Hacker Cinema
The Sum of All Fears
2002 · Film · 124 min
Directed by Phil Alden Robinson
When the president of Russia suddenly dies, a man whose politics are virtually unknown succeeds him. The change in political leaders sparks paranoia among American CIA officials, so CIA director Bill Cabot recruits a young analyst to supply insight and advice on the situation. Then the unthinkable happens: a nuclear bomb explodes in a U.S. city, and America is quick to blame the Russians.
3 positive8 neutralfrom 11 commenters
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15 comments on Hacker News
I get it though, it’s crazy that I know so many people who now say “I don’t like old movies” or “I don’t want to watch this movie, it looks old” when what they see and are really saying without realizing it is , it was shot on film.
It’s especially worse since the hit rate of actually good, creative movies is so much lower in the digital era.
My big pet peeve now is these “ew, this movie looks old” attitude.
I was watching Sum of All Fears the other day and my partner had this attitude. Funny though as soon as people in tuxedos showed up on the screen she changed her mind and started watching. Tuxedos are one of those movie magic things.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43736805 is one example. Another is the Highway of Death, which inspired a Call of Duty level, but swapped the perpetrators from US to Russians [1]. Yet another might be A Time to Kill [2], based on a novel [3], inspired by a true event. Again, perpetrator and victim were swapped - in the novel and film, there are two white attackers, and the victim is black. In the real event that inspired it, the attacker was black, and the two victims were white. The subway killing of the three scoundrels in the Joker film was likewise inspired by a real event [4], but again, the antagonists were changed from black to white. Or how Dr. Who deliberately alters historical settings [5]. Especially amusing is the case of The Sum of All Fears - in the film, the villains trying to construct a nuclear bomb are neo-nazis. In the book it is based on, the villains were Palestinian terrorists. Finally, in the real event the book was inspired by [6], the uranium was stolen by Israel.
A more straightforward example is the many times that the New York Times 'mistakenly' claimed Iraq had expelled nuclear weapons inspectors, in the run up to the Iraq invasion [7]. This is more obviously false/a lie, while the prior examples use the cover of fiction to mislead.
'Small' changes, but pervasive, like water, mostly cut only one way, and they add up.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_of_Death#In_popular_culture
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_to_Kill_(1996_film)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_to_Kill_(Grisham_novel)#Inspiration
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_New_York_City_Subway_shooting#In_popular_culture
[5] “And we’ve kind of got to tell a lie: we’ll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn’t have been, and we won’t dwell on that. We’ll say, ‘To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we’ll summon it forth.’ - https://www.doctorwhotv.co.uk/moffat-on-diversity-in-doctor-who-we-must-do-better-80637.htm
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_affair
[7] https://theintercept.com/2023/03/30/new-york-times-iraq-war-error/7
One of my favorite movies. The Tom Clancy (Jack Ryan[1]) themed movies are all very good. I wish Hollywood would make more of this type of genre today instead of recycled superhero garbage.
[1] - The Hunt for Red October (1990) - Patriot Games (1992) - Clear and Present Danger (1994) - The Sum of All Fears (2002)
> Because every nuclear power developed their own enrichment processes and bomb technology, their bombs have different isotope ratios in the fallout. It's possible to analyze the fallout to determine 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 exchange between the US and the Soviet Union. It turns out the fissile material was made at Oak Ridge, crisis averted, tea^Wcoffee and medals in Washington.
> The point of the book is that religious fanatics can take over even in the USA
That's her point. My point are the gymnastics done to substitute Islam with Christianity. If her work was the exception, with lots of other made-into-Netflix-miniseries works warning of Sharia, I would share your opinion.
It gets even more skewed than Handmaid's Tale: The Woman King was perfectly fine depicting things that happened "far away", to "other people", "a long time ago". What the films was not fine with was accurately depicting the African kingdom of Dahomey as slavers, and the French as (belatedly) fighting against slavery. So the film simply reversed their roles [1].
For a more topical example, look at how the Apollo affair [2] made it into popular media: Israel stole plutonium from the US for their weapons program. It inspired the book Sum of All Fears, in which the plutonium was instead stolen by Palestinians. By the time it was made into a star-studded movie, the villains became Neo-Nazis.
There is always some artistic excuse to justify these politically useful alterations.
[1] https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/woman-king/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apollo_Affair
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)
I'm not a nuclear scientist. I haven;'even played on on TV, but your story could be pretty fun :)
>I can't even think of a major movie since 2010 that had a villain who was socialist besides The Interview, Team America, and Red Dawn 2012 but those aren't even fake examples.
>A wealthy capitalist in a suit is pretty much today's standard cliche villain trope.
