The Sum of All Fears
One of Clancy’s roman à clef.
Zorkin is Yeltsin. Bulgakov is Putin-ish. The POTUS is Clinton, so he’s a bumbling idiot (played by James Cromwell, the fools) being kept on the “straight and narrow” by the intelligence Blob. The Senators on the Intelligence Committee are also bumbling fools that only the Blob can tame by lying about what they know.
From what I can tell, this was written before the fall of Berlin Wall, but the film was done afterwards, so they just replaced USSR with Russia, keeping everything else intact. Yeltsin drinks himself to death and is replaced by a slick FNG who is generally incontinent. He calls the head of the CIA (for some reason he’s part of the UN nuclear disarmament team?) to announce Chechnya is their backyard. The Russkies bomb Chechnya (that part is correct at least) with novichok (and not saved some for Skripal), the new guy brags about it on TV but in fact it was some rogue general.
Jack Ryan is the author avatar who is not only hot as hell, he can speak Ukrainian and write intelligence reports like a boss.
After Baltimore is nuked, it comes to light this was a rogue plot by literal Nazis, bankrolled by some Austrian billionaire (no mention how he got his money, maybe investing in Steyr, selling guns to the US), to pit the empires against each other and rule over cockroaches. Not the sharpest tools in the shed.
This is accomplished by getting hold of an old nuke lost by Israel in the 6 Days War, and shipping it by FedEx or something. Since Israel never admitted they had nukes, they did not admit they lost that, so Baltimore is an irradiated hole now.
Never pegged Tom Clancy as a pacifist anti-Israel member of the blob. Write what you know, I guess.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.