Could the world survive biological war?

Earlier this year, at the urging of a family member who might not have had my ability to sleep at night foremost in his mind, I picked up a copy of Nuclear War: A Scenario by the American author and journalist Annie Jacobsen. I was aware of the buzz around it. On its publication in 2024, it had stirred up debates around the pros and very significant cons of nuclear armament, and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize. But almost as soon as I started reading, I had to put it down. The opening pages, in which Jacobsen describes the aftermath of a nuclear strike on a US city, were so distressing that my nervous system was still in fight-or-flight mode the following morning. Months went by before I gathered the courage to pick it up again.

The book, which I then proceeded to devour, eyes bulging in horrified fascination, imagines a situation in which North Korea fires a nuclear missile without warning at the continental United States. Jacobsen guides us through what happens next, tracking the path of the missile and America’s response to it on a minute-by-minute basis. The scenario is speculative but she intercuts it with facts gleaned from extensive research and conversations with architects of America’s nuclear weapons programme. Despite these interruptions it rattles along like an airport thriller, speeding you white-knuckled towards the bleakest outcomes imaginable.

Now, as though we haven’t suffered enough, Jacobsen is back with another scenario that promises to be even more ghastly and perversely thrilling than the last. “New book coming, guaranteed to horrify,” she wrote on X last December. “‘Unlike nuclear war,’” she went on, quoting former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, “biological war will be ‘a long, painful, slow death… deeply nightmarish. People doing inhuman things, just to survive.’”

The inciting incident this time is a night-time explosion at a biological research institute in Siberia named Vector – a real place, unfortunately – where Russia is believed to be illegally tinkering with the world’s deadliest germs, those that cause Ebola, Marburg, smallpox. What gets out in this lab-leak scenario is genetically modified plague. Plain old Yersinia pestis was responsible for wiping out up to half the population of Europe in the 14th century. This weaponised version is much, much nastier.

Biological warfare is not a new phenomenon. Assyrians were poisoning enemy wells with ergot back in the sixth century BC. In 1346, during a siege on the Crimean city of Kaffa, Mongol soldiers reportedly catapulted plague-infested corpses over the city walls to neutralise the holdouts. But it’s in the past half century or so, with the advent of genetic engineering, that the means of waging germ warfare have really revved up. In the 1970s and 80s, despite an international moratorium, the Soviet Union vastly expanded its bioweapons programme, ushering in strains of existing diseases with entirely new pathogenic properties. “It was our Manhattan Project,” one of the programme’s directors later said.

The engineered plague in Jacobsen’s scenario is full of unpleasant surprises. The transmission rate has been increased to chickenpox levels. The fatality rate is 100%, with no known cure. Worse still, it’s spliced with the DNA of a second killer germ which, when triggered, leads to a whole new set of profoundly unwelcome symptoms. To complete the cocktail, the weapon has been engineered to deliver a neurochemical high before the symptoms hit, so that the victim has the urge to go out and socialise. It sounds like science fiction but, as Jacobsen notes, all these modifications were realised decades ago in Soviet labs. Presumably, these microscopic horrors still exist.

In Nuclear War, the reader watches through the eyes of US agency chiefs and military commanders as the lone North Korean missile arcs across the Pacific towards its target. The effect is eerily spellbinding (a film adaptation is being developed by Dune director Denis Villeneuve). In this book, the journey of the Franken-plague is a lot messier. When containment efforts in Siberia fail, one carrier takes it to Los Angeles, where he unwittingly unleashes it on the homeless encampments on Skid Row. Another infects a planeload of passengers en route to Dallas. Still other carriers head for a cruise ship in the South Pacific and a crowded gym in the Dominican Republic.

None of these destinations are random: Jacobsen has chosen each one to pinpoint specific weaknesses in our pandemic defences, which, as Covid showed, are already ragged (and which are fraying even more in the US under Trump). You can see why, for example, she wanted to highlight the fact that the CDC’s biosurveillance programme doesn’t collect data from American homeless shelters and clinics – it’s a ridiculous oversight. But all this string-pulling detracts from the realism of her scenario.

As it dawns on US leaders that they’re dealing with a plague outbreak, the vast machinery underneath them cranks into gear. This is familiar territory for Jacobsen. Her previous books, including Operation Paperclip and the Pulitzer-nominated The Pentagon’s Brain, shed light on the often secretive workings of the US state – its covert research agencies and hush-hush intelligence programmes. In Nuclear War, we learn about the various protocols that arise when the country comes under attack. None of them contribute towards a happy outcome for the world at large. The same is true in Biological War, but for reasons of insufficiency and sluggishness rather than overkill. In the previous book they were well integrated into the narrative, but here the litany of military departments and disaster response agencies, each with its own stockpile of acronyms, has a clogging effect.

To offset this, Jacobsen adopts the clipped style of a screenwriter (she has written for the TV show Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan), which keeps the story moving but lacks elegance. Longer sentences are sledgehammered into fragments. Cliches are indulged (people have sinking feelings in the pit of their stomachs; a “cash cow” has “everybody wanting a piece of the pie”). Nuclear War had the same hyper-terse style but also some lyrical passages of genuine power. The writing here feels rushed.

Jacobsen doesn’t hold back on the grisliness. You’d expect stomach-churning details in a book about biological warfare, but the relish with which she describes the effects of plague on the human body, and on the fabric of society, feels a little too evident. The frequent lurches between bureaucratic minutiae and all-out body horror has a disorienting effect. They also diminish the sense that we’re reading a sober assessment of a profoundly serious issue.

And it is serious. The threat doesn’t start and end with Russia. Before September 2001, the American government operated two Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratories, where the very deadliest pathogens are contained for research. After the 9/11 attacks, the numbers surged. According to Jacobsen, there are now 110 BSL-4 labs in 34 countries worldwide, many of which are presumed to be experimenting with dangerous pathogens. This activity may be for defensive rather than offensive purposes, to better prepare for a bioweapons attack, but what’s the difference if an accidental leak sets them loose?

Recent advances in AI, which could help turn anyone’s basement into a mini bioweapons lab, only add to the urgency. Jacobsen’s book may not provide the most level-headed or fluently written account of what a full-scale biological war might look like. But it gives us more than enough detail to understand that it wouldn’t be pretty.

Biological War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen is published by Torva (£22). Order a copy for £18.70 (15% off RRP) at The Observer Shop. Delivery charges may apply

Photograph by Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation