Stephen Budiansky

Stephen Budiansky is the author of fourteen books about about military history, intelligence and espionage, science, and the natural world. His work has also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times magazine and op-ed pages, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The Economist, and many other publications.

He grew up in Lexington, Masschusetts, and graduated from Lexington High School. He received a bachelor of science degree in chemistry from Yale University and a master of science degree in applied mathematics from Harvard. In 1979 he became a magazine editor and radio producer at the American Chemical Society in Washington, D.C. and from 1982 he was Washington correspondent and then Washington editor of the scientific journal Nature. In 1985–86 he was a Congressional Fellow at the U.S. Congress's Office of Technology Assessment, where he co-authored a study of advanced conventional weapons technology and then in 1986 he joined the staff of U.S. News & World Report where he worked for the next twelve years in a variety of writing and editing positions, including national security correspondent, foreign editor, and deputy editor.

He is a member of the editorial board of Cryptologia, the scholarly journal of cryptology and intelligence history, and is on the American Heritage Dictionary's Usage Panel. In 2011, Budiansky was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship as a writer of general non-fiction. He lives on a small farm in Loudoun County, Virginia.

The author’s official web site is budiansky.com