This post was originally published on Audible.com.
Note: Text has been lightly edited and does not match audio exactly.
Kat Johnson: Hi, listeners. It's Kat Johnson, an editor here at Audible, and today I'm speaking with Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author Annie Jacobsen, who's here to talk about her new book, Biological War: A Scenario. Welcome, Annie.
Annie Jacobsen: Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you so much for being here. We are such big fans of your work here at Audible, not least because you narrate all your work yourself. Like your previous book, Nuclear War, Biological War lays out an absolutely nightmarish story. There's something amazing about hearing it in your voice, which I find very soothing, steady, and polished. I just find it an amazing combination. I wanted to know, do you enjoy recording your books? How do you do it? And can you share any highlights from recording?
I love recording my books. Thanks for saying that. One's voice is just kind of the voice. My voice is what I was born with, and so the fact that listeners really not only relate to my telling of the story but seem to really feel comfortable in this very dystopian world that I paint in this book and the previous one, makes me feel even more confident in narrating my own stories.
Oh, that's so great to hear. I think your books are really the definition of “better in audio.” I have a friend who's listened to Nuclear War three times. I'm currently on my second listen of Biological War. I find that in addition to your narration, just listening to these books while you're moving around daily life, walking around a big city, thinking about this potential panic and destruction, is so surreal. I'm curious if you've heard from readers and listeners about the audiobooks, specifically.
People say that same thing, that for some reason it feels a little bit comforting to hear it read by me. I love that you're listening to the book again. It reminds me a bit of my own process as a national security reporter, as a journalist. I do these incredible interviews with subject-matter experts who have been so dedicated to their professions for decades. They are chock-full of information that is mind-boggling. So, my experience sitting with people, sometimes for brief interviews but more often for long series of interviews over and over again, it's almost like I have that same experience that readers do. Because I go back and listen to my interviews and contemplate what has been told to me as part of the process of figuring out how can I convey this information to listeners, to readers, in the most succinct manner, but also the most dramatic? Because let's face it, we're all busy, and the job of the author is to keep the listener-reader engaged.
Yeah, absolutely. You've been writing nonfiction for a long time, including your bestselling histories Operation Paperclip, Area 51, and Surprise, Kill, Vanish. But with your last two books, you're really looking into the future via these "scenarios." Both Nuclear War and Biological War are pure nightmare fuel, but they're also impressively realistic. You speak to scores of experts, including high-ranking politicians and military officials, scientists, journalists, law enforcement, to understand how these situations might play out in real life. How do you strike that balance between information and entertainment, between what's real and what's imagined?
Yes, it's such an incredibly profound conundrum that I face as an author, as a journalist, because the information I learn when I'm dealing with what are called global catastrophic risks—that's what nuclear war presents; that's what biological war presents—these are, as you say, nightmare scenarios. So, how do you balance what essentially boils down to too much information versus, “Okay, reader, listener, you have to know this in order to not only move forward in the story I'm telling you, but to actually lead your life and live your life.” Here's the strange paradox for me, and I do think my readers and listeners get this, is that even though I'm writing these dystopian scenarios, I often am told there is always a sense of hope at the end. That is the individual experience, not the scenario I'm presenting.
That's so interesting. I want to talk to you a little about the ending, too, because I absolutely loved it. But first I want to contrast these two a little, because I thought Nuclear War was 10 out of 10 scary, and then I listened to Biological War. For me, there was a little comfort in the idea that in a nuclear attack, like you said in the book, best-case scenario, you're just directly under the blast and then it's over. Biological War is a different situation. It's more prolonged. It plays on our visceral fears of infection and disease. And that's not even what the military considers to be the real threat, which is chaos, panic, and anarchy. Can you tell us a little bit about why that is? Why is that the bigger threat?
That was one of the most stunning realizations for me as a reporter. Unlike all of the other war scenarios or historical experiences I've dealt with in reporting and been told by sources, bio has a component that none of the other ones share, that you spoke of so clearly, which is fear of infection. That is a phrase that repeats throughout Pentagon war gaming whenever one is looking at these declassified scenarios that are actually gamed out at the Pentagon. In other words, fear of infection, that the individual people impacted will become part of the spiraling, is something that is not quite a component of other warfare.
“How can I convey this information to listeners, to readers, in the most succinct manner, but also the most dramatic? Because let's face it, we're all busy, and the job of the author is to keep the listener-reader engaged.”
