Jacques Bergier (1912–1978), born Yakov Mikhailovich Berger in Odessa, was a French chemical engineer, resistance fighter, journalist and writer. Trained at the Paris faculty of sciences and at the École nationale supérieure de chimie, he worked in the 1930s on nuclear chemistry, collaborating with André Helbronner on heavy water and the synthesis of radioactive elements. A member of the Marco-Polo resistance network, he was arrested by the Gestapo in November 1943, tortured, and deported to Neue-Bremm and Mauthausen, from which he emerged alive but weakened in 1945. In the 1950s he left industry for science journalism and literature, popularising in particular topics related to astronautics, secret weapons and technical intelligence. His preface to Dornberger's book, written shortly before his most famous work The Morning of the Magicians (1960, with Louis Pauwels), already signals his interest in the borderlands between science, war and speculative imagination.