Widely considered “the undisputed master of nuclear knowledge” (Annie Jacobsen, bestselling author of Nuclear War: A Scenario) Fred Kaplan is an award-winning historian and journalist who has been writing about nuclear issues for more than forty years. Currently the national security columnist for Slate, he was previously a staff reporter for the Boston Globe, where he was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for “War and Peace in the Nuclear Age,” a Sunday Boston Globe Magazine special report on the U.S.–Soviet nuclear arms race.  He is the author of seven books, including The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, The Wizards of Armageddon, and The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. An elected member of the Society of American Historians, Kaplan has been the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a visiting fellow at New America and the London School of Economics, and a writer-in-residence at the American Academy in Berlin.

Kaplan’s book The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War is considered the definitive history of American policy on nuclear war. Richard Rhodes called it “the best overview yet” on the subject, while Timothy Naftali calls him “the world’s preeminent Dr. Strangelove-whisperer.”

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War was hailed as “the best account to date” on the subject (Times Literary Supplement) and “an account that is both fascinating and authoritative,” putting “the people, the technologies, the dramatic turning points, and the strategic economic stakes together in a way no author has done before” (James Fallows). John le Carré, the preeminent spy novelist, called it “a book that grips, informs and alarms, finely researched and lucidly related.”

Kaplan’s most recent book, A Capital Calamity, is his first novel, a satirical thriller about a cynical defense consultant who accidentally triggers a war and then has to help stop it. Malcolm Nance called it “the Catch-22 of our day.”

His prowess as a researcher, scholar, and storyteller has been recognized going back to his first book, The Wizards of Armageddon (winner of that year’s Washington Monthly Political Book of the Year), which Barbara Tuchman praised, calling its subject “intensely important….Kaplan makes it absorbing, and what is more, comprehensible.” Materials he collected while researching the book are now housed at the National Security Archive.

The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War, hailed by The New York Times Book Review as “thrilling reading,” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, as well as a New York Times best seller and the winner of the Washington Institute’s Silver Book Prize. Michael Inman, a curator at the New York Public Library called it one of the 15 best nonfiction war books of all time.

“Fred Kaplan is one of the best in the business, a top-notch journalist and military analyst with serious intellectual chops and a killer pen. His new book The Insurgents…[is] not only a great read—it’s a major contribution to one of the most important strategic debates of our time.”

—Gideon Rose, editor, Foreign Affairs, and author of How Wars End

His other books include Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power and 1959: The Year Everything Changed. Kaplan has written articles for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and many other publications. He also reviews jazz records for Tracking Angle. He has appeared many times on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, the BBC, and other TV networks, radio shows, and podcasts.

Kaplan was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, graduated from Oberlin College, and has a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Brooke Gladstone. They have two daughters and one granddaughter.

For more information on Fred Kaplan, visit fredkaplan.info.