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The novel

  • Accidental Innuendo: The prologue features fighter pilot Motti Zadin feeling supernaturally alert to "the manly scents of oil and leather in the cockpit" and "the tingle of his hands on the control stick."
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Pacifist protest leader Hashimi Moussa and Marvin Russell (the Affably Evil Native American terrorist accomplice who gets plenty of good lines and is in the dark about how violent Qati's plan is) are both well-liked and well-remembered supporting characters.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • Islamic extremists launch an attack against the United States and trick them into believing they can destroy the world at will. In retaliation, the U.S. government almost invades Iran, an action the extremists predict will simply create more anti-Western Islamic extremists. Post-9/11 and the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, the countless terrorist attacks carried out all over the world against nations that had troops in those two countries in revenge, and the rise of the Islamic State, and one has to wonder if the Bush administration either did not read this book or took all the wrong lessons from it.
    • The Jersualem Treaty also counts as one, in light of increasingly tense disputes between Israelis and Palestinians. Interestingly enough, it also extends to in-universe, for better or worse, as it is revealed as the Treaty fell apart by the time The Teeth of the Tiger came around.
    • Ryan and Ayatollah Daryaei meet to talk about how they hate each other, but Ryan saves Daryaei's life by preventing a nuclear strike on his city, with there being subtle hints that the Ayatollah might have a Heel Realization after Ryan asks him if it's so hard to believe that he cares about the lives of innocents in all countries. Daryaei returns in Executive Orders as the Big Bad, orders a terrorist attack against America, and feels nothing but cold contempt when he reflects on his meeting with Ryan.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Elliot calls Ryan “James Bond”, unable to adapt to the end of the Soviet Union, but the novel makes it clear that his skills are still necessary. More than twenty years later, Skyfall would run with the same themes.
  • Iron Woobie: The unnamed Druze farmer, who has lost virtually his entire family, either to natural causes or the Arab-Israeli conflict. The only thing he asks God for his is a little respite, but he realistically knows he won't get it. But he still gets up everyday to care of his dying farm and find great joy in his grandchildren from his only living, crippled son.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Though Clancy points out in his afterword that he specifically changed a lot of details on creating a nuclear bomb, he also points out that the information necessary to do so is public knowledge, and not terribly difficult to acquire.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The medical efforts to save the survivors from the football stadium (including four people who were in the stands when the bomb went off but survived, and Officer Dawkins from the parking garage, who is a Determinator about revealing the suspicious license plate he saw even while lying in a hospital bed) could have been a compelling subplot. Unfortunately, it's dropped after just a scene or two, and it's never even revealed how many of those people ultimately survived the radiation doses they were exposed to.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: A very specific one. Key to the book's plot, it's set after The Gulf War, but before the fall of the Soviet Union. That narrows the time-frame to the year 1991.

