Sum of All Fears, The - Tom Clancy

''Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious sailor, put them at a table together - what do you get ?

The sum of their fears

-Winston Churchill

What has been the world's greatest collective fear since World War II ? A nuclear conflict with USA and allies on one side and Russia on the other. In this book, Tom Clancy brings us as close as possible to realization of this nightmare.

Jack Ryan, Tom Clancy's chief protagonist is now the Deputy Director of CIA with an irresponsible drone as his boss. Adding to his misery is the current President of USA and his National Security Advisor who consider Ryan to be a relic of the Cold War and ignore him. Hence, Ryan is totally isolated. His work hours have affected his health and family life to further compound the problem. What happens in such a situation if USA and Russia are at each other's throats and one step away from pressing the nuclear button? This is the question this novel answers.

This is the only novel I have read with a nuclear device exploding inside the USA and shows the repurcussions on the current administration. Once more Tom Clancy shows a realistic, logical way in which things could deteriorate between the two major superpowers. The biggest plus point is the way in which individual, unconnected incidents add further fuel to the hostilities taking world closer to nuclear annihilation. The only flaw is the US President not asking support or views from NATO and other allies and taking decisions on such matters alone.

The novel is another behemoth from Tom Clancy at 900+ pages. It has been made into a movie starring Ben Affleck and Morgan Freeman and also into a game. But the story has been completely messed up for the movie as is the case with most movies. See the movie before reading the novel or you might end up cursing the director

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I'm a huge Clancy fan, but this outing falls short. The first four-hundred pages are little more than character introductions masquerading as scenes; little if anything happens outside of the opening scene. Some of the conclusions drawn by Ryan, especially concerning the Israeli-Palestinian situation, don't make any sense to me. And then there are the endless looks into the innermost thoughts of backstabbing, power-hungry politicians, which I found very wearisome. And the technical explanations of the nuclear bomb - I actually took some physics in college, and yet still I felt like I was reading a textbook that was well beyond my comprehension.

The book does pick up nicely between pages 500 - 700 though, and becomes your typical fast-paced, seat of your pants Clancy work.

Then comes the ending. I suppose the problem was that I really didn't care for any of the characters (Ryan included) by that point, and my main thought was ''It'll be surprising if these idiots don't end up destroying the world''. The very end, where the terrorists get their due, suffered from what could best be described as a fairy-tail idealism; Clancy seems to forget that if a nuclear bomb were detonated in the US, a country would certainly need to be invaded in retaliation. It's confusing as to whether the terrorism was state-sponsored or not - Clancy wastes so much time giving us physics lessons that he's not got enough pages left to properly wrap up key plot points. He seems to lose sight of their importance by the end, focusing instead on, well...all the characters basking in the warmth of their own overwhelming personal morality.

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