Born in 1940 in New York City and educated at Yale University, Thomas Powers worked as a newspaper journalist until 1970, when he quit to become a freelance writer. Powers claims not to have had a job since, but he has certainly kept himself busy: he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for National Reporting at the United Press, and has been a contributor to The Atlantic since 1972. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he has also received the National Intelligence Study Center annual book award (in 1980) and the Olive Branch Award for "outstanding coverage of the nuclear-arms issue" (in 1984). Powers is a founding editor of the two-year-old Steerforth Press, of South Royalton, Vermont.

Powers has written numerous book reviews and feature stories for The Atlantic, most of which have focused on nuclear weapons and military policy. In addition to reporting for The Atlantic, he has written extensively for The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The New York Times Book Review, Life, and The Nation. He is the author of six books, the most recent of which, Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb, was published in 1993.