The Sum of All Fears
by Tom Clancy · first published 1991
4% recommend96% neutral
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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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)…
on “Ask HN: Any tech help out there for a techno-thriller inspired by post on HN?” ↗Still, it could be done. I remember reading The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy - tldr; Islamic terrorists stumble onto an Israeli atomic bomb, kidnap a former East German nuclear engineer, build a machine shop in a cave, and rework the bomb into a thermonuclear fusion…
on “A Stark Nuclear Warning” ↗Look around you at the world stricken by pandemic. What self respecting terrorist isn’t pivoting to bioweapons now instead of keeping Black Sunday or The Sum of All Fears on loop in the headquarters (for the life of me I can’t remember the name of the Tom Clancy book where Iran weaponizes Ebola)
on “EU experts to say nuclear power qualifies for green investment label: document” ↗All I know is what I read in Tom Clancy's Sum of All Fears, which has a hell of a lot of detail about building a nuclear bomb. The thing that struck me was all the very high precision machining required, and how hard that was to achieve. As you suggest, design…
on “This experiment proved that anyone could design a nuclear weapon” ↗Cards on table... My main knowledge of , er, building nukes (hello GCHQ) comes from the widely accepted to be well researched book by Tom Clancy, The Sum of All Fears. Apparently it is a very good account of how to make a nuke, but with some very crucial details missed out of changed. And, yeah, very fair enough. What I got from reading that book only once was that,…
on “High-end CNC machines can't be moved without manufacturers' permission” ↗…problem. The W88 warhead with its prolate (egg-shaped) primary is the most advanced nuclear weapon that has had design details leaked to the public: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W88 In the case of the Sum of All Fears the terrorists were trying to build a strategic level bomb (i.e. hundreds of kt) using a fusion boosted fission design to try and start a global war - so they were actually trying to build something relatively…
on “High-end CNC machines can't be moved without manufacturers' permission” ↗I agree that you can't simply capture a bomb then detonate it; there are many ways to prevent that from happening. I assume the threat model people are worried about is the plot of Tom Clancy's 'The Sum of All Fears' [1] wherein a damaged nuclear bomb is captured by terrorists who can't enrich uranium themselves, but can replace the firing mechanisms once they have the fissile material. And of course, a group that…
on “Troubled covert agency responsible for trucking nuclear bombs across America” ↗Yep, Tom Clancy's Sum of All Fears has a very similar premise. Israel loses a nuclear bomb during the Yom Kippur War, which is subsequently recovered by Palestinians who team up with some East Germans to start a war between America and…
on “US has lost at least three nuclear bombs that have never been located” ↗…verbalise the concept of a mass killing, they need to give their heads a wobble. My text editor can be used to write "set off a nuclear weapon in a city, lol". Is Notepad++.exe terrifying? What about the Sum of All Fears? I could get some pointers from that. Is Tom Clancy unaligned? Am I terrifying because I wrote that sentence? I even understand how terrible nuking a city would be and I still wrote it down. I must be,…
on “GPT-4 is getting worse over time, not better” ↗…confirmed by the Senate, and they can't be summarily fired by the President without due process.) Of course these sorts of scenarios are the stuff of which thrillers are made (for example, Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears); but the point is that officers are supposed to exercise judgment. Which does mean that Major Hering was entirely justified in asking the question he asked.
on “Unsung Hero of the Nuclear Age” ↗You're right. Tom Clancy used it in The Sum of All Fears
on “US has lost at least three nuclear bombs that have never been located” ↗A friend's dad loaned me The Sum of All Fears when I was 11, and that was the first Clancy novel I read (Having seen the movie of The Hunt for Red October, I figured I'd enjoy it). Those 914 pages took me a couple weeks to read while relaxing in…
on “Tom Clancy has died” ↗I read The Sum of All Fears as a teenager which did absolutely nothing to calm that fear!
on “Nukemap” ↗On a related note, in college ca. 1999, when I took a history and philosophy of science course on nuclear weapons, the instructor, a retired Los Alamos physicist, assigned an excerpt from The Sum of All Fears as required reading. He claimed it was — critical, probably deliberate technical inaccuracies notwithstanding — the best description of the process of detonating a nuclear weapon he was able to find…
on “US has lost at least three nuclear bombs that have never been located” ↗…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…
on “W54” ↗