One of the co-authors here is Herman Kahn, the nuclear strategist. He wrote On Thermonuclear War in 1960, which made him one of the models for Dr. Strangelove - some of the lines in the movie are direct quotes from that book. Later he became a utopian (or dystopian) futurist - when he wrote a book called The Coming Boom (which title provoked ironic comment, given his earlier book).

A biography appeared several years ago, The Worlds of Herman Kahn by Sharon Ghamari Tabrizi. She concludes that Kahn was a sort of performer, a monologist working in a then-popular genre called "sick comedy".