few crazies anyway?
Tom Clancy? In ‘Debt of Honor’ it’s a major plot-point after all. The issue here is not that making a train into a cruise missile is hard to imagine, it’s actually impossible. You can attack the train, or use the train to attack a station or something close to the tracks, and that’s it. It’s also a purely kinetic event, rather than adding the complexity of so much fuel.
