The Sum of All Fears

The Sum of All Fears is a political thriller by the American writer Tom Clancy, published in 1991 as a sequel to Clear and Present Danger. It went straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

The novel's central situation is a peace process in the Middle East that Ryan has been helping to move forward, and the determination of a group of Palestinian and former East German terrorists to stop it. The material they have obtained is a nuclear device that went missing at the time of the Yom Kippur War, and their plan depends less on the weapon than on the confusion it can produce.

Because the book is as interested in machinery as in people, a good deal of it follows the decisions made in Washington and Moscow by officials who do not have the full picture. Ryan is better informed than most and is not in a position to make anybody believe him, so the tension comes from the gap between what has happened and what the people with their hands on the controls think has happened.