The Sum of All Fears is Tom Clancy's most apocalyptic Jack Ryan novel, a doorstop thriller that imagines how a single act of terror could push two superpowers toward mutual annihilation. Years after a Middle East peace settlement Ryan helped broker, a group of terrorists recovers a long-lost nuclear weapon and conceives a plan of terrifying ambition: to detonate it on American soil and manipulate the United States and the Soviet Union into blaming each other, triggering the war neither side wants.
As misinformation, wounded pride, and itchy trigger fingers drive the crisis toward catastrophe, Jack Ryan -- now a senior intelligence official -- is one of the few people who grasps what is truly happening. Sidelined and disbelieved, he races to cut through the fog of panic and convince the men with their hands on the button that they are being played, before a regional atrocity becomes a global one.
Longer and darker than its predecessors, the novel is both a meticulous techno-thriller and a sober meditation on how easily deterrence can unravel. Its central set piece is among the most harrowing Clancy ever wrote, and the book cemented his reputation as the master of the modern political thriller.