If I were Tom Clancy I hope that I would not have published Debt of Honor. I don’t know whether terrorists were inspired by it, but at least for me it’s pretty clearly in the “not worth the risk” category.
In some respects the 9/11 attacks can be considered similar to the Tylenol incident (though obviously much more devastating) - an incident took place using a method that had been theoretically viable for a long time, prompting immediate corrective action.
One of the reasons those attacks were so successful is that air hijacks were relatively common, but most led “only” to hostage scenarios, demands for the release of political prisoners, etc—in point of fact the standard protocol was to cooperate with hijackers, and as Wikipedia says “often, during the epidemic of skyjackings in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the end result was an inconvenient but otherwise harmless trip to Cuba for the passengers.” Post-9/11, hijacks began being taken much more seriously.
(There were actually many terrorist attempts against airplanes in the time shortly after 9/11, though most were not hijack attempts—the infamous “shoe bomber” who attempted to destroy an aircraft in flight a few months later, only to be beaten and captured by other passengers, was maybe the most well known.)
I hope that I would not have published Debt of Honor.
There have been an enormous number of books, movies, etc with various forms of realistic plots. Are you saying this genre shouldn’t exist, that authors should make sure their plots are not realistic, or that there’s something unusual about this plot in particular that should have kept Clancy from publishing?
If I were Tom Clancy I hope that I would not have published Debt of Honor. I don’t know whether terrorists were inspired by it, but at least for me it’s pretty clearly in the “not worth the risk” category.
I get the argument but then I’m wondering where it stops? Don’t direct A Clockwork Orange because there’s a high likelihood that copycat murders will happen? Stop production on all things where someone might copy something harmful?
I think I would have published. A potentially-productive question is “With 7 years warning, why did bad guys try it before good guys prevented it?”. Was is a question of misaligned incentives (where the good guys effectively let it happen because the public punishes for inconvenience), or different estimates of success (the good guys thought it’d never happen, although it was (in retrospect) extremely effective?
Keeping ideas/information obscure is unlikely to work—the more motivated side is going to get it first, and it’s likely to be more effective the first time it’s used than if many people anticipated it (or at least understood the vulnerability).
“With 7 years warning, why did bad guys try it before good guys prevented it?”
This came up around 9/11. Good guys have too too many things to prevent to focus on any random hypothetical more than any other hypothetical. Gwern has some writing on terrorism and it not being about terror. I leave it up to the reader to find the link.
If I were Tom Clancy I hope that I would not have published Debt of Honor. I don’t know whether terrorists were inspired by it, but at least for me it’s pretty clearly in the “not worth the risk” category.
In some respects the 9/11 attacks can be considered similar to the Tylenol incident (though obviously much more devastating) - an incident took place using a method that had been theoretically viable for a long time, prompting immediate corrective action.
One of the reasons those attacks were so successful is that air hijacks were relatively common, but most led “only” to hostage scenarios, demands for the release of political prisoners, etc—in point of fact the standard protocol was to cooperate with hijackers, and as Wikipedia says “often, during the epidemic of skyjackings in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the end result was an inconvenient but otherwise harmless trip to Cuba for the passengers.” Post-9/11, hijacks began being taken much more seriously.
(There were actually many terrorist attempts against airplanes in the time shortly after 9/11, though most were not hijack attempts—the infamous “shoe bomber” who attempted to destroy an aircraft in flight a few months later, only to be beaten and captured by other passengers, was maybe the most well known.)
There have been an enormous number of books, movies, etc with various forms of realistic plots. Are you saying this genre shouldn’t exist, that authors should make sure their plots are not realistic, or that there’s something unusual about this plot in particular that should have kept Clancy from publishing?
I get the argument but then I’m wondering where it stops? Don’t direct A Clockwork Orange because there’s a high likelihood that copycat murders will happen? Stop production on all things where someone might copy something harmful?
I think I would have published. A potentially-productive question is “With 7 years warning, why did bad guys try it before good guys prevented it?”. Was is a question of misaligned incentives (where the good guys effectively let it happen because the public punishes for inconvenience), or different estimates of success (the good guys thought it’d never happen, although it was (in retrospect) extremely effective?
Keeping ideas/information obscure is unlikely to work—the more motivated side is going to get it first, and it’s likely to be more effective the first time it’s used than if many people anticipated it (or at least understood the vulnerability).
This came up around 9/11. Good guys have too too many things to prevent to focus on any random hypothetical more than any other hypothetical. Gwern has some writing on terrorism and it not being about terror. I leave it up to the reader to find the link.