Red Storm Rising has some qualities of a daydream: What if war were to break out between NATO and the Warsaw Pact? In this sense it is an imaginative playing out of a daydream many a war game player must have had. A discussion group might play on the novel's invitation to use one's imagination by speculating on its details and offering alternative possibilities. Clancy seems to have drawn on the CIA's late 1970s report that poor distribution of fuel would create an economic crisis in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Clancy speeds events up a bit by introducing terrorists who try to spark a world war by blowing up an oil production plant. Are there other ways the war might have started?

Would the war progress as Clancy suggests? Would Iceland be a likely target, or does it symbolize the...