John Harvey Wheeler (October 17, 1918 – September 6, 2004) was an
American author,
political scientist, and
scholar. He was best known as co-author with
Eugene Burdick of
Fail-Safe, 1962, an early
cold war novel that depicted what could easily go wrong in an age on the verge of
nuclear war. The novel was made into a movie, directed by
Sidney Lumet and starring
Henry Fonda, in 1964. In later years, Wheeler was a founding editor of the
Journal of Social and Biological Structures, 1982, and an early advocate of
online education and the
Internet as a democratizing tool. He taught a course in "OnLine Publishing" for
Connected Education in the mid-to-late 1980s.