This was true during the Cold War, too. In the Bond films, Soviet Russia is the enemy in exactly one film, For Your Eyes Only. Red China is the implied power behind the throne in two, Thunderball and You Only Live Twice. In every other entry in the series, the villains are SPECTRE and a variety of madmen, predominantly the billionaire type.
Another example is the frequently made claim that "Muslims are always the villains in Hollywood". It is far, far, far easier to name films in which "Islamophobia" is the greater evil than the opposite, both before and after the September 11 attacks on the US. The Sum of All Fears is one example in which the book's Islamic villains are explicitly replaced (by "neo-Nazis") for the film.
> you can only use them, not threaten with them
IMO this. The real reason of existence of nuclear weapons is deterrence, not actual retaliation. If you reach the point of nuclear retaliation, then you only get MAD (mutual assured destruction) and no one wins.
> For delivery, I've always wondered if it was possible to smuggle them in, say, by car. No need for a rocket or anything.
If you're interested on this possibility, a good movie I can recommend is "The Sum of All Fears" (2002).
There is a long history of right wing terrorism, Timothy McVeigh committed the deadliest act of terrorism in the US until 9/11.
In Italy right wing terrorists from the stay behind army Gladio committed several false flag attacks to prevent the rise of communist parties.
1980 a right wing extremist bombed at the Oktoberfest in Munich.
Before 9/11 it was one of the dominant forms of terrorism. The movie The Sum of all fears is bases on the book of the same name. In the book the terrorists are muslim extremists, but they deemed the scenario as too unrealistic so they changed it to Neo Nazis for the movie.
"There would be no hard evidence linking the source of the attack."
If are willing to take seriously a movie, Sum of all Fears, then for each ball of plutonium, just take the distribution of its isotopes. If have a catalog of all such balls of plutonium, then, for any one ball of plutonium, its distribution, looked up in the catalog, will identify where and when that plutonium was made. Similarly for any bomb from such a ball of plutonium -- just get the distribution of the isotopes in the fallout from the explosion, look up in the catalog, and know the source of the plutonium. Maybe from the nuclear weapons treaties, the catalog was developed.
If all that is approximately the case, then whenever a plutonium bomb goes off, will know the source.
Next, it may be the case that, if a missile is launched at sea, then US satellites will detect the launch and start a search -- e.g., by air, dropping sonar buoys with active sonar -- to find the submarine.
It may be the case that the submarine trying to get away is limited to a speed of only about 6 knots since going faster might generate enough flow noise for the submarine to be heard and located nearly anywhere in the ocean. If the submarine is limited to such a slow speed, then it would appear that the airplane and sonar buoys would be able to find the submarine easily enough.
Next, it may be the case that the US knows the location, 24 x 7, of every submarine in the world able to launch a nuclear missile.
Net, for a missile with a plutonium warhead to be launched at sea and the submarine to get away without being detected might be nearly impossible.
> oblique dancing around
That part was a joke and also to soften the point of the old claim that the US gave Israel plutonium for Israel's plutonium nuke bombs.
For the joke, my post was to suggest that the OP was an "oblique dancing around" way for Israel to remind its enemies that, according to the old story, it got plutonium for bombs from a deliberate US accounting error from an effort in Pennsylvania. Since the old story and also, with my conjecture, the OP were "oblique dancing around", so was my post.
I thought that nearly everyone on HN would have known the old story that the US gave Israel the plutonium they needed -- heck, that old story was even in the movie The Sum of All Fears. Looks like much of the HN community would have missed the point in the movie also. Apparently the movie makers also over estimated the historical knowledge of the HN audience.
Got it now?
> They most certainly could have purified the materials themself.
Know how? Yes. Actually do it? Likely not -- starting with just common uranium, it's a lot of work and a big installation to get to weapons grade uranium or plutonium, and hiding that installation would not have been easy.
Easy or not, the old story was that Israel got the bomb materials, plutonium, from the US accounting error, deliberately done and covered up in the US.
My point in my post was to suggest that the OP, considering current and recent events in the Mideast, was to remind enemies of Israel that Israel does have nuke bombs and did get the plutonium from the US via an effort in Pennsylvania. Again, that story is old -- I heard it long ago and saw it essentially repeated in the movie The Sum of All Fears. That is, my comment was to mention a possibly curious purpose to the OP. This conjecture about the purpose of the OP can continue to stand whatever the truth was about how Israel got, if they ever did, materials for nuke bombs.
Tough for me to believe that the highly technical HN audience had so much difficulty with my post.
The blunt claim is that the way Israel got materials for nuke bombs was from the US, from some place in Pennsylvania, and, IIRC from the claims, that the material was plutonium ready for use in a bomb without further processing.
The claim was that the accounting error was deliberately overlooked in the US as a way to get Israel the materials and bombs.