I mean, you can think about it in really visceral terms. If someone's shooting at you on the battlefield, it presents one kind of fear. If you're a civilian and you are consumed with the threat that you might get infected or be infected, that is a whole new set of problems. And that is precisely what leads to anarchy, chaos, panic, and ultimately, for Pentagon war gamers, insurrection inside the United States.
Yikes. And biological weapons, for the reasons that we're talking about, are considered so dangerous and evil, they're actually illegal. Yet the threat is real because there's this loophole in the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty. Can you talk a little bit about that loophole and what that means in real terms? How many bioweapons labs are there? How much should this keep us up at night?
It is really profound to think about that nuclear weapons are not illegal, at least to the five nations that hold them legally. Then again, there are nine nuclear-armed nations, so try and wrap your head around that. But they are not illegal, and there is a component of nuclear war called deterrence, which allegedly keeps nuclear war from happening, and so far has managed to hold. Biological weapons are in an entirely different category. As you say, they are illegal. They were made illegal by a treaty signed by all the nations in 1972. So, because biological weapons are illegal, it makes for a very dangerous situation. Because they're illegal, no one's supposed to have them. And yet, it is known that nations do have illegal biological weapons programs.
One of the leading reasons for that is this tiny carve-out that exists in the treaty, which is that nations are allowed to store and work on incredibly dangerous pathogens for prophylactic purposes. It's a fancy way of saying medical research. So, that gray area—which can also be called genetic engineering, it can also be called gain-of-function—that area has created this very dangerous paradox of what defines biological weapons engineering and what defines advanced research toward some kind of medical countermeasure. And because there are no treaties that are enforceable, no one really knows what is going on inside these thousands of laboratories that exist across the world.
Thousands? That's scary. The virus at the center of your scenario is a biologically engineered form of pneumonic plague, which is 100 percent fatal if a person doesn't receive antibiotics within 24 hours. But it's been designed with this nasty little secret inside, which is a neurological disease triggered by antibiotics, so you get two diseases in one. And then I love the addition of euphoria to make it faster and easier to spread, so in the early stages people feel great. You have this incredible opening of this guy dancing in a nightclub because he feels amazing, and how many people he can infect that way. How did you land on this particular concoction and decide ‘this is the bug for my book’?
Everything in my scenarios, the important plot points in particular, are tied to science fact, not science fiction. They are tied to historical precedent and to things that the Pentagon and pandemic planners seriously worry about. And that is the euphoria component. It is incredibly dark and nefarious.
Before I get to that, I'm going to make one tiny correction. Dangerous pathogen involves two particular components. It can be a virus or it can be a bacteria, and so that is different from germs. We all have germs in the gut and we talk about that. But a pathogen can give a human a disease. Viruses are generally treated with vaccines and other medical countermeasures. Bacteria have long been treated with antibiotics. The plague pathogen that I use in the scenario is historically tied to some very important events, and that's why I use it. Plague is a bacteria. So, the bubonic plague of the 14th century, the Black Death that we've all heard of or maybe even read about in history, killed 150 million people. It killed almost half of Europe, a bacteria, before the invention of antibiotics. So, plague has long been seen as a pandemic of the past.
But what I write about in the book that has historical precedence is that during the Soviets’ last decades of existence, the last sort of years of the Cold War, we now know the Soviets had an illegal biological weapons program. After signing that treaty, they began to work even more aggressively on biological weapons. The centerpiece of their program was pneumonic plague. Pneumonic plague is the dark-hearted uncle or stepfather of bubonic plague, which is spread by the bite of a flea. Pneumonic is, think pneumonia, think the lungs, think airborne. And that's where you get incredibly dangerous. That's where you get into pandemic potential.
“Here's the strange paradox for me, and I do think my readers and listeners get this, is that even though I'm writing these dystopian scenarios, I often am told there is always a sense of hope at the end.”
So, the euphoria: One of the things I always do is interview the world's subject-matter experts on a given subject. So, for plague, I looked to Dr. Henry Heine, a former US Army doctor at America's only BSL-4 lab that the Pentagon has, at Fort Detrick. Dr. Heine was working on plague to try and find a medical countermeasure. He's the one who told me that during the Soviet era they had genetically modified plague in the most nefarious of ways. They had inserted that gene for euphoria you reference into the front end of the bacteria.
You might say, "Well, why on earth would you do that?" When a person gets sick, when a person is near death, as pneumonic plague makes you very quickly, you're going to go home, get under the covers, and not infect a lot of people. But if that euphoria gene is there, the opposite will happen. You will have a desire to go out and socialize, and you might even, as you say, wind up in a disco with a lot of people, a superspreader event, which is precisely how I begin the scenario.
