Kenneth Neal Waltz was an American political scientist who was a member of the faculty at both the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University and one of the most prominent scholars in the field of international relations. He was a veteran of both World War II and the Korean War.

William Thornton Rickert Fox, generally known as William T. R. Fox, was an American foreign policy professor and international relations theoretician at the Columbia University. He is perhaps mostly known as the coiner of the term "superpower" in 1944. He wrote several books about the foreign policy of the United States of America and the United Kingdom. He was a pioneer in establishing international relations, and the systematic study of statecraft and war, as a major academic discipline. National security policy and an examination of civil-military relations were also focuses of his interests and career. He was the founding director of Columbia's Institute of War and Peace Studies and held the position from 1951–1976.