On Biological War
In a book released this summer called Biological War: A Scenario, Annie Jacobsen presents “one of many” scenarios that would involve a global pathogen engineered to kill, demonstrating that our systems are far from resilient enough to avoid collapse. Part tech-thriller in a Michael Crichton vein, we witness the collapse of cities and the rush of the federal government to implement “devolution” and “reconstitution” policies. Threaded through the main narrative are a series of “history lessons” that explain Jacobsen’s reasoning as she imagines the scenario.
These crisp lessons cover topics like the history of Russian and Al Qaeda biological war plans, US research and policy, including our own biological weapons research and preparedness planning; the espionage network to try to detect biological weapons research; notes on the history of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially mistakes made and failure of disease spread models; other past outbreaks; declines and ruptures in public trust; homelessness and human global migration patterns; the prevalence of drug deaths in America; symptoms of pneumatic plague; and reflections on human nature.
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It is a tightly wound, highly organized book that manages to present enormous amounts of information while simultaneously ramping up tension using storytelling skills. I am very impressed, and found it so propulsive that I read the last 40 percent of the book practically in one audio session. I was using the audio version, and cleaning up the house as I listened, but I also stopped often to take notes. Here are a few items I think worthy of review.
The lab leak that Annie Jacobsen imagines takes place at The Vector Institute, whose very name seems lifted from a James Bond novel:
The term Vector is emblematic of this Russian research institute’s goal, which the U.S. State Department suspects is to illegally carry out biotechnological advancements on the world’s deadliest germs. That at Vector and elsewhere, “Russia maintains an offensive [biological weapons] program and is in violation of its obligations” to the Biological Weapons Convention treaty.
Throughout the book, Jacobsen comes off as sensationalist, which ironically causes the reader to feel a little distant from the reality of her research objects. But when I looked up the facility and saw it marked on the map, a sense of reality overlay the incredulity of just an instant before. I describe this to try to get at the deep, epistemological malaise that reading Jacobsen’s book cultivates — surely this cannot happen; it might happen; it seems certain to happen. And what does the reader do with this information? Call a Congressperson, I suppose? Say, hey, are we preparing for this? Or, as I often think, carpe diem and not worry over the future? This last seems the most wrongheaded approach. We must plan for the future, and not only plan for the future, we need an economics that accounts for the costs and benefits accruing to the future.
Another point, made by A. in a conversation on this topic: Jacobsen does not write that the Vector Institute is a facility conducting basic research. If a chimerical engineered pathogen is released by a lab leak, it’s possible that we are all dead in a single week, but if we are able to keep such labs going for at least a few months of intense research, a cure can likely be produced. (And wouldn’t the Russians, Chinese, or Americans want to produce a cure for their own weapons? They must understand that such weapons could not be contained to target zones.)
Work Cited:
Jacobsen, Annie. Biological War: A Scenario. New York: Dutton, 2026.
