I’ve been slowly working my way through Tom Clancy’s works in publication order — I commented on Patriot Games and the next few novels a few years ago — and I just got around to listening to the audiobook version of Debt of Honor, which I enjoyed as a period piece from its publication date of 1994, right at the tail end of Japan’s rise to power. I remember reading a paperback copy of Michael Crichton’s similarly themed Rising Sun around this time.
Oddly, this novel about a nationalist Japanese plot to cripple the US economy and seize US-controlled islands is best remembered for presaging the 9/11 attacks, because the whole complicated story ends with a bit of an afterthought:
With the crisis over, President Durling nominates Ryan as vice president for successfully handling the crisis. However, an embittered Japan Air Lines pilot, driven mad by the deaths of his son and brother during the conflict, flies his Boeing 747 directly into the U.S. Capitol during a special joint session of Congress. The president, as well as nearly the entire Congress, the Supreme Court, and many other members of the federal government, are all killed in the attack. Ryan, who was on his way to be sworn as vice president after being confirmed, narrowly escapes the explosion. He becomes the President of the United States and takes his oath of office before a district judge in the CNN studios in Washington.
[…]
In later years, the novel was noted for its similarity to the circumstances surrounding United Airlines Flight 93, especially regarding its climax, where an embittered Japanese pilot crashes his 747 on a joint session of Congress in the Capitol. While researching for the novel’s ending, Clancy consulted an Air Force officer and described his reaction: “I ran this idea past him and all of a sudden this guy’s eyeballing me rather closely and I said, ‘Come on General, I know you must have looked at this before, you’ve got to have a plan for it.’ And the guy goes, ‘Mr. Clancy, to the best of my knowledge, if we had a plan to deal with this, it would be secret, I wouldn’t be able to talk to you about it, but to the best of my knowledge we’ve never looked at this possibility before.’”
In April 1995, United States senator Sam Nunn outlined a scenario similar to the novel’s ending, in which terrorists attack the Capitol on the night of a State of the Union address by crashing a radio-controlled airplane filled with chemical weapons into it. Nunn concluded that the scenario is “not far-fetched” and that the required technology is readily available. However, the 9/11 Commission Report revealed that national security officials did not consider the possibility: “[Counterterror official] Richard Clarke told us that he was concerned about the danger posed by aircraft in the context of protecting the Atlanta Olympics of 1996, the White House complex, and the 2001 G-8 summit in Genoa. But he attributed his awareness more to Tom Clancy novels than to warnings from the intelligence community.”
In the aftermath of the attacks, Clancy was called into CNN and commented on the similarity between a plane crash depicted in the novel and the crash of United Flight 93. CNN anchor Judy Woodruff later remarked: “People in our newsroom have been saying today that what is happening is like right out of a Tom Clancy novel.”
Echoes of Jerry Pournell and his sci-fi buds from the 1960s through the 1980s.