* On Alert: Alarm bells are sounding...

* On Alert: Alarm bells are sounding at the Pentagon. It seems a hot manuscript has arrived for review. Former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger has security officers worried about possible disclosures of classified information in his forthcoming memoirs, “Fighting for Peace,” the Washington Post reports. But Weinberger, aide John Duncan says, was very careful when he reconstructed key meetings on U. S. actions in Lebanon and Libya and on the Iran-contra affair. Duncan says Weinberger took great pains to prevent disclosure of intelligence “sources and methods.”

* Zap It: Musician Frank Zappa says he thoroughly approves of the alliance of politics and culture in Czechoslovakia, where the president, Vaclav Havel, is a playwright. “This is the one place with the closest relation between politics and culture,” he said in Prague recently. Zappa’s music, which combines jazz and pop with biting political satire and scatological humor, is popular on Czechoslovakia’s rock scene.

* 11th Commandment: Television evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, whose reported encounter with a prostitute cost him his affiliation with the Assemblies of God, the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination, recently preached against “rotten filthy corruptness” to more than 1,000 people in a church in Marietta, Ga. He also urged the congregation not to pass judgment on AIDS patients. In a sermon Sunday night, Swaggart said that “all of us had spiritual AIDS.”

* New World: Actor Jack Nicholson has earned himself an entry in the latest edition of the World Book Encyclopedia. His 15-line entry describes him as often playing “a cocky, rude outsider or free-spirited individualist who rejects conventional society.”