Line #9 Headscratchers/TheSumOfAllFears


1	* A nuclear attack in the US by an Islamic group made to look like a Soviet sneak attack? Really? Who would buy a Russian attack like that?
2	** A paranoid National Security Adviser having a nervous breakdown and a president that thought he could ignore learning about international affairs, for starters. Also, the Islamic connection was unknown at the NCA level until Clark and Chavez caught Qati and the other guy. All the NCA knew was that they had apparently credible reports of missing nuclear weapons and instability in the Soviet government that threatened to send the country into a civil war. The readers knew neither was actually the case, but the characters didn't, outside of Ryan and a few people who were not exactly first on the Fowler administration's Christmas card list.
3	** The entire ''plot'' is based on the premise of the President not being up to the job; when isolated from all of his competent advisors and left to rely solely on the incompetent one, of ''course'' he is going to make a horrible judgement call.
4	** Also, in the book, the bombing of Denver is followed up by a group of the villains starting a conflict between US and Soviet tank divisions on the East/West Germany border. (In the movie, a Russian general is bribed to launch an air attack on a US carrier group.) The second attack makes the Americans more likely to believe that the nuclear attack was of Soviet origin.
5	** Additionally, had either Fromm or Ghosn taken the step of purifying the tritium supply, the weapon would have functioned properly and achieved a 400+ kiloton yield, which nobody (including Ryan, by his own admission) would have suspected was anything ''but'' Russian since they only other countries known to possess such weapons are America, England, and France. Even the 15 or so kilotons that the bomb did achieve was thought to be a stretch for an improvised weapon, since nobody had any reason to suspect that there was an Israeli (made with American plutonium) weapon unaccounted for since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
6	* Movie-related question: [[spoiler: Why assassinate the Neo-Nazis, why not just arrest them]]?
7	** And charge them in what jurisdiction, and with what crime in particular, and how would you sentence them? It is a lot of complications for two countries that just want to heal on and be at peace. It is better for everyone involved for the perpetrators to simply be taken care of.
8	** They have killed at least half a million people. In real-life, I imagine the governments of the world would prefer they be killed.
9	*** Wouldn't assassinating them without any fanfare cause more issues than solve them?As for charging them actually the list of charges would be very long:mass murder,using a weapon of mass destruction just to name a few. They would have broken laws in more than a dozen countries that could realistically put them on trial.Assassinating them implies almost no one except a few found out about who did it and why.Meaning the public at large has no idea the mastermind of the worst mass murder in a western country since [=WW2=] is dead. Meaning all around paranoia and fear would dominate the airwaves since the general public would not find out who did it and whether or not they are dead. The operation to take out Ben Laden was publicised and carried out in a very obvious everyone knows it happened way.
10	* Also from the movie, how were the neo-nazis supposed to take over? Their plan is get the US and Russia to nuke each other basically, but it forgets the large US military presence in Europe and the fact that most european countries are US allies. The Russians would at the very least take these out. Are we to assume that in the post-war chaos they would have all the levers of power given to them? We never really know how they plan to govern a post-war nuclear wasteland that would have been called Europe.
11	** The Neo-Nazis undoubtedly intend to rise in the resulting militaristic and autocratic ruins of the old world. It is not a plan which has to make sense because it is made by a bunch of Neo-Nazis. They are deluded about who, exactly, is going to benefit from their actions.
12	** The novel itself largely avoided the obvious question of how the villains wanted to profit from a nuclear war by having them be primarily from the Middle East and therefore largely spared immediate destruction in a nuclear war between the Russians and the Americans.
13	* Other than obvious American CreatorProvincialism, how would you explain "over a billion sports fans in seventy-one countries" (quote from the novel) watching a Super Bowl match? That is roughly one fifth of humanity in 1991. Do Americans really think their football is ''that'' important?
14	** I think the line is meant to say that the potential viewership is that number, not that that number was actually watching.
15	** For what it's worth, many Americans have in fact heard that billion viewer number told to them. It might be that Tom Clancy is one of those, though the actual record for viewers seems to be 114.4 million domestic and only an estimated additional 30 to 50 million more worldwide (in 2015).

Context Headscratchers / TheSumOfAllFears