Paul Bracken is the author of The Second Nuclear Age (Times Books 2012). A professor of management and political science at Yale University, he is the author of several other books on geopolitics and nuclear strategy, including The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (Yale 1983) andFire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age (HarperCollins 1999).

He worked closely with the legendary strategist Herman Kahn for ten years at the Hudson Institute and later with Albert Wohlstetter. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Bracken currently serves on several advisory boards to the Pentagon and the intelligence community, including the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel and the Transformation Advisory Group of the U.S. Joint Forces Command. He also advises the National Academy of Sciences Task Forces and the Director of National Intelligence. He graduated from Columbia University in 1971 and received his doctorate in operations research from Yale in 1982.