Abstract
Seed examines some of the defining attributes of fictional texts that deal with nuclear terrorism, attributes that include a focus on anticipating and blocking the commission of a crime and the question of demarcation: who or what, in other words, is primarily responsible for responding to terrorist threats? From Seed’s perspective, neither of these issues has received much attention from traditional forms of crime fiction, focused as they are on retrospective forms of crime investigation on the part of individual crime solvers. The relevance of crime narratives whose primary focus is terrorism has become especially pronounced, Seed argues, in the post-9/11 era, with fiction both reflecting and anticipating ‘real-world’ debates about how to confront the threat of terrorism.
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Notes
- 1.
On the different meanings of terrorism, see Silke 4–12.
- 2.
Hall’s novel is unusual among this fiction in depicting an ideally smooth cooperation between President and agency heads in thwarting the conspiracy to bomb Washington. His afterword on how to abolish weapons of mass annihilation simply appeals to our common humanity as expressed through the United Nations.
- 3.
Clarke’s novel, set some five years in the future, describes an Iranian conspiracy, in the wake of a coup in Saudi Arabia, to seize Bahrain and the Shia districts around the Persian Gulf. His first-hand acerbic account of the War on Terror can be found in Against All Enemies (2004). He served as counter-terrorism adviser to Presidents Bush senior, Clinton, and Bush junior before stepping down in 2003.
- 4.
See Croft, 2.
- 5.
Arthur C. Clarke’s 1949 story describes the premature panic of villagers living next to a nuclear research facility when they hear that a mysterious truck has crashed and shed its load. The 1962 novella by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth is set in a future where constant nuclear drills have reduced the population to a critical extremity. Critical Mass was to be used yet again by Whitley Strieber for the title of his 2009 novel.
- 6.
In the FBI Mirage Gold exercise of 1994 agents searched New Orleans for nuclear devices placed by a fictitious domestic group called Patriots for National Unity (see Cockburn, Chap. 6).
- 7.
Edward M. Lerner’s Countdown to Armageddon (2010) describes a Hezbollah conspiracy to make devices out of stolen plutonium, the apocalyptic end-point in the novel’s title. In order to explore the historical roots of this East-West conflict Lerner uses time travel so that the action alternates between the twenty-first and eighth centuries.
- 8.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations persuaded Paramount to change the conspirators in the 2002 film to a far-right white supremacist group. Clancy’s terrorist line-up unusually includes a Native American activist.
- 9.
The film was directed by John Frankenheimer, adapted from the 1975 novel by Thomas Harris, who had been inspired by the 1972 killings at Lod Airport and in the Munich Olympic village. Harris schematically categorizes his Palestinians as bad, and his Mossad and CIA agents as good. The novel traces out the predictable consequences of this opposition.
- 10.
The popularity of a stadium as a target for attack was bizarrely confirmed in David Chase Taylor’s 2011 e-book The Nuclear Bible, which claimed to reveal plans for a ‘false-flag’ assault on the Super Bowl XLV in Dallas, Texas, to be mounted by agents of the Obama administration. Soon after the publication of his book, Taylor sought political asylum in Switzerland.
- 11.
The route followed by the terrorists partially follows that used by the ABC reporter Brian Ross in 2003, where a suitcase containing uranium was shipped to the Port of Los Angeles and then delivered into the city (Allison, 104–106).
- 12.
It is a measure of Filger’s care over detail that the only identification on the dead man’s torso is a tattoo worn by technicians working on the ‘Tsar Bomba’ (i.e., king of bombs) in the secret Soviet plant at Arzamas-16 (cf. Cockburn, 135). Renamed Sarov, the town houses a model of the Tsar Bomba in its atomic bomb museum.
- 13.
Iran also figures as the financial backer for a conspiracy to construct nuclear devices from stolen material within the USA in Ronald Klueh’s Perilous Panacea (2010). A former nuclear researcher, Klueh describes this construction as an amateurish repeat of the Manhattan Project. His title refers to the ambiguities of nuclear energy, which can be used to either benefit or destroy humanity.
- 14.
Cf. Houen, Terrorism and Modern Literature, 4–6.
- 15.
On October 28, 2007 the journalist Paul L. Williams published excerpts from a 2001 interview where an Al-Qaeda leader claimed that they had smuggled suitcase bombs into Europe and the USA.
- 16.
The Wild Fire protocol resembles a nuclear ratcheting-up of a pre-emptive strike against Al-Qaeda sites considered by the Bush administration in 2002 (Friedman, 229–231).
- 17.
Strieber has experience of describing the aftermath of a nuclear war in Warday (1984), co-written with James Kunetka, which presents a futuristic report on the nation’s shattered landscape.
- 18.
The figures endorsing the novel included Richard A. Clarke.
- 19.
In October 2013 Kelly participated with four other writers in a Boston Book Festival panel discussion on ‘Writing Terror: An Exploration of Fear.’ The other participants were CIA operative-turned-novelist Valerie Plame Wilson, thriller writer Wes Craven, terrorism specialist Jessica Stern, and political columnist Joe Klein (Palmedo 2013).
- 20.
This genre is discussed by Nader Elhefanwy, who argues that these thrillers typically center on how military action or technology is used to deal with emerging crises.
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Seed, D. (2016). US Narratives of Nuclear Terrorism. In: Pepper, A., Schmid, D. (eds) Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-42573-7_12
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