Report from Iron Mountain

The “Report from Iron Mountain” was a 1967 publication that claimed to be a leaked, top secret government report. It argued that though world peace was a nice idea, the economy of war was such a vital part of global stability, it was difficult to come up with substitutes. A hoax? Satire? Or the truth? For more than three decades, the Report has been a cornerstone of intelligent debate… sometimes.

In 1967, a major publisher, The Dial Press, released Report from Iron Mountain. The book claimed to be a suppressed, secret government report, written by a commission of scholars, known as the “Special Study Group”, set up in 1963, with the document itself leaked by one of its members. The Group met at an underground nuclear bunker called Iron Mountain and worked over a period of two and a half years, delivering the report in September 1966. The report was an investigation into the problems that the United States would need to face if and when “world peace” should be established on a more or less permanent basis. Or to quote from the “official” report: “It is surely no exaggeration to say that a condition of general world peace would lead to changes in the social structures of the nations of the world of unparalleled and revolutionary magnitude. The economic impact of general disarmament, to name only the most obvious consequence of peace, would revise the production and distribution patterns of the globe to a degree that would make the changes of the past fifty years seem insignificant. Political, sociological, cultural, and ecological changes would be equally far-reaching. What has motivated our study of these contingencies has been the growing sense of thoughtful men in and out of government that the world is totally unprepared to meet the demands of such a situation.”

The book appeared during the Cold War, but specifically at a time when America was hit by bloody racial riots in its cities and piles of body bags being returned from VietNam. Was the Government really promoting a culture of war? The “Report” was the most talked about book of the year. A number of people believed the Report was authentic. This impression was helped when noted economist John Kenneth Galbraith reviewed the book in The Washington Post, using the pseudonym Herschell McLandress: “As I would put my personal repute behind the authenticity of this document, so I would testify to the validity of its conclusions. My reservations relate only to the wisdom of releasing it to an obviously unconditioned public.” Still, many, including most other book reviewers, deemed it to be a satire. US embassies were asked to comment and had to disclaim the report, noting it was not an official government report. Still, President Lyndon B. Johnson apparently couldn’t be sure that his predecessor (John F. Kennedy) hadn’t commissioned the report. According to US News and World Report, the President “hit the roof” upon learning of it and ordered that the report be “bottled up for all time”.

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[link to www.red-ice.net]