Report from Iron Mountain

Upon its first appearance in 1967, this best-selling "secret government report" sparked immediate debate among journalists and scholars with its disturbingly convincing claim: a condition of "permanent peace" at the end of the Cold War would threaten our nation's economic and social stability. Although finally identified as an antimilitarist hoax by writer/editor Leonard Lewin, who conceived and launched the book with a consortium of peace movement intellectuals including future Nation editors Victor Navasky and Richard Lingeman, novelist E. L. Doctorow, and economist John Kenneth Galbraith, Iron Mountain would eventually take on a life of its own. Long out of print, the Report suddenly reappeared in "bootleg" editions more than twenty years after the original publication. In a manner never foreseen by the book's creators, it was now being read as a "bible" by the militias of the radical right - a bizarre reversal that returns this haunting satire to the spotlight and raises uncomfortable questions about the changing nature of today's political culture.