Biological War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen (2026)

Biological War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen

Annie Jacobsen has built an entire career around an uncomfortable question: what is the worst thing the American national-security apparatus knows and isn't saying? In "Area 51," in "Operation Paperclip," in "Phenomena," and above all in "Nuclear War: A Scenario" — the book that catapulted her name to a mass audience in 2024 and now has a film adaptation on the way — Jacobsen has perfected a genre of her own: the minute-by-minute nonfiction docudrama, populated by retired generals, scientists with access to top-secret facilities, and officials who speak with the candor of people who no longer have anything to lose. "Biological War: A Scenario" applies that same narrative machinery to a different object: not the bomb, but the germ.

The result is a book read with held breath and closed with a sense of moral vertigo, but one that also reveals, more clearly than its nuclear predecessor, the limits of the Jacobsen method.

The premise is deceptively simple. At the Vector Institute in Koltsovo, Siberia — the Russian maximum-containment facility that in real life suffered an actual explosion in 2019, though without any pathogen leak — an accident releases a genetically modified strain of plague: transmissible person to person, engineered to defeat existing antibiotics, and, in a twist that only nonfiction can get away with because it sounds invented, programmed to induce euphoria during its early incubation hours, so that the infected, far from isolating, go out dancing, traveling, spreading it further. From there, Jacobsen deploys her narrative stopwatch: Day One, Day Two, Day Three, all the way to a Day Six in which Washington activates the Devolution protocol and, in effect, declares martial law. An epilogue, titled with bleak precision "Biological Twilight," jumps years ahead to show a country turned into a permanent occupation zone, governed by those with the discipline never to remove their gas mask.

As in "Nuclear War," the evidentiary apparatus is the book's true star. Jacobsen interviewed an extraordinary roster: a former secretary of defense, a former Senate majority leader who was a target of the 2001 anthrax attacks, senior USAMRIID officials, White House pandemic advisors, CIA officers specializing in weapons of mass destruction, and even OpenAI's chief executive, brought in to discuss the risk that artificial intelligence could lower the cost of designing pathogens. That source list is not decoration; it is the argument. Jacobsen does not claim this scenario will happen; she claims that every link in the chain — from the design of a plague with a euphoria gene to the existence of a government "Devolution" plan inherited from the Cold War — is documented, tested, or confirmed by someone who was there. The cumulative effect is devastating precisely because nothing feels invented.

And yet that is also where the problem begins. The book's strength — its obsessive commitment to verifiable detail — is also its narrative limit. Jacobsen is not, and does not aim to be, a prose stylist; her instrument is accumulation, not introspection. The short, almost telegraphic sentences that convey urgency in the prologue start to feel formulaic after three hundred pages. In the literary sense, the book has no characters: it has functions. The "American traveler" who opens the scene in a Frankfurt nightclub is a narrative vector, not a person; he exists so the reader understands how a pathogen spreads, not so the reader cares what happens to him. This is not necessarily a flaw — Jacobsen writes warning, not tragedy — but it does explain why "Biological War," for all its erudition, never reaches the emotional weight of, say, John Hersey's "Hiroshima," the book to which it is inevitably compared and of which it is, in a sense, a direct heir: both use documentary testimony to make the invisible visible, but Hersey lingered on bodies; Jacobsen lingers on systems.

That privileging of the systemic over the human has a logic consistent with the book's stated purpose. Jacobsen does not want the reader to weep for the Frankfurt traveler; she wants the reader to understand how the scaffolding meant to protect us works — and fails: the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, which bans the development of such weapons but lacks any verification mechanism; the Strategic National Stockpile of antibiotics, insufficient by design for a nation of 340 million; the twelve-hour "Push Packages" that never arrive on time; and, at the book's climax, the Devolution plan — that secret program, active since the Net Evaluation Subcommittee of the 1950s, which transfers executive power to a preselected group of officials once the regular government can no longer function. It is in these pages, more than in the contagion scenes, that the book reaches its sharpest clarity: the revelation that Washington has rehearsed its own disappearance for eight decades under a succession of names — Plan C and Plan D, Operation Garden Plot, Rex 84 — is, on its own, more unsettling than any clinical description of pneumonic plague.

Where the book loses some of its rigor is in how it manages scientific uncertainty. Jacobsen interviews enough microbiologists and intelligence officials to convey the impression that her scenario is, if not inevitable, at least highly probable; but the book rarely pauses to explain how much of what it describes — the genetic engineering of a euphoria gene, the guaranteed hundred-percent lethality, the speed of spread — rests on documented evidence from historical (chiefly Soviet) programs, and how much is reasoned extrapolation toward what synthetic biology could plausibly do today. The distinction matters, and Jacobsen blurs it deliberately: it is the same rhetorical device that made "Nuclear War" so effective — and so debated — where critics noted that the author presented estimates and classified protocols with the same narrative authority as confirmed fact. Here the problem is larger, because biology, unlike nuclear physics, admits far more degrees of technical uncertainty, and the book tends to resolve that uncertainty always in the most catastrophic direction.