Wow. I mean, that is really diabolical. It actually makes me think, there's a book called All Better Now by Neal Shusterman. It's a YA book about a virus that actually makes people really happy. And it just makes me think, couldn't we design viruses that were good? That we would want?
It's interesting how science fiction and science fact are rapidly becoming scarily aligned with one another. That has to do with the age in which we live, where science and technology are essentially outpacing democracy, outpacing law enforcement. If there's any kind of hopeful component of my book, I think at the end, it's where I say in my acknowledgements, the point is not panic as much as pressure. That collectively, as a society, it's really valuable to look at precisely that, that idea of the moment in which we live. We need to really examine science and technology right now.
Right. I'm sure you saw the other day, there was the New York Times article about how scientists taught AI to translate DNA patterns into recipes for entirely new viruses. And 16 of them were viable. What did you think about that news?
I mean, it's exactly a perfect example of why we need to have eyes on it. I think that has to do with journalism at this moment in time, really having eyes on that as a concept and bringing that information to the public. Whereas before it might have been interpreted as scaremongering or “Why are you telling us that?” Well, those days are over. We now know that a biological catastrophe that impacts everyone in the world and kills millions, or tens of millions, of people is no longer theoretical. It is very important to have a calm but measured approach to facing the facts about the world in which we live.
It feels like, with all the technology we have, even naturally occurring diseases are just keeping pace with us. We've got this cyclospora lettuce outbreak, Alpha-gal syndrome, Legionnaire's disease has made a comeback. How much is this research helping with that? And how do naturally occurring viruses stack up against engineered disease?
You've raised an important point. People have asked me, "Why didn't you use an AI-enabled biological pathogen as a launch point in your book, since that's the greatest threat we all face right now?" And the six CEOs of the AI companies echo that and have written about that publicly. The reason I didn't do that is because I wanted to show that Mother Nature's pathogens, viruses, and bacteria, genetically modified with a few tweaks in a lab by scientists, is enough to cause what pandemic planners worry about is called a near-extinction level event. So, you don't even need to put AI-enabled recipes into the mix. It is incredibly dangerous to be doing the kind of genetic modification that has been going on.
Now, with that said, the other thing people often ask me is, "Well, what about zoonotic events?" That's what they're called when there's a spillover event, if something actually comes from nature and makes its way into the human population. My feeling about that is it's much more containable, meaning that has been going on in evolution forever. I remember being in high school and reading Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague. It's this 900-page tome on zoonotic spillover events, and this is 25, 35 years ago. It's a brilliant book, but you have a sense of these incredible virus hunters out there trying to get a handle on how man and animals coexist and the different environmental situations that make zoonotic spillover events plausible. But it, to my eye, has a feel of manageability because man has been dealing with this for thousands of years.
“We now know that a biological catastrophe that impacts everyone in the world and kills millions, or tens of millions, of people is no longer theoretical.”
It's the science that is really the dangerous part. It is the genetic modification of dangerous pathogens to make them more virulent. That means more deadly. Make them more transmissible. That means take something that was maybe spread through droplet transmission and making it purely airborne, as in aerosolized. And then adding those tweaks to defeat a pre-existing medical countermeasure. I mean, imagine plague let loose on the world where people believe that if they take antibiotics, they will be saved—this is the scenario I tell—and instead, the antibiotic not only doesn't work, but kills them in an even more horrific way. I mean, that is the true nightmare scenario. It has historical precedent. It's what the Soviets were after. The Soviet defector scientists themselves told our CIA officers, whom I interviewed: the plan was to kill all the people in the United States, march in, and leave the infrastructure intact.
It's so chilling, and we wouldn't have known about it had there not been defectors. Spoiler alert, I really did love the way this book ended with the president in an underground bunker listening to the Kinks and kind of not knowing if he's speaking into the void. It reminded me of how banal details, like the recent revelation that Trump evaded an assassination attempt in a catering truck, are so vivid to us. So I'm wondering how you landed on that ending.
