Sum doesn't add up: besides its faulty casting and poor production quality, the movie The Sum of All Fears subversively promotes U.S.-Russian convergence in the name of fighting terrorism. (Cultural Currents).

Devouring over $30 million at the box office during its first weekend in theaters, the movie adaptation of Tom Clancy's novel The Sum of All Fears has been praised for its timeliness and supposed realism. Advance screenings of the film, which depicts a terrorist nuclear strike on Baltimore, were held for policymakers and opinion molders. Every effort was made to impress upon the mind of the movie-going public that this is no ordinary film; instead, it is a preview of our likely future.

In the novel, published in 1991, Clancy depicted a conspiracy of Muslim terrorists collaborating with other elements of the Soviet-created international Terror Network. The fictional cabal, which included a member of the Red Army Faction and an American Indian radical previously involved in the "Warrior Society," detonated a nuclear bomb at Denver's Mile High Stadium during the Super Bowl. (In the film, the bomb detonates in Baltimore.)

While this premise all but begged for a big-screen treatment, Hollywood's Sensitivity Commissars dictated changing the villains' identities. Accordingly, in the film the plot is carried out by a ring of shadowy European neo-Nazis working in tandem with a white South African arms dealer and an embittered American white supremacist. In Clancy's novel, the terrorist plot was underwritten by the Ayatollah Mahmoud Haji Daryaei, an Iranian radical who eerily prefigured Osama bin Laden (remember, the novel was published over a decade ago). In the film, Daryaei was replaced by unctuous neo-Nazi industrialist Richard Dressier (Alan Bates), unmistakably a caricature of Austrian libertarian politician Joerg Haider.

Adolf Hitler, Dressler informs his followers, "wasn't a madman -- he was stupid. He fought America and Russia, instead of letting them fight one another." Dressier intends to frame the Russians for the nuclear attack on Baltimore, and bribe a Russian air base commander to stage an attack on a U.S. aircraft carrier. The ensuing U.S. retaliation would trigger a full-scale nuclear war, out of which a Fascist Phoenix would arise. The new Reich would be built by the radical right -- "neo-Nazis, Klansmen, Aryans," and the like -- who have supposedly created a global network through the Internet.

In both the novel and the film, the key component of the terrorist bomb is a plutonium warhead cannibalized from an Israeli bomb left over from the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The bomb was buried in a farm on the Golan Heights after a Syrian surface-to-air missile blows the jet carrying it out of the sky. In the movie, the Arab farmers who discover the unexploded bomb consider it a dud and sell it to a South African arms dealer for a pittance. Dressler pays the dealer an extravagant sum for the plutonium core and hires three Russian nuclear scientists to turn it into a weapon. Once the bomb is ready, Dressler ships it to Baltimore on a Ukrainian freighter, where a disaffected white supremacist dock worker picks it up and places it -- disguised as a vending machine -- in the parking lot of an NFL stadium.

As planned, the bomb detonates during the Super Bowl, vaporizing much of Baltimore and bringing the U.S. and Russia to the brink of nuclear war. Only the timely intervention of CIA analyst Jack Ryan (played by a badly miscast Ben Afflack) staves off the apocalypse.

Familiar Scenes, Faulty Casting