The film

  • Awesome Music:
    • This was one of Jerry Goldsmith's last major film scores before his death in 2004, and also one of his finest.
    • "Nessun Dorma" is used to great effect in a sequence where the masterminds behind the conspiracy are assassinated one by one, while Fowler and Nemerov sign an agreement to combat nuclear proliferation.
  • Common Knowledge: At the time of the film's release, it was commonly suggested that the book's plot was rewritten to deemphasize Islamic terrorism because 9/11 made a film on that subject uncomfortably topical. In fact, although its release was delayed and some relatively minor edits were made due to 9/11, the movie had finished shooting in June 2001, three months before the attack, and the screenwriters changed the villains to neo-Nazis because they thought Arab villains were too cliche.
  • Complete Monster:
    • Richard Dressler is a Neo-Nazi billionaire who wants to create a fascist superstate in Europe. His ruminations on history have led him to the conclusion that Adolf Hitler was a fool for trying to fight Russia and America—it's much better to have them fight and destroy each other. Dressler obtains a nuclear weapon and places it in a football stadium during the Super Bowl, killing countless innocent people. He blames the attack on Russia so the Americans will bring their military to bear, and when Russia stands its ground, the two countries are ready to engage in all-out nuclear war on one another thanks to Dressler's framing and stroking of tensions.
    • Derek Olson is a man who supplies weapons to terrorists all over the world to make conflicts even worse. Discovering a cache of weapons-grade plutonium, Olson swindles a grieving father with lies that it is scrap, not warning anyone there of how dangerously radioactive it is. From there, Olson sells it to the neo-fascist Richard Dressler to start World War III, intending on riding out the storm from safety and wealth.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • In the movie rogue elements of the Russian Military use a Novichock nerve agent on the Chechen capital. At the time, their existence was known to only a few experts and they had never been used in the real world.
    • Also, the use of Neo-Nazi baddies in 2002 was ridiculed as being far-fetched and not very believable at the time. Now, after several successful terrorist attacks by neo-fascists committed in several nations...
    • Dressler's line about fascism spreading like a virus through global communications like the Internet has only become more grim in hindsight with the rise and subsequent exploitation of social media in the years following the movie's release proving it all too right.
    • Let's just say Nemerov's role as a heroic Vladimir Putin who wants to expand the Russian Empire but disdains war crimes hits very, very different after years of Putin's control of Russia.
  • Inferred Holocaust: Even though World War III is averted, the implications of a terrorist attack by neo-Nazis is still harrowing due to the usage of nuclear weapons that claimed the lives of civilians.
  • Nightmare Fuel:
    • The attack on Baltimore, although brief, is still horrifying due to the devastation; the aftermath alone is reminiscent of Hell itself on a smaller scale. This is exemplified by the mounting look of horror on Cabot's face after he's received Ryan's warning that the bomb is in Baltimore, with him realizing that it's been hidden inside the very stadium he and the President are in, knowing that all the people around him are doomed as there is not enough time to evacuate the stadium. All that he can do is order the President's evacuation before the bomb goes off.
    • The tagline is simple but effective Nightmare Fuel: "27,000 nuclear bombs. One is missing".
  • Tear Jerker: The Israeli pilot at the start being shot-down by a Syrian SAM site.
    • Cabot's death. Ryan and the President are both deepy saddened by this.
  • Unintentional Period Piece: Oh, man. The movie is about large-scale terrorism and finished filming in June 2001.
    • The terrorists are changed from Arab nationalists to neo-Nazi European types in part because generic Arab terrorists had become cliché. Also, East Germany, one of the nations involved, had ceased to exist by the time the film was made.
    • In reworking a plot that was already released in book form in 1991 (begun in and broadly dated to the late 1980s) and centered around Cold War tropes, the movie depends heavily on a Conflict Ball between the USA and Russia. In real life, the late 1990s United States was already seriously concerned about a terrorist actor with loose ex-Russian nuke material. This went up to eleven after the 9/11 attacks when, among other things, there was a credible threat delivered to President Bush that al-Qaeda had smuggled a small tactical nuclear weapon out of the former USSR and into New York City.
    • Since the deterioration of relations between Putin's Russia and NATO, and the loudly public re-emergence in the mid-late 2010s of neo-Nazi movements in the West, the film version has become Harsher in Hindsight.
      • The US' planning in general came to be focused on a true "improvised nuclear device" that wouldn't require expertise as seen in both the novel and movie ( Truth in Television in the novel in particular - nuclear weapons are easily botchednote , and the technical expertise needed to create even a low-yield atomic device is considered far beyond the reach of terrorist groups - see the Real Life folder on Explosive Stupidity for examples of the trouble they can get into with just conventional explosives). There is a lot of such planning, much of which was released to the public, and the idea of a terrorist doing this is now so deeply ingrained that it would be all but impossible to leap to the conclusion the fascists want as quickly as the plot demands.
    • The portrayal of US-Russia relations in the movie is clearly based on the realities of the 90's with the post-Cold War thaw and general improvement in relations between East and West being prominent. Also, the Chechen conflict is a plot point. Today the same premise would feature a far more tense and paranoid atmosphere between the two.
    • The Russian president in the film is pretty much a Putin expy. He's portrayed pretty much the way most in the West viewed Putin circa 2001, a bit tough and rough around the edges but a good guy ultimately. That line of thought has not aged well since then, unfortunately.
  • Values Dissonance: Some Russian viewers were unhappy with the portrayal of the Chechnya problem in the film.

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