In the movie Sum of All Fears, a German neo-Nazi bought such plutonium from an Arab, had it made into a bomb, and blew up Baltimore.
The plutonium came from an Israeli bomb from an Israeli plane shot down in an Arab area, and some Arabs found the bomb, thought it was worthless junk, sold it to a guy in Damascus who knew that it was an old, lost Israeli plutonium bomb, and sold the plutonium to the German. The German wanted the US to think that Russia set off the bomb. When the hero of the movie communicated with a high, secret guy in Russia, he asked the Russian where Israel got the material, and the Russian said that the US had given the material to Israel. That is, the Russian knew about the accounting error.
Once the bomb went off in Baltimore, the radiation spectrum of the material confirmed the origin, US Savannah River, that is, the reactor that had produced it, in the US. Thus, the movie also used the same old story.
So, my conjecture here was that the OP was to remind and alert Mideast enemies of Israel about just where Israel got its plutonium, to remind those enemies that Israel does have the nuke bombs.
Tough for me to believe that all this has been so difficult for the HN audience to understand. I thought that everyone would understand my first post. What is this, a shortage of coffee in the HN audience?
No. Not even close. Way, way off.
Gads, no one here knows the story.
Hint: What country in the Mideast is widely believed to have some nuke bombs and has had for many years?
Hint: There's only one.
Hint: Considering how long, say, Iran has been working on concentrating uranium, just how the heck did the first country in the Mideast get the critical materials?
Hint: As in the movie The Sum of All Fears -- I thought that enough people has seen that movie to get it.
Solution: Some years ago, some accounting errors in or near Pennsylvania -- that's the usual story.
Understand now, or is this still too vague?
Again, my guess at the purpose of the OP now is to point out again to other countries and any terrorists that they better not mess with the Mideast country that has long had nuke bombs.
Now, let's be totally clear: At no point did I say that long ago Israel got some chunks of nuke bomb material from some accounting errors from some place in Pennsylvania and that those errors were the source of Israel having nuke bombs. I did not say that! But it has been said often enough before by others.
Too many words to understand this time?
What you say here suggests a rather big lack of understanding of history.
> For a political statement, a nation could make it very clearly demonstrated you have, say, a dozen. ... It'll cost two working models and you need perhaps a dozen packed up and well hidden to be effective. I would imagine the reaction would never be declassified, and I'll be surprised if it hasn't already happened.
This is the logic of nuclear blackmail, and in general of brinkmanship. It has been used before, if the relevant Wikipedia page is to be believed.
It is a dangerous and unpredictable threat. The Cold War strategy asserted that only mutually assured destruction would be sufficient to bring about peace. A dozen nuclear bombs, under that logic, is not enough. If it were, the results of the Cuban Missile Crisis would have been a lot different. If it were then the US would not have built its huge arsenal of nuclear warheads - 12 per nation would have been enough.
You say "always think outside the box", but nothing you've mentioned is outside of the box. In fact, it's boringly in the box. First off, there's nothing special about containerized shipping. A 1 MT bomb weighs less than a ton, and you could bring that in via tramp freighter or even private sailboat.
It's almost needless to say, but we also had a lot of cargo ships in 1900. The Halifax Explosion of 1917 was equivalent to about 2.9 kilotons, and that was with conventional explosive. Blow up that ship at a wharf in NYC and it will take down skyscrapers.
For that matter, look to drug smugglers. A single speedboat in June was captured, with 3 tons of cocaine on it. Narco-submarines are believe to carry in several hundred tons of cocaine per year. A 49-foot sailboat was recently intercepted 400 nautical miles off the US coast, on the way from Venezuela to Canada with 621 kg of drugs on board. Any of these are enough to deliver a megaton bomb.
"More than a dozen years ago, how would Saudi Arabia knock down skyscrapers in NYC? That's insanity, they'd have to launch cruise missiles or build a battleship and successfully park it off the coast of NYC, or invade overland with bulldozers or something."
This is not true. You need only to look to the movies of more than a dozen years ago to learn about some alternatives.
"The Peacemaker" has a Yugoslav named Dušan Gavrić who comes close to exploding a nuclear device at the UN.
"The Sum of All Fears" has a group of Palestinians who set off a nuclear bomb at the Superbowl in Denver.
I pointed out movies to show that the alternatives were part of popular culture, but I could stick with real-life.
The W54 warhead weighed about 23 kg and had a yield up to 1 kiloton. It was used to make a backpack nuke - the Special Atomic Demolition Munition. This could take down a few blocks of NYC.
And of course the first attempt to take down the World Trade Center was in 1993 using car bombs. That failed, but in principle that could be used to take down a skyscraper.
So in real-life and in the movies there were many other options beyond cruise missiles, battleships, or bulldozers.