Thank you for that. Thank you for loving that ending because I do, too. I'm going to set this up a little bit by sharing a part of my journalist-reporter's journey getting there, which is that one of the things I do to try and figure out the scenario, how it would unfold, is I just read everything I possibly can before I'm interviewing people. And a set of documents that I was always looking at were these declassified Pentagon war games that go through catastrophic biological incidents or attacks, lab leak or an attack, and likewise, those that get run for pandemic planners, CDC, HHS, DHS, FEMA. There are many of them on the public record. I list them in my notes. People can read them. They are fascinating. They are illuminating. You can learn so much from them. They involve different pathogens with different case fatality rates. The course of the scenario runs either over days, weeks, months, sometimes years. But they all end the same way. They end when anarchy happens. It is literally like, “Anarchy breaks out, game over.” Period. That is the end of the exercise.
As a reporter, it was like, "Okay, clearly I need to know what happens the day after anarchy, because I know enough about national security reporting that the government has a plan. They're just not telling us." It took me a lot to find that answer, but I ultimately got it from President Obama's former FEMA chief, Craig Fugate. Fugate had allowed me to interview him for Nuclear War, and it was incredibly interesting to learn from him about FEMA's planning for nuclear war. In essence, what he said to me was, "There is no planning because everyone will be dead." I mean, the exact quotes are in the book, but it's very close to that. And so, to your point of, the flash happens, we're all gone, it's like, okay, game over.
“Everything in my scenarios, the important plot points in particular, are tied to science fact, not science fiction.”
But Fugate explained to me that is not the case with biological catastrophes. He calls them a “maximum of maximums event.” And he is the individual who signed off on the most current plan I'm about to tell you about, which is a classified plan with an unclassified name. It's called the Devolution Plan. It is, in essence, a program whereby a secret pre-selected group of individuals will get word that the Devolution Plan is happening, and they will immediately leave Washington, DC. They know who they are—they have signed contracts, they have rehearsed the Devolution Plan. They will leave, they will go to underground bunkers, also classified, across the United States, called hot sites, warm sites, and cold sites. And they will wait out the anarchy and the insurrection to be able to reconstitute the government at some future date after tens of millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans die.
This is an astonishing concept to deal with. So, in my interviews with Craig Fugate, he took me, and I take readers, up to the edge about what can legally be known about that Devolution Plan, but I was particularly curious about the president. And, spoiler alert, I was really fascinated to learn, which of course makes sense, the president doesn't go off to one of the hot sites, the Raven Rock, the Mount Weather, one of these underground facilities that has up to a thousand or more people working. President doesn't go there. Think about the chances of infection. He goes somewhere entirely alone. Those details were both horrific and kind of exhilarating to report, because you realize at the end of the day, if all you are is alone with a gas mask on and a team of Secret Service agents outside the door and the military aide with the nuclear football, I mean, what does it really even matter at that point?
Right, and how many people have the constitution to survive that and can survive that? It's absolutely wild to think about.
It also begs the question, like, okay, so wait a minute, the Devolution Plan exists. There's no plan for us. It's just anarchy and insurrection. Why aren't we demanding transparency, accountability? How about we learn from all of this so that, in the event of a biological catastrophe, people are better prepared?
I certainly hope so. You're a writer, not a policymaker, but your books have been so impactful. I think since both of these scenario books came out, you've been invited to speak at the White House, the Vatican, the UN. How surprised were you by the response? And what impacts of the books have been most satisfying for you?
I am a journalist who is so grateful to be an author that is read by a lot of people. I am always focused on telling a really dramatic story that impacts the individual reader or listener. So, to have Nuclear War: A Scenario be embraced internationally and by policymakers, to be invited to these very interesting places around the world that I had never imagined that I would be invited to, like the Vatican, like the United Nations, to talk specifically about what was in my book, that was really something. That was astonishing.
“As a reporter, it was like, ‘Okay, clearly I need to know what happens the day after anarchy, because I know enough about national security reporting that the government has a plan. They're just not telling us.’”
But the takeaway, I think, that perhaps is valuable to the public, to all of us, is that it comes from something that was said to me by one of the diplomats at the United Nations. After I spoke to the hundred and some odd, 183 diplomats, I gave them a 16-minute condensed version of my previous book, Nuclear War. There was a small reception afterwards, and one of the diplomats who's responsible for writing one of the nuclear treaties said to me that what he and the other subject-matter experts—because they are truly subject-matter experts on nuclear—what they had forgotten was to be able to have regular people relate to the threat, and that I had done that in writing the drama of it. That is, I think, very interesting for two reasons. One, when something is relatable, it's easier to want to deal with it. This idea of esoteric science or esoteric policy really doesn't benefit any of us. That things can be really broken down into really simple terms. That's what I had hoped to do with Nuclear, and that's what I'm hoping to do with Biological.
