Meaning that the Europeans would want stronger defense of their own nations, or that they wouldn’t want nukes in their own backyard? Because we have a number of weapons that were designed specifically for use in that theater, and it’s normal for nuclear-armed nations to test them within their own territory.
I have the same question as Chronos. If I understood right, the West Germans were not pleased about the prospect of NATO turning their homeland into a nuclear wasteland in the name of stopping an invading Warsaw Pact.
My other tangential question is why this genre of fiction is unique to the West and you never saw Soviets writing a Red Storm Rising type of novel tailored to Soviet readers who wanted a tale about the righteous Warsaw Pact defeating the evil NATO.
Was it Black Sunday? That book had Black September terrorists using a Goodyear Blimp to fire off a device which had thousands of bullets that would be shot into the crowd at the Super Bowl. The author was Thomas Harris, of Silence of the Lambs fame.
The other possibility is Sum of all Fears, which silenus already mentioned.
the sum of all fears
There has to be, we just don’t hear about them because it never came over. There’s a ton of international books that have come out in the past 30 years that are basically “Local guy writes book about his native country defeating NATO/America/Russia/China in a war”. I remember one written by a South Korean where Korea Unifies and literally invades America (and no this wasn’t that shitty video game Homefront it was even crazier since it was a South Korean lead invasion force)
Was also made into a movie; you know, that one where Bruce Dern* played a bad guy.
* Still alive and kicking at 84, and if IMDb is anything to go by, still working.
That was the East Germans in the book actually. They got hold of some Rand Corporation studies of what would happen in Germany (East & West) if a conflict went NB or C. They weren’t pleased with Soviet plans to use chemical & biological agents as part of their invasion of West Germany, and theorized that wiping out German culture altogether was a Soviet secondary goal, or at least something they wouldn’t be particularly upset over.
So, a Netflix event series isn’t out of the question…
Do you recall China calling the United States a Paper Tiger a generation or two before the Clancy novel? I say we may have grown fat and soft (as our foreign adversaries always claim) - - but we sure have not lost our stomach for battle. Give “us” some bear spray and limited resistance and we will battle until . . . dinner time!! Being a dog who barks, but dares not bite is a common attitude toward us – along with the opposite attitude that we are a rabid dog who bites indiscriminately.
(This is meant to be humor and intends no disrespect toward the Capitol, law enforcement, or our legislators – except the ones who sided with the insurrectionists.)
I haven’t read Clancy in a decade at least, but I loved those early works before he started writing the same book over and over in different settings. I truly admired Clark/Kelley, but a guy and his son-in-law with twelve of their highly trained buddies can only take down so many well funded, state actions before it devolves into buffoonery. (Those stories make the Bruce Willis film series RED seem ordinary and quaint.)
I believe Clancy did more than contrive a way to cause a conventional world war with the Soviet Union’s ‘misdirection’ campaign in his set-up, I believe he tapped into a deeply held belief about our cold war nemesis and about our own power structure. The Soviet hero was a mid level Secretary of Energy as I recall, recently promoted – but his adversaries were Soviet hardliners who were old, and set in their ways, and patently mad! When faced with a challenging reality, they assumed the Americans would use the disaster to attack and destroy the USSR!! To avoid that they let their black ops people murder innocent children to fabricate a lie in order to launch a full scale war that was nothing more than a distraction- a hack magicians misdirection. What an insane series of events - - but still it seemed plausible and was also plausible about the U.S. under the right conditions It should have been a warning about what happens when you put crazy men in charge, but . . . . .
The thing is, the stereotype of old, political men who fought in a war and still see every event as a war was so ingrained it was not outrageous that it could happen! Especially those war loving Commies hell bent on destroying us! (And he showed how much we were the other side of that same coin because of how the U.S. was viewed over there.) I wasn’t very many pages into that book (by a Tom Clancy standard) when I realized that Energy Secretary guy was the only sane man in the room and he would come out of the book being in charge of the Politburo. He is the only reasonable guy and the only one you could count on to keep his head in a crisis. The Soviet version of George Bailey (or if I dare- Joe Biden). I believe it was assumed then that the United States was never going to be foolish enough to elect anything other than a level headed, contemplative leader who was above doing crazy things for paranoid or selfish reasons.
