Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind

This expanded follow-up to Weiner's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1988 Philadelphia Inquirer series exposing the Pentagon's secret treasury offers a comprehensive look at the origin and growth of this budget and the weapons and wars it has financed. Among the programs examined are the Stealth bomber (an ""impossibly expensive mistake"") and a satellite system called MILSTAR which is central to the plan to ""win"" a nuclear war that will already have been lost in the event of its activation. Weiner brings to light black-budgeted activities of a cadre of colonels, retired generals and CIA agents, a virtual hidden army within the U.S. Army that ""came close to hijacking a fair amount of power"" during the Reagan years. This hard-hitting expose of power out of control, immune from accountability, is well documented. It reveals how the executive office, the Pentagon and the CIA have squandered billions of dollars on useless weapons and renegade foreign policies. First serial to Rolling Stone; BOMC alternate. (Sept.)