AI Summary
5 min readWeapons of mass infection
Annie Jacobson, the investigative journalist known for digging into topics that sound like conspiracies—Area 51, ESP—and finding they aren't entirely conspiracies, spent years interviewing high-level government sources about what would happen in a nuclear war. Her resulting book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, was a work of imagination built on exhaustive research. But the people in the no-nukes community gave her a piece of advice: after you look at nuclear, you have to look at bio. So Jacobson is back with Biological War: A Scenario, and the scenario begins not with a terrorist attack, but with an accident.
The inciting incident
The book opens at Vector, an actual biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) lab in Siberia, Russia—the highest classification for handling the world's most dangerous pathogens. In real life, there was an accident and explosion there, though no deadly pathogen was released. In Jacobson's scenario, a pathogen does escape: a form of pneumonic plague, which sits at the top of the tier-one select agent list.
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What you'll learn
- 1 Weapons of Mass Infection
- 2 Today, Explained with Noel King
- 3 (00:00) **Introducing Annie Jacobson and the Bio Threat** - The investigative journalist who wrote "Nuclear War: A Scenario" was told by Pentagon sources to look at biowarfare next, leading to her new book "Biological War: A Scenario"
- 4 (02:15) **The Inciting Incident: A Siberian Lab Accident** - The book opens with an explosion at Vector, a real BSL-4 lab in Siberia, releasing a form of pneumonic plague
- 5 (03:45) **Why the Outbreak Becomes Unstoppable** - Without mitigation in the first 24-48 hours, the pathogen release becomes an unstoppable scenario
- 6 (04:18) **Pneumonic Plague: The Airborne Nightmare** - The bacteria Yersinia pestis causes pneumonic plague, the airborne version that uses human lungs as its delivery system
- 7 (05:51) **The International Spread** - A group of international hunters finds a dying scientist in the snow, one gives CPR, and the infected travelers board planes home to five or six continents
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
A new book imagines the chaos that could unfold if a biological weapon were released — either accidentally or on purpose.
This episode was produced in partnership with Vox's Future Perfect. It was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Miranda Kennedy with help from Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Tatasciore, and hosted by Noel King.
A person wearing an orange protective suit and a gas mask is seen at an event to promote the German government's new initiative to strengthen civil defence nationwide. Photo by Maryam Majd/Getty Images.
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