Still, it would be unfair to read "Biological War" only as alarmism. At bottom, the book is an argument about the asymmetry between two kinds of weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear weapons, Jacobsen reminds us, require fissile materials almost impossible to obtain outside state control; biological weapons, by contrast, are increasingly accessible to actors with minimal training, thanks to the very tools — gene editing, synthetic biology, artificial intelligence — that could also be used for early epidemiological surveillance. That double edge, laid out in more detail in the closing acknowledgments than in the body of the book, is Jacobsen's real argument, and it is a shame it is relegated to the epilogue rather than structuring the central narrative. The concept of "mirror life" — synthetic organisms with a mirror-reversed biology that the human immune system could not recognize — appears only at the end, almost as a terrifying afterthought, when it might deserve to be the book's true center of gravity.

Jacobsen's prose, when it steps outside stopwatch mode, can lapse into a somewhat solemn didacticism: her interspersed "history lessons" — on the 1988 accident at Vector, on the 1925 Geneva Protocol, on thalidomide — serve a legitimate pedagogical function but interrupt the narrative pulse the author works so hard to sustain. And the epilogue, with its imagery of mass funeral pyres, permanent gas masks, and a humanity reduced to "Machiavellians, solipsists, and psychopaths," edges toward apocalyptic kitsch, even though the intent — to warn, not to entertain — is genuine and, judging by the sources cited, shared by a good part of the American national-security establishment.

Does the book work? As a piece of public education about a real and underrated danger, without question: few works of nonfiction have made so visible, for a general audience, the fragility of the international regime governing biological weapons and the existence of government-continuity mechanisms most citizens don't know exist. As literature, the book is less ambitious than its material deserves: Jacobsen prefers the accumulation of testimony to sustained moral reflection, and the reader ends up knowing a great deal about the "how" of biological warfare and relatively little about the human "why" that would make it possible. It is, in sum, a book that more than fulfills its function as a warning — and will likely, like its nuclear predecessor, insert itself into the public debate on biosecurity — but that leaves unwritten the larger literary work this material, in other hands, might have produced.

It is worth pausing on the book's architecture itself, since much of its persuasive power lies there. Jacobsen organizes the story as a series of almost cinematic geographic cuts: from a laboratory in Siberia to the geostationary belt where a U.S. satellite detects the explosion's thermal flash, from there to National Reconnaissance Office headquarters in Virginia, and from there to the National Security Agency in Maryland. This montage technique — already tested in "Nuclear War" — has the advantage of dramatizing, without inventing any dialogue, the real mechanics of satellite surveillance and signals intelligence. The reader learns, almost without noticing, how the American early-warning system for a possible chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear incident actually works. It is a considerable feat of popularization, achieved with the same tools as a Tom Clancy thriller, but without fiction's license: every agency, every acronym, every procedure exists and has been described, with nuance, by someone who worked there.

The book also devotes considerable space — perhaps the most unsettling material in the entire volume, though it arrives almost as a marginal note in the acknowledgments — to the relationship between artificial intelligence and the falling cost of pathogen design. The presence of Sam Altman among the interviewed sources is no accident: Jacobsen wants to register that the same computational tools that could help detect an outbreak in its first hours — genomic surveillance, wastewater analysis, the early-warning systems companies like Palantir or Biobot Analytics are building — are, in theory, the same tools that could help a malicious actor design a more lethal variant. This technological ambivalence, which in another author's essay might have been the book's central axis, is here compressed into a few closing pages, as if the author had decided, at the last moment, that the reader had already absorbed enough pessimism for one sitting.

Compared with "Nuclear War," the book on biological weapons has a structural advantage: disease, unlike the instantaneous detonation of an intercontinental ballistic missile, allows for a slower narrative unfolding, with more room for dramatic irony. The scene that opens the book — an American traveler dancing euphorically in a Frankfurt nightclub while genetically modified plague multiplies in his lungs — is, in that sense, the book's best passage: it combines technical detail (the explanation of why a euphoria gene inserted into Yersinia pestis would, from a cold military logic, maximize contagion) with an almost Hitchcockian tension between what the character feels and what the reader knows awaits him. It is a pity that level of dramatic tension isn't sustained with the same intensity across the nearly five hundred pages that follow, where the focus shifts, with increasing frequency, from infected bodies to bureaucratic org charts.

The epilogue, "Biological Twilight," deserves separate comment because it reveals both the project's ambitions and its limitations. Set years after the initial outbreak, it describes a country turned into a permanent military occupation zone, a world where, by the book's unforgiving logic, it is not the fittest who survive but the most disciplined: those who never remove their gas masks, those who accept living and dying alone. The tone inevitably recalls Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," though without its verbal economy or moral ambiguity: where McCarthy lets the reader complete the horror through silence, Jacobsen prefers to enumerate it. The line that closes that section — the idea that biological weapons turn the living into monsters and the dead into relics — neatly condenses the book's moral argument, but also exemplifies its tendency to favor the ringing declaration over suggestive ambiguity.

In the end, "Biological War: A Scenario" holds up less as a work of literature than as a document of public warning, and on that register it succeeds handsomely. Jacobsen has once again done exceptional reporting work: she has gotten dozens of officials, scientists, and military officers to speak with a degree of candor that rarely reaches the general public, and she has organized that material into a narrative that, despite its predictable stylistic stumbles, is almost impossible to put down halfway through. If the book doesn't reach the literary depth of its best reference points — Hersey, McCarthy — that is because it doesn't aim to: its ambition lies elsewhere, more civic than aesthetic, and in that more modest but no less urgent ambition, it triumphs without reservation.