Authors Like Annie Jacobsen

Eric Schlosser

American · Fast Food Nation (2001), Command and Control (2013)

Command and Control is built around the night in September 1980 when a dropped socket punctured a Titan II missile's fuel tank in a silo near Damascus, Arkansas, with a nine-megaton warhead on top, interleaved with a history of every American nuclear weapons accident he could document through freedom of information requests. It was a Pulitzer finalist in 2014 and became an American Experience documentary in 2016. He had already spent three years on the fast-food supply chain for Fast Food Nation, which changed how a generation ate.

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Richard Rhodes

American · The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), Dark Sun (1995)

The Making of the Atomic Bomb runs nearly 900 pages from Leo Szilard working out the chain reaction at a London traffic light in 1933 to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and the National Book Award. Dark Sun continues into the hydrogen bomb and Soviet espionage. Rhodes writes physics as narrative without simplifying it, and the physicists in his books are treated as people who understood exactly what they were doing.

Garrett M. Graff

American · Raven Rock (2017), The Only Plane in the Sky (2019), UFO (2023)

Raven Rock is a history of the American government's plans to save itself in a nuclear war: the bunkers, the helicopter lists, the sealed orders, the question of who would actually turn up. The Only Plane in the Sky is an oral history of 11 September 2001 assembled entirely from firsthand accounts. UFO works through a century of official investigations into unidentified objects and treats the government's own behaviour, rather than the objects, as the mystery worth solving.

Tim Weiner

American · Legacy of Ashes (2007), Enemies (2012)

Legacy of Ashes is a history of the CIA from 1947 onward built on declassified documents and on-the-record interviews, with a stated rule against anonymous sources, and it won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 2007. The agency disputed its framing; the documents are footnoted so readers can check. Weiner covered intelligence for The New York Times and shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for reporting on the Pentagon's secret budget.

Steve Coll

American · Ghost Wars (2004), Directorate S (2018), The Achilles Trap (2024)

Ghost Wars traces the CIA, Saudi intelligence and Pakistan's ISI in Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion of 1979 to the day before 11 September 2001, and won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 2005. Directorate S carries the story through the American war that followed. The Achilles Trap reconstructs the road to the 2003 Iraq war partly from Saddam Hussein's own recorded conversations, captured after the invasion. Coll has been a staff writer at The New Yorker and dean of the Columbia Journalism School.

Daniel Ellsberg

American · Secrets (2002), The Doomsday Machine (2017)

Ellsberg worked on American nuclear war planning at the RAND Corporation before leaking the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971. The Doomsday Machine is his account of what he saw inside that planning: the delegation of launch authority far below the president, the casualty estimates circulated as routine paperwork, the assumption that a first strike would kill hundreds of millions. He had copied the nuclear documents alongside the Vietnam ones, but they were lost for decades. He died in 2023.

Kai Bird

American · American Prometheus (2005, with Martin J. Sherwin), The Outlier (2021)

American Prometheus took Sherwin twenty-five years and Bird five more, and won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2006: Oppenheimer's physics, his Communist associations, the Manhattan Project, and the 1954 security hearing that ended his career, reconstructed from the hearing transcript and FBI surveillance files. Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer (2023) is based on it and won seven Academy Awards. Sherwin died in 2021. Bird has since written a reassessment of the Carter presidency.

Mark Bowden

American · Black Hawk Down (1999), Killing Pablo (2001), Hue 1968 (2017)

Black Hawk Down reconstructs the October 1993 raid in Mogadishu almost minute by minute, cutting between soldiers on the ground, pilots, commanders watching from the air and Somali civilians, from hundreds of interviews and radio transcripts; Ridley Scott filmed it in 2001. Hue 1968 does the same for the twenty-four days of house-to-house fighting in the Vietnamese city, using American and Vietnamese accounts. He spent twenty years as a reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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Fred Kaplan

American · The Wizards of Armageddon (1983), Dark Territory (2016), The Bomb (2020)

Kaplan wrote his doctoral work on the civilian strategists who invented American nuclear doctrine at RAND and elsewhere, and turned it into The Wizards of Armageddon. The Bomb follows the war plans themselves from Truman to Trump, including presidents discovering what the existing options actually were and being appalled. Dark Territory is a history of cyber warfare. He has written on war and policy for Slate for more than two decades.

Serhii Plokhy

Ukrainian · Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy (2018), Nuclear Folly (2021)

Plokhy is a historian of Eastern Europe at Harvard who works from Soviet and Ukrainian archives opened after 1991. Chernobyl reconstructs the reactor explosion and the cover-up around it from KGB files and trial records and won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2018. Nuclear Folly retells the Cuban missile crisis from both sides, and undoes a good deal of the American mythology about it, including how much of the outcome was accident rather than statecraft.