In the summer of 2020, while the country was between ‘waves’ of Covid, Dominic Cummings convened a meeting at my urging in Downing Street on pandemic biosecurity. Around the table sat the types of people you would want: scientists, key national security figures and officials. They explained that the thing Cummings was worried about, namely an engineered pathogen, obtained or built cheaply by a small group or even one person, was essentially science fiction. ‘You can’t beat Darwin,’ we were told.
At the end, Cummings turned to me and asked what I thought. I said that much of what had just been declared impossible I had personally seen done in a laboratory five years earlier. Such work was, and is, openly published. Furthermore, President Obama had paused funding ‘gain of function’ engineering on human-transmissible pathogens back in 2014, after scientists had developed a flu virus to transmit more effectively between ferrets, the standard model for human transmission. In short, not science fiction.
Biological War: A Scenario, by the American journalist Annie Jacobsen, is the briefing we should have received. The author has been writing on the intersection of technology and national security for more than 20 years, and this book is effectively the sequel to her bestselling Nuclear War: A Scenario. It follows the same formula, of dozens of interviews with the people who own the nightmare from inside government, extrapolated into a dramatisation of how the nightmare would actually unfold. The interview list is excellent. I spoke to several of the same people five years ago when, at No. 10, we tried and largely failed to convert the Covid tragedy into any serious effort to protect ourselves against something very much worse.
The US security state now regards the use of bioweapons as a greater overall threat than nuclear weapons
Jacobsen’s scenario begins with a lab accident at the Vector Institute in Russia, a known centre of bioweapons research in the past. What escapes is imagined, not real: a ‘chimera pathogen’, based on plague but combining material from other pathogens, engineered for high airborne transmissibility and pneumonic infection and spreading with an R of 11 (early Covid was 2-3) and an untreated fatality rate near 100 per cent. That’s the same mortality rate as natural pneumonic plague. In the grimmest touch, the pathogen is engineered to release a second pathogen when antibiotics are given to treat it. Except that part isn’t invented. Jacobsen shows that the Soviets’ ‘chimera programme’, beginning almost 50 years ago, pursued almost exactly this weapon: plague spliced with an encephalitis-causing virus, engineered so that the antibiotics a victim took would trigger the next disease rather than cure it. A weapon that kills by its own victim’s hand, a ‘booby trap bioweapon’.
Jacobsen reports claims that they also tried combining plague with endorphins, so that the infected would go out and socialise: high lethality and high spread. She details the extraordinary chain of events when British Intelligence first discovered, through defectors at the end of the Cold War, how the Soviets had pursued such programmes at scale. She also reveals that al Qaeda explored biological weapons on their own; and she outlines how the US state department publicly declares that it believes multiple hostile nations are continuing related lines of work, and how the prospect of their deployment, either deliberately or accidentally, is regarded by the US security state as a greater overall threat than nuclear weapons, given use likelihood. She does an important service in raising the salience of this.
The book’s fictional plague is an update to what could be happening with such programmes now. We see deaths begin and spread in the town by the lab, following the accident. The circumstances, Jacobsen dryly notes, point to an obvious conclusion: a lab leak. They also point to a familiar one. In her scenario, the Russians blame a wet market selling contaminated meat, and every early case is duly linked to it. This is, she says, ‘a wink and a nod’. Her view is that what she calls the ‘Covid origins fiasco’ did lasting damage to public trust in scientific institutions, from which they have not begun to recover. It also greatly impeded efforts to prevent a repeat. The point of the scenario is not to relitigate 2020 but partly to show what happens when a state has already spent its credibility before the crisis begins.
This effect of biowarfare was not lost on those in the Soviet bioweapon programme. A threat of this kind weaponises a free society against itself. The very act of free assembly amplifies the spread. Jacobsen follows the conclusions of the American security apparatus’s biological war-gaming exercises. We watch how the seeds of distrust from Covid and broader politics combine with such a disease to trigger a descent into anarchy and state collapse.
