One of my favorite authors is Tom Clancy, he wrote “The Hunt for Red October”, “Patriot Games” and “Clear and Present Danger”, -among many others. He’s a very nuts and bolts type of writer, with his stories full of real technology and insider knowledge of the Intelligence community.
The reason I bring him up on this thread, is that a number of his stories contain actions, by both the good guys and bad guys, -that did not take place until after the books were published!
In one book, a couple of years before 911; he had a fully fueled 747 hijacked and flown into the Capitol building. Explaining in detail how the burning jet fuel killed more people and acted to destroy the building more than the damage inflicted by the aircraft itself.
Another book had a US Special Forces Team conducting black operations against Columbian cocaine Cartels. A few years later, the same type of mission, with a number of similarities, was run against the poppy fields and heroin manufacturing facilities in Afghanistan.
One book had a laser guided smart bomb, taking out a terrorist’s house –specifically to kill that one terrorist, leaving all the other houses around his undamaged. –Years before the US started doing it in actual practice.
There were a lot of others and I’ll try to find the article I read that listed them all, but the one in particular, relevant to this thread, is in his book “Debt of Honor”; where US operatives use a Laser Dazzler device, aimed at passenger aircraft just about to land. The agents fired the Dazzler at the cockpit of the airliner from the top floor of a hotel facing the landing planes. This allowed them to be directly level with the cockpit, fully exposing the Pilot to the disorienting ray at the most critical point of the flight –landing.
When the book came out, Clancy was criticized for this scene, as being too “science fictiony”. Clancy responded that the device indeed existed and he had seen the device being tested and evaluated with his own eyes. ”. –This was well before most people had even heard of the Dazzler or even green lasers.
Sooner or later, some terrorist is going to use a laser, whether a 15W Dazzler or 200W CO2, to blind a pilot and cause a real crash. When that happens, you probably won’t be able to buy a laser pointer anymore.
~SK
