In a tradition of political satire that ranges from A Modest Proposal to Dr. Strangelove falls the perplexing, ingenious, and ceaselessly curious Report from Iron Mountain

Upon its first appearance in 1967, this best-selling "secret government report" sparked immediate debate amoung 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.

While the language of the Report appears quite reasonable and even astute, like the "think tank" jargon it lampoons, the book's cumulative logic becomes a journey into the madness of a "value free" rationalism that drives it to outrageous conclusions. What ultimately emerges is a brilliantly rendered social commentary that again and again taps a nerve in our national psyche.

When the book first appeared, U.S. News & World Report revealed that President Johnson "hit the roof" upon learning of it "and ordered that the report be bottled up for all time." Twenty-five years later filmmaker Oliver Stone would extol the "fabled" Report as raising "the key question of our time," which journalist and businessman Tony Brown would excoriate it as "a precursor to The Bell Curve, and...the seminal work on social triage."

Exposing fear of the national security state in one era, Iron Mountain now reveals a new fault line of paranoia in our own time—one that may negate old political categories and exacerbate a new and more significant division between the rational and irrational in American politics.

This new edition of Report From Iron Mountain features and introduction by Victor Navasky, an afterward by Leonard Lewin, and a collection of articles, assembled here as "The Iron Mountain Affair," that appeared on the book's original publication—each a revealing piece of the still-developing puzzle that has grown up around one of the most engaging and resilient works of political comment of our time.