Does it work as a book? Mostly, and it certainly reads as a page-turning thriller. I finished it in two sittings. It is at its best when it seamlessly weaves its scenario with much critical history too little known to the public. This includes the massive proliferation globally of the highest containment level bioresearch facilities (BSL3&4) which house such pathogens, usually located in or near urban centres, and how such pandemic pathogen ‘gain of function’ research, sometimes functionally indistinguishable from bioweapons research, became normalised as part of ‘biodefence’ after the 2001 anthrax attacks on America’s East Coast. The 2012 quote by Anthony Fauci, the former chief medical adviser to the US president, is included: ‘The benefits of such [gain of function] experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.’
Readers will naturally ponder whether this view needs revising. However, as with Nuclear War: A Scenario, sometimes the thrillerisation goes too far and is a little too breathless. The horror of plague death is described, then described again, and then again, at every rung of the exponential ladder. An entire page is devoted to explaining that an F-16 fighter jet is a technological marvel but completely useless against plague – a point which most readers will have grasped by the second sentence.
Specialists may also quibble with the particulars, and the lack of caveats: the speed and certainty of collapse, the inability to contain with lockdown, the mechanics of state distrust, and, for reasons best left unsaid, the plausibility of the precise engineered pathogen setup and characteristics invoked. (This may have been a deliberate decision on Jacobsen’s part for security reasons.) But let them quibble. It misses the deeper alarm, which is not about this precise scenario at all.
Jacobsen’s chimera is an update of a known Soviet programme whose tools go back half a century. In the past 20 years, the tools for engineering biology, such as gene editing, directed evolution and now AI, have become not merely more powerful but vastly cheaper and easier. Making a protein that seeks out and destroys a cancer cell is, in its essentials, a similar skill to making a viral protein adhere more tightly to the lining of a human nose. That is what ‘dual use’ means.
This is the twist in the tale at the very end. In the Acknowledgements, Jacobsen writes that, through her interviews, she realised that worse scenarios were possible. Bioweapon research is democratising, and bioweapon creation is one thing you definitely do not want democratised. This technological trajectory is the part that the briefers in 2020 had not absorbed, and I suspect most readers have not either.
Here John von Neumann is unavoid-able. The mathematician and physicist titled a 1955 essay of his with a question: ‘Can We Survive Technology?’ He argued that the ‘effectiveness of offensive weapons is such as to stultify all plausible defensive time scales’, with his own Manhattan Project research heavily influencing his thinking. But consider his question in a form he did not have to face. If a person could create an atomic bomb in a basement from raw materials readily available, a nuclear weapon as easy as an IED, could civilisation continue to exist at all? Mercifully, uranium enrichment is hard. How-ever, von Neumann did not foresee biological weapons. The uncomfortable possibility, which the MIT synthetic biologist and gene drive inventor Kevin Esvelt has spent years warning about, detailed in a paper Whitehall ought to read, is that biology imposes no such convenient constraint in ‘a future in which thousands can release new pandemics’ – as the paper is subtitled. The warning is about the direction of travel, not the present state: building such a weapon still demands skill and resources beyond a lone amateur. However, that margin of safety is precisely what is eroding.
Bioweapon creation is one thing you definitely do not want democratised
To her credit, Jacobsen does not dramatise those scenarios in detail. The material is an information hazard. You do not want to inspire a biological Unabomber in the course of warning about him. But this leaves people such as Jacobsen, who want to alert us to dangerous possibilities, in a bind: making the case loudly enough to be heard and in sufficient detail to be credible raises the very risk they are trying to reduce. Jacobsen’s nation-state lab scenario is a floor, not a ceiling.
Which is why the book’s central outcome matters more than any debate about its scenario’s precise plausibility. As I and others have argued, biodefence is primarily a national security problem, not a public health one. Covid showed our looming vulnerability to nuclear-risk-scale weapons from rogue states, terrorists and lone actors.
Britain has refreshed its Biological Security Strategy with a claimed headline £1.5 billion a year, spread across topics varying from bee health to pandemics. However, the Centre for Long-Term Resilience, which helped shape the strategy, has rightly questioned whether this is actually new money at all post-Covid, while key safeguards, such as the screening of synthetic DNA orders, remain voluntary. But what has commanded most attention, resources and time is a lawyer-run inquiry. This is akin to investigating the Challenger disaster by convening barristers to adjudicate the tone of the control room rather than hiring Richard Feynman to find the failed O-ring.
Read this book. It is a better briefing on the problem than the one we received in Downing Street six years ago – and that is not just a compliment to Jacobsen but more an indictment of us.
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