#2534 - Annie Jacobsen

In 2019, an explosion occurred at the Vector lab, Russia’s highest-level biosafety facility in Siberia. Nothing got out. But the incident revealed something perhaps more unsettling: American and Russian scientists were on WhatsApp together, calling each other to get the real story within hours. By 2024, that backchannel no longer exists. Annie Jacobsen, who has spent years writing about existential threats from nuclear war to biological weapons, argues this loss of human contact between adversaries may be the most dangerous development of all.

Jacobsen’s latest book, Biological War: A Scenario, is structured as a Pentagon-style war game. It tracks a fictional but meticulously researched outbreak of pneumonic plague—a pathogen with a 100 percent case fatality rate unless antibiotics are given within 24 hours. The real subject, however, is not the disease itself. It is what happens when society breaks down.

The threat that makes nuclear war look simple