Cresson H. Kearny was a graduate of the Texas Military Institute and of Princeton University. He worked for Standard Oil in Venezuela and served in the US Army as a captain in the Panama Mobile Force. Many of his jungle-tested inventions were used by US infantrymen in WWII. In 1964, Kearny joined the Oak Ridge National Laboratory civil defense project, which is where the research supporting his book Nuclear War Survival Skills was conducted. He died in 2003.

Don Mann is an ex-Navy SEAL, an athlete, and a prolific author of Navy SEAL–related fiction and nonfiction. He has made numerous television appearances across all major networks and has written pieces for Time, Newsweek, Runner’s World, Men’s Fitness, Huffington Post, CNN.com, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and many more. He lives in Miami, Florida.

Dr. Edward Teller (1908–2003) was a theoretical physicist known colloquially as “the father of the hydrogen bomb.” He was a key member of the Manhattan Project during WWII.

Eugene P. Wigner (1902–1995) was a noted theoretical physicist and mathematician. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963.

Don Mann’s impressive military resume includes being a decorated combat veteran; corpsman; SEAL special operations technician; jungle survival, desert survival, and arctic survival instructor; small arms weapons, foreign weapons, armed and unarmed defense tactics, and advanced hand-to-hand combat instructor; and Survival, Evade, Resistance, and Escape instructor, in addition to other credentials. He lives in Williamsburg, Virginia.