Clive Cussler, author of a dozen consecutive New York Times bestsellers with sales of over 70 million copies, has just released a new adventure novel, Flood Tide. The story, set in the year 2000, centers around the launching of demographic and economic warfare by the leaders of mainland China. Chinese aliens flood into the U.S., Canada, and other countries around the Pacific Rim. Drugs and guns come with them. The sitting U.S. President, here a former governor of Oklahoma, is himself compromised by virtue of the fact that the leading Chinese alien-and-drug smuggler, who poses as an international businessman and philanthropist, has poured vast sums into his reelection campaign. A handful of dedicated American law enforcement agents, led by the Immigration and Naturalization Service along with Cussler's hero, Dirk Pitt of the fictional National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), combat Asian and traitorous American elites.

Although a work of fiction, the author salts his story with data about immigration, population pressure, and the hard economic consequences of "free trade" policy. For example, on page 66, Cussler has the INS Commissioner (who is not modeled after Doris Meissner!), inform a gathering of national security officials "Congress appropriated a sixty-percent increase in INS border patrol agents, but provided no funds for expanding our investigations division. Our entire department has only eighteen hundred special agents to cover the entire United States and foreign investigations. The FBI has eleven hundred agents in New York City alone. Here in Washington twelve hundred Capitol police patrol an area that is measured in city blocks. Simply put, there are nowhere near enough INS criminal investigative assets to put a dent in the flow of illegal immigrants."

Would not that kind of leadership be an answer to the earnest desires of many readers of The Social Contract?

Later, the head of NUMA warns, "The last census put the U.S. population at roughly two hundred and fifty million. With the coming increase in births and immigration, legal and illegal, the population will soar to three hundred and sixty million by the year twenty fifty ... Every great nation or civilization either fell by corruption from within or was altered forever by foreign migration." Toward the end of the book, the CIA forecasts the breakup of the United States "The Chinese in time will control the West Coast from San Francisco to Alaska and the Hispanics will govern the lands east from Los Angeles to Houston. It's happening before our eyes."

As we go to press, Flood Tide is already atop the national best-seller lists for fiction. Cussler is to be commended for introducing many thousands of readers to the very real demographic, political, and economic considerations upon which he has spun a story of high adventure and intrigue. Perhaps his public will be led to ponder what these sobering facts and trends portend for the future of their country.

The Next War

by Casper Weinberger

and Peter Schweitzer

Washington, D.C.

Regnery Publishing

470 pages, $27.50

(Available from the Social Contract Press, 1-800-352-4843) * * *

Will America be ready for The Next War? That is the question behind each of the hypothetical war scenarios that compose this sobering yet readable book.

Former U.S. Defense Secre-tary Caspar Weinberger and Hoover Institution Visiting Scholar Peter Schweizer drama-tize the outbreak and progress of major wars that realistically could occur over the next decade. They include conflicts in the Far East, the oil-producing Gulf States, and Russian aggression following the emergence of a dictator who promises to restore national greatness.

Readers of The Social Contract will be especially interested in Part Three, set in the Spring of 2003. Here the authors outline a crisis along our southern border. The economic collapse of Mexico, triggered by a government beholden to drug lords, leads millions of Mexicans to tramp northward. The U.S. President calls out Army troops to reinforce the Border Patrol. But they are swamped. Latino terrorists set off bombs and touch-off riots in cities in California and Texas. As the story unfolds, the U.S. President is unafraid to take decisive action to restore order and protect American interests.

That someone with Wein-berger's credentials should look upon Mexico as a likely national security threat should lead at least some of those who view conditions there with complacency to re-evaluate their position. Clearly, the authors see that the current unwillingness of Washington policy makers to deal with Mexican-related problems could soon have disastrous consequences.