"Sum of All Fears" 
2002 
PG-13 
123 minutes

reviewed January 2, 2003

A young and new CIA analyst saves the world from 
nuclear destruction in this largely realistic 
drama. What this film is lacking is a sense of 
just how often the CIA and the U.S. Government 
generally think they are going to have to chase 
after individual weapons of mass destruction. 

Whether it is the arms-dealer of the week paying 
nuclear-scientists or whether it is the country of 
the month-- Iraq, Korea inspections etc.--the 
current U.S., British, French, Russian etc. 
approach is doomed to lethal failure, if not with 
nuclear weapons, then with some other future or 
past weapon invented through the wonders of 
capitalist science. We can count on capitalism for 
progress in destruction.

Aside from having to assert himself in the
corridors of power at an early age,
in order to save the world, the character Jack 
Ryan has to fly and boat back and forth between 
the DC/Baltimore area and Russia and Ukraine. If 
he did not bail out his operations colleague in a 
pistol fight, if he did not survive having a chain 
placed around his neck to choke him, if he had not 
survived a helicopter crash in a terrorist nuclear 
bombing and if he did not find his boss the CIA 
director just as he died to take his 
identification for illegal use, Ryan would have 
failed and the world would have ended in nuclear 
war between Russia and the United $tates. The sad 
part is that the rulers just do not know or don't 
care that there is something wrong with that. They 
see a happy ending.

The bourgeois politicians in the film and in real 
life speak in generalities, but they cannot come 
up with a solution for weapons proliferation. The 
capitalist authorities' approach is a lot like 
their approach to crime in general--spying on 
individuals and trying to catch people. That's not 
surprising, because the premise of the movie is a 
black-market nuclear weapon lost in a Mideast war 
in 1973. For $50 million, neo-Nazis obtain the 
weapon.

It's hardly relevant that it was neo-Nazis seeking 
to play off Russia against the United $tates. The 
point is that in a world with a black market and 
money as the legal monarch, someone was going to 
buy and sell nuclear weapons. It speaks to just 
how bold the solution has to be, yes, an extreme 
solution, but much less extreme than waiting for 
nuclear or other catastrophe.

Although the Tom Clancy novel is great apologetics 
for the CIA, on the whole, the "Sum of All Fears" 
succeeds in adding just another degree to the 
political temperature in Amerikkka. Published in 
1991, the book seems especially relevant thanks to 
the response to September 11th, 2001.

Neo-Nazis ship the bomb to Baltimore and succeed 
in detonating it there in what appears to be a 
cigarette machine. Since the nuke is supposedly 
smaller than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and 
Nagasaki, and since smoking kills over 400,000 
Amerikkkans a year, it's not entirely implausible 
that smoking kills more people, and that may have 
been part of the symbolism. It turns out the nuke
was "made in the U$A" anyway when the CIA stole
plutonium to give to I$rael, which then lost the
nuclear weapon in the midst of the 1973 war.

Even though the story centers on readily 
identified centers of power--the CIA, the U.S. 
president--the film is politically ambitious. We 
suspect that it left a large part of the audience 
behind, including some reviewers who we will not 
mention by name.

The outcome of the whole movie relies on knowing 
who detonated the nuclear bomb in Baltimore. That 
is a great subject matter; even though, we do not 
agree with the answers being killing the 
communists and listening to the CIA instead of CNN, the 
State Department or Pentagon generally. Those are 
just details really.

If the bomber of Baltimore turned out to be 
Russia, then the United $tates was going to 
retaliate in a general way. The movie succeeds in 
portraying the logic of escalation of war. As in 
the movie on the Cuban Missile Crisis "Thirteen 
Days" based on government documents, we see that 
not all aspects of the crisis go according to the 
rulers' plans. Neither Kennedy in "Thirteen Days" 
nor the Russian president in "Sum of All Fears" has total control 
of their militaries. Such an idea of total control 
is fantasy in any case, except in bourgeois-written
idealist history where only a handful of 
individuals matter. In contrast, we see in this 
film that an air force officer easily convinced 
his men that Moscow had been nuked by the united 
$tates: he then ordered them into attacking a U.S. 
aircraft carrier. The fact that the world is not 
of one mind, including in the respective 
militaries is one part of the benefit of this 
movie.

People that the united $tates usually considered 
very suspicious in Russia turned out to be the 
real "good guys." Shadowy forces kill the military 
officers in Russia who go off on their own 
tangents in Chechnya and the aircraft carrier 
attack. The author labels the errant officers as 
old-style "communists" in Chechnya and corrupt 
officers bribed by neo-Nazis in the aircraft 
carrier attack, but all that is besides the point 
in weapons proliferation when the whole point is 
that it could be anybody with money.

In fact "back channel" communications with shadowy 
Russian forces prove to save the day while 
political hotheads in the u$a and Russia bring the 
planet to the brink. Without a CIA director to 
clear the way for him, Jack Ryan used the back 
channel communications to Russian intelligence to 
understand what was happening and to get the job 
done. Other departments of the U.S. Government 
hardly listened to Ryan and they called him an 
"apologist" for the Russian president. He actually 
succeeds in convincing his own president by 
convincing the Russian president first, because 
the U.$. president had shut Ryan off, literally.
It goes to show that truth does not have a nationality,
and just how important that could be.

The chasing-drug-dealers-and-murderers-paradigm 
for arms proliferation will not work. Our ruling 
class has not noticed yet, but individual 
murderers and drug-dealers get away all the time, 
especially those in the ruling class itself. In 
contrast, even one weapon of mass destruction can 
bring down the species if it is powerful
enough to ruin the atmosphere or if it sets off certain 
suspicions and chains of events in a world 
brimming with causes of war. Not all CIA agents 
can drive vehicles through nuclear radiation and possess the thick 
necks necessary to survive choking by chain. 
Relying on them lacks vision. What is important is 
not the actions of a few action-heroes chasing weapons-
dealers like drug-dealers but the ongoing 
statistically relentless probability of 
catastrophe. We encourage our readers to imagine 
hundreds of Jack Ryans and similar scenarios 
generated in a capitalist world where the line 
between legal and illegal profit-making is 
impossible to find in every instance. Sooner or 
later, the Jack Ryans are going to fail: it's 
built into the system.

There is a word for those who support Bush and 
Clinton who offer no vision or progress toward a 
global peace: stupid. When such an 
approach is imposed through government it is not 
just stupid but evil.

MIM in contrast, does have an answer. Abolishing 
money in the long run and profit in the short-run 
while holding for questioning anyone transferring 
$50 million for persynal consumption would be a 
start. The social cost of the black market in weapons
alone is too much to offset the benefits of
having a free market in other goods. 
Production and exchange for profit should be illegal
in all cases, so there are no problems of law enforcement.
That is communism--an extreme solution to 
an even more extreme problem. Weapons 
proliferation and terrorist nuclear bombings 
cannot be treated the way the bourgeoisie handles 
street crime. The causes of weapons proliferation 
have to be eradicated completely. There is no 
other realistic solution.