This reminds me of what a former military guy told at the time the book was written. He said that our reservists use first or at most second line weapons and train on them regularly. But that in the Soviet Union, once you were done with active duty your unit retained the older weapons and you were then a reservist for life. So after the frontline weapons were destroyed (along with those who used them), there was a whole previous generation of weapons maned by those who were soldiers when those weapons were state of the art. Behind them were older weapons with older operators all the way back to WWII. He claimed that keeping the earlier generation weapons rather than turning them into razor blades guaranteed victory in a long protracted war of attrition. They would just out last us until we were fighting with pitchforks and torches and they had desperately outdated tanks.
Was the armored division held in reserve first line, I don’t recall? I do seem to recall that Europe was taking a beating but they refused to pull back to the consternation of the Americans. It seems the turning point was when American stealth technology allowed NATO to establish air superiority – that was when the tides changed. Then Western air power tore the hell out of the Eastern Block’s armored divisions.I also recall feeling like all the ground pounders were supposed to be the true front but I had a feeling Clancy just stuck them into the story because he had to – the essence of the book in my recollection was the Naval battle in the North Atlantic.
Their’s or ours? (Remember when Japan’s economic strength was seen as a genuine threat to U.S. security? Now it is China!)
What?!? Bruce Dern once played a bad guy? He was not always an all American hero? I must have missed that one! Next you will tell me that one time James Woods played a creepy guy- yea, right!
I also remember reading how up until the 1980s the Soviet Union kept WW2-era T-34s in reserve at vehicle yards able to be quickly reactivated in case they ran out of every other front line tank. Which makes sense, a T-34 won’t stand a chance against an Abrams but against some Bradley’s? I can see that being a fairly pitched battle.
I remember a KGB defector said that one of the biggest misunderstandings Western analysts had about the leadership was that their WW2 experience made them more wary of war. Having lived through a genocidal war they had very little taste for conflict compared to their American counterparts who had experience in an expeditionary conflict, one mostly of choice.
In his memoirs, Colin Powell recalls meeting his Soviet counterpart and learning that he was the only member of his High School class to survive the war and Powell then expressed a similar view to the one the defector did.
A tv miniseries would have worked, except that Amerika failed and the miniseries era was coming to an end.
The Sum of All Fears was a very bloated book that could have been excellent with an editor slicing out all the sub plots.
The film is a disgrace and I’ll never watch it again. I wouldn’t even show it to torture prisoners of war.
Tom Clancy books LOVE pointless subplots that don’t go anywhere and also telling people the entire life story of a guy who’s going to die within the next 3 pages anyway.
The book even devoted a considerable amount of attention to a…log. A log that would float into the ocean and…hit a submarine.
The prologue describing the Yom Kippur War, and the chapter detailing the excruciatingly detailed step-by-step detonation of a nuclear bomb, though, were two of the finest chapters Clancy ever wrote.
That novel basically summed up Clancy in a nutshell: 10 percent gold and 90 percent gravel. The gravel is awful to sift through, but the gold bits shines enough to make it all worth it. Most Clancy books are goldpanning like that.
I read a David Weber (collaboration) in which a ridiculous amount of pages were devoted to a picnic cooler (which would cause a waterscooter accident later in the book).
Another Weber signature…
Nah, Weber’s signature is the ten thousand missiles, of which various percentages get nullified by various countermeasures, step by step, until at the end there are three that get through, and one of them smashes the bridge of the starship Honor Harrington is on and kills everyone present except her.
Christopher Buckley, an entirely different sort of writer of fiction (and travel and non-fiction), had a heated flame war with Clancy when Buckley wrote a review of Clancy and it hit much too close for comfort. He also wrote an article on Clancy’s rise to fame entitled The Ego Has Landed and a few other articles for nationwide publications. They are all republished in his book Wry Martinis.
While Clancy made me want to storm an enemy stronghold on more than one occasion, the sheer humor in some of Buckley’s exploits leaves me short of breath from either embarrassment (while cruising on his bosses yacht with dignitaries and European royalty starting to wakefulness on the third day by realizing you are the only one on board [including much more important people] not calling the mustachioed guest Royal Majesty but Jim Bob [or whatever his first name was], or from laughter (many, many examples readily available). I found The White House Mess particularly funny; it is all the parts of national politics that do not make it into Clancy books.
From time to time, before the missiles fly, we get a few pages of the internal thoughts of a character who is about to die, and who for some reason is thinking about how the last several decades of political history have led to this particular incompetent admiral to be appointed in command of the task force, or the like.