W.J. Hennigan awarded top prize from Military Reporters & Editors
WASHINGTON — During its annual conference for journalists, Military Reporters & Editors presented awards to the winners of the 2025 MRE Journalism Contest. The New York Times‘ W.J. Hennigan given MRE’s top prize – The Joseph L. Galloway Award for Distinguished Writing – for opinion pieces in the Times series “On the Brink” about the modern threat of nuclear weapons.
Award Summary
“On the Brink” opinion series, The New York Times, published 10/10/2024 – 6/18/2025.
Prize Category: Joseph L. Galloway Award for Distingished Journalism
Named after UPI combat correspondent and McClatchy Newspapers columnist, Joe Galloway, this award is for the Best of Show in journalism. This is Military Reporters & Editors top honor and includes a $1,000 reward.
Additional credit: Photographs by An-My Lê, “The Price” and “The Warning”
Judges’ Comments:
While Hennigan submitted five excellent pieces for the contest, the two standouts were in-depth, interactive stories examining two aspects of the growing nuclear threat environment and the arms race of the future. They were part of a broader opinion series called “The Brink” and look, in part, at how the Ukraine war has put the U.S., Europe and Russia on the road to the chilling possibility of a nuclear strike, once inconceivable in modern conflict, that is “more likely now than at any other time since the Cold War.” It is a threat that also hangs over the Persian Gulf, the Taiwan Strait and the Korean Peninsula.
“The Price” was an extraordinary interactive story taking a comprehensive look at a “modern Manhattan Project” as the U.S. plans the modernization of its nuclear arsenal. Hennigan takes the reader into the planning across the country and around the world for possible nuclear war. “With Russia at war, China escalating regional disputes and nations like North Korea and Iran expanding their nuclear programs,” he writes, “the United States is set to spend an estimated $1.7 trillion over 30 years to revamp its own arsenal.”
“The Warning” was a frightening look at the danger of satellites that could one day be armed with a nuclear weapon in space — possibly starting the weaponization of space and upending the longstanding agreement not to start an arms race in space. It could impact war-fighting globally. One satellite in particular, Russia’s Cosmos 2553, is already up in a high orbit — not armed but testing the prospects. The peril of such a weaponized satellite — derisively dubbed Sput-nuke — is that it could detonate and “obliterate hundreds, if not thousands, of critical satellites.” Hennigan takes the reader deep into the growing nuclear threats from space.
Read the Winning Commentary
- Opinion 1: The Price, The New York Times (10/10/2024)
- Opinion 2: The Warning, The New York Times (12/5/2024)
- Opinion 3: The Message Pete Hegseth Sends the Troops The New York Times (04/1/2025)
- Opinion 4: Trump Crossed the Line at Fort Bragg, The New York Times (6/11/2025)
- Opinion 5: Trump Is Threatening War Against Iran. Here’s Who Can Stop Him. The New York Times (6/18/2025)
Journalist Biography
W.J. Hennigan
W.J. Hennigan is a New York Times Opinion correspondent covering the U.S. military and national security issues from Washington, D.C.
He has reported from war zones and countries worldwide, writing about everything from nuclear weapons proliferation and the deterioration of arms control to the global weapons trade and civilian casualties in America’s air wars.
Hennigan is the lead writer for The New York Times Opinion section’s “At the Brink” series, a multimedia project that examines the nuclear weapons in the modern world. The series was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Opinion Writing, an Emmy nominee for documentary, and earned recognition from the National Magazine Awards and Overseas Press Club.
In 2021, his coverage of domestic extremism and the Jan. 6 Capitol attack was recognized with a Sigma Delta Chi award. Stories from his embeds with U.S. troops and COVID-19 pandemic responders earned the Gerald R. Ford Award for Defense coverage in 2020, an honor he received six years earlier for a series on the aging infrastructure underpinning America’s nuclear weapons complex.
Before joining the Times, Hennigan worked at TIME magazine and the Los Angeles Times, where he was part of a team of journalists who won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. He is a native of Chicago with degrees from Arizona State University and Northern Illinois University.