Other Columns by Mike Bayham
Mike Bayham Bio

Printer-Friendly Version

The Reality of All Fears
By Mike Bayham
June 6, 2002

When the film version of Tom Clancy's "Sum of All Fears" was set to open, protests were made by some people in government and in the media that a movie that involves the detonation of a nuclear weapon in a major city is inappropriate to release at this time. Oversensitive critics cried out that since we are approaching the one year anniversary of 9-11 the film's debut at the box office should be postponed.

However the movie was released anyway and people flocked to see the film which upended Star Wars II's brief reign at the box office. In defense of Tom Clancy and the studio folks that made the film, the movie more or less stays true to the story of the best selling novel in which a nuclear device is detonated in a major city (for some reason the movie has Baltimore as the target instead of back-up US capital Denver).

In other words, this was not cooked up at the last second to play on last year's bombing.

The biggest change, and for that matter my biggest objection, in the movie which may have been made in light of 9-11 for some bizarre reason is that the bad guys who blow up Baltimore are European Neo-Nazis instead of militant Arabs, who are the people responsible for the bombing in the book.

Even more ludicrous is that the Arabs that help deliver the bomb to the imagined 21st century Nazi business tycoons are portrayed as unwitting accomplices (damned white men strike again). The moaning over supposed American protests regarding Russia's dealings with Chechnya which play a prominent role in the movie, though not in reality.

My only other objection to the movie is that Tom Clancy allowed the "Party of Fiving" of the film by swapping out Harrison Ford and Willem Dafoe and other established actors with Ben Affleck and Liev Schreiber along with a younger cast in general. It simply did not have the same feel that the other Clancy movies had, but I digress.

Releasing a movie about an American city getting nuked is the least of my concerns because it reminds people that with the passing of every decade and with every technological advancement, the world gets smaller and smaller. We can longer feel secure from international problems with the assurance that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans will continue to serve as our protective blankets.

What happened in New York and in northern Virginia last year takes place on an annual basis in other countries, though the degree of destruction and loss of life in the individual instances is not as great.

I remember reading an article in the newspaper about ten years ago how thousands of Algerians were slaughtered in an internal conflict. Though the story cited the tremendous loss of life, the amount of space it was given in the newspaper could be appropriately described as a "blurb." I doubt many people read the story and even fewer remember it today. But I was fascinated with the fact how an atrocity of this magnitude could be so ignored and shelved. After a while, I wondered how the story would be covered if something like that ever took place in the United States.

A few years later I got my answer with the tragedies of Waco, Oklahoma City, Columbine, and of course September 11. However more Algerian lives were lost in that one incident than in all of the events in America combined. In many ways we are still clinging to tragedy as evident with the of the pomp and attention given to almost ceremonial removal of the last girder from the WTC complex.

But bomb attacks and massacres are not exclusive to the Third World. Even our friends in Europe are visited with large scale attacks by terrorists, indigenous and foreign. Prominent politicians in Italy and the Netherlands have been assassinated recently. England and Northern Ireland are no strangers to terrorist attacks. France and Spain have endured many attacks from separatists who want an independent Corsica and Basque region.

And of course Israel has not known peace since its reemergence on the map in the late forties. The constant loss of life in the Jewish State at the hands of Islamist suicide bombers and Palestinian nationalists is staggering. What happened to three airliners on September 11th happens far too often to mass transit buses all over Israel. Yet if Israelis were as clingy to tragedy as Americans have been, they would have to create a cabinet position for mourning in the Knesset.

The Bush Administration through the vice-president and other surrogates have stated time and time again that the United States is going to get hit by terrorists again. Despite what some Democrats have stated or implied in the media, we will be as unsuspecting to a future attack as we were when the first plane hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center. And though the CIA and other counter-terrorist agencies have successfully stopped other plots from coming to fruition and will probably stop many future ones, one attack is bound to slip by.

Prior to the rise of Hitler, World War I was referred to as the "war to end all wars." Diplomats who were horrified by the death toll and the mass destruction of the war believed that such warfare could never be repeated. About twenty years later the first world war was outdone by the second. The attack on 9-11 was done through the use of civilian airliners, which is a tactic that is straight out of Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor, the sequel novel to Sum of All Fears.

The next attack could come in the form of a nuclear explosion. The implementation of a space based nuclear deterrent system can provide a great deal of protection from a missile tipped with a nuclear warhead. Granted there are other ways to use a nuclear weapon against a population center, especially with some nuclear devices being suitcase sized, it is still a good idea to close off or limit one avenue of nuclear attack.

Americans need to face the reality that it is very possible that another major terrorist attack will be made against the homeland. Though the bombing may not be imminent and could be ten to twenty years away, to believe that 9-11 was a one shot deal is to be like one of the naive statesmen that thought there could not possibly be an encore to World War I.

The problem with the American psyche today is not that there is a movie in the theatres about the nuking of a city but that we have exposed ourselves through the media as oversensitive people obsessed with grieving. Terrorists do not win by taking capitals but by paralyzing their opponents with fear. If terrorist groups perceive that we are a nation of wallowers instead of warriors, we will only be inviting future attacks.