The Sum of All Fears is a political thriller novel, written by Tom Clancy and released on August 14, 1991, as the sequel to Clear and Present Danger (1989).
During the first day of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) prepares to conduct a tactical nuclear strike to stave off defeat.
The necessity for the strike is averted, but an Israeli Mark 12 nuclear bomb is accidentally left on an A-4 Skyhawk attack aircraft flown by Captain Mutti Zadin; which is subsequently shot down over Syria, near Kafr Shams.
Eighteen years later, an Israeli police captain (coincidentally the brother of the downed pilot) converts to a fundamentalist sect of Hasidic Judaism after discovering his wife had an extramarital affair and attempts to instigate a violent demonstration of Palestinians at the Temple Mount.
Following the advice of Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (DDCI) Jack Ryan, National Security Advisor Dr. Charles Alden enacts a plan to accelerate the peace process by converting Jerusalem into a Vatican-like independent city-state to be administered by a tribunal of Jewish, Muslim, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox religious leaders, and secured by an independent contingent of the Swiss Guards.
She concurrently begins a sexual relationship with widowed President J. Robert Fowler and manipulates him to publicly omit Ryan's role in the peace settlement, taking credit for himself.
The terrorists enlist the help of disaffected East German nuclear physicist Manfred Fromm who agrees to the plot, wishing to exact his own revenge against his former communist country's reunification as a capitalist democratic state.
The terrorists' plan is to detonate the weapon at the Super Bowl in Denver while simultaneously staging a false flag attack on U.S. military forces in stationed in Berlin by East Germans disguised as Soviet soldiers.
The crisis is averted by Ryan, who learns the domestic origin of the bomb's plutonium, gains access to the hotline, and convinces the Soviet President to stand down his country's military.
The book was said to be inspired by the 1977 thriller film Black Sunday, which depicts a blimp being used as a weapon to blow up a football stadium during the Super Bowl; the movie was referenced three times.
The novel also explores the danger of "electing someone who covets power for all the wrong reasons and who is totally inept at managing it", according to Marc Cerasini's essay on the book.
It comes from a Winston Churchill quote serving as the first of the novel's two epigraphs: Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together—what do you get?
Speaking of the consistency, Clancy said: "The whole series really is a logical and connected network of plot lines which would continue to diverge and converge throughout the body of the work.
[5] Whilst the Israelis used both the A-4 single-seat single-engine subsonic light attack jet and F-4 two-seat twin-engined all-weather supersonic fighter-bomber during the Yom Kippur War, use of the A-4's nuclear capability was never envisaged.
This was done on October 8 in such a way that the U.S. got to know of it by the next morning, prompting President Nixon to initiate the same day an immediate air-lifted re-supply to Israel of conventional arms, including tanks and planes to replace losses, in Operation Nickel Grass.
The plutonium pit of a Mark 39 nuclear bomb warhead remains buried 33m deep in a North Carolina field, now fenced-off, following the fatal 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash.
Publishers Weekly praised the novel as "a nonstop roller-coaster ride to a nail-biting finish", adding: "Fundamentally, Clancy is writing about a vital and elusive quality: grace under pressure.