BLOCKBUSTER

Not since the Isaacs' Coercive Utopians (now most unfortunately out of print) has there been a book like Covert Cadre by S.S. Powell ($29.95, hdbd., 469 pp., Green Hill Publ., Box 738, Ottawa, IL 61350), revealing in alarming detail the far-flung tentacles of the Inst. for Policy Studies (IPS). Readers may be particularly inter-ested in the Govt. Accountability Project subsidiary, whose travel-ing allegers brought about the cancellation of the 97% completed Zimmer nuclear plant, the cancellation of Midland, the hor-rendously expensive delays of Diablo Canyon and a dozen other plants, their false allegations of tools buried at Palo Verde, and their delay tactics even in the clean-up of TMI¾robbing the American ratepayer of billions of dollars, and all too often of a sound mind unpoisoned by superstitions.

Yet the GAP takes up only a handful of pages in the book. And so it should: for their dirty work in sabotaging nuclear power is as nothing compared with their systematically built tentacles of influence in the media, in Congress, and in the government executive. Their connection with Soviet and Cuban intelligence, repugnant as it is, is probably less important than their role as secret agents of Soviet totalitarianism in another sense¾as David Horowitz writes in a brilliant and moving introduction, "not in an official sense, perhaps, but, more important, in their hearts."