The Burmese Civil War began twelve weeks after Britain granted Burma independence in 1948 and has continued ever since. Shelby Tucker defines the war's core causes for readers new to the subject or baffled by its complexities and shows how a well disciplined army of a wealthy colony was transformed into a ruthless instrument of an impoverished autocracy. Tucker draws on his experience as a trial lawyer to appraise afresh the murder of Aung San, and argues that the military goverment is the leading player in the country's flouriching drugs trade. Media emphasis on the junta's record of human rights abuse, he suggests, tends to obscure a strategic interest in ending the trade shared by all major powers