Yeah, and they're both so cinematic. It really comes alive in your head as you're listening. For Nuclear War, there's a Denis Villeneuve adaptation coming out that I'm very excited about. Do you have any details you can share?
Well, my last conversation with Denis Villeneuve was him reminding me that he is under contract to do the new Bond film. And then next on his list would be Nuclear War: A Scenario. That, I think, is just so incredible. At the United Nations and at the Vatican and other places, it was not lost on them that Denis Villeneuve has been working on this book, in essence, since before it published. That's when we first began our conversations. And so to have the diplomats say on that open floor of an open mic, "We need that film." I shared that with Denis and he agreed with me. Because if you go back in time to this ABC movie in the 1980s called The Day After, I was in high school, and it was a movie that showed nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was watched by 100 million Americans.
Wow.
But what was really incredible about that is it was watched by one very important American named President Ronald Reagan. Reagan saw that film and he wrote in his White House journal that he became greatly depressed. And because he felt that way, Ronald Reagan, who had been a nuclear hawk before that moment—he believed more nuclear weapons made America more safe—and a film, a TV film, changed his mind. And because of it, he reached out to Gorbachev and said, "We must get rid of these giant arsenals." As a result, the world went from 70,000 nuclear weapons in 1986 to approximately 12,300 that we have today. That's how impactful storytelling is.
Again, it's like you're just telling an amazing story, and you have so much expertise and so many great sources, but at the end of the day, it's like these stories are really changing hearts and minds in a way that I think politics and science would struggle to do. It's a great service that you're doing, and also very entertaining as well. So, is there anything that you're working on next that you can share with your fans on Audible? Do you have another scenario in the works, perhaps, or anything else you can share?
I'm extremely focused on getting the message out about bio because it seems to me like such an extraordinary threat. I mean, that document I referred to that says that bio is the greatest overall threat is enough to keep you up at night, because the low barrier for entry is deeply concerning to me as a mother not just as a national security reporter. I feel like the time is now to really lean into looking at AI-enabled bio.
When I began reporting the book, the threats of AI mixed with bio were nothing compared to what they are now, and that speaks to the speed at which AI is advancing. When you consider that the six CEOs of the six major AI companies themselves have expressed serious concern about the possibility of synthetic biological weapons, which is what the New York Times article refers to, creating a virus from nothing, that is not something that neither the scientific community nor the human body can handle, because there is no precedent. And so the time is now to really look at bio.
Will I write another scenario in the future? I have a lot of sources who tend to whisper in my ear, "You need to write about this." I really will take all of those ideas and let them filter out as time progresses and come to the idea of, “Okay, what is it that we are really facing next?”
Yeah, that low barrier to entry is a really important point and really terrifying. Is there anything else you would want to share with your fans on Audible before you go?
I'm fascinated by the way in which new technologies have this incredibly positive effect that you can't imagine when they're first happening, and I'm going to speak to doing audiobooks specifically. My first book, Area 51, I had information in there that had never been reported before, and so the book was embargoed, meaning it was kept kind of in a safe and no one could know about it. There were no advanced copies that went out. It literally published and that was the first anyone saw of it.
“When I began reporting the book, the threats of AI mixed with bio were nothing compared to what they are now, and that speaks to the speed at which AI is advancing.”
So, when it came time to do the audiobook, and this is back in 2011 when audiobooks were not nearly as popular as they are now, the publisher faced a conundrum, because having an actor or a professional audio recorder read the book would open up the lane for other people to know about it, and they really wanted to keep the lid on it. So, they said to me, "Annie, how would you feel about recording the book?" I kind of didn't have a choice. I said, "Sure, I'll do it." And so I did. I look back at that experience, and it was really hard. I had no experience. And I guess this is kind of a shout-out to people who are afraid of doing something but do it anyway. The whole team, the engineering team, was so generous with me. When I would get what I would call “audio snow blind,” you know, where you're reading along and you're not accustomed to reading eight hours a day of your own material, they were really gentle with me and would be like, "Annie, take a break.”
The audiobook ended up taking, I want to say, two and a half weeks to record. Now I can record an audiobook in under a week, essentially, because eight books later, you become really good at something. I do also notice that some of my listeners comment exactly that way. Like, they notice my progression, how I've gotten better at reading over the years. I think as a mom, I just love to share that, because nothing starts out perfectly, but you can get there through a lot of hard work.
That's right, and that's so human. It's so great to hear these books in your voice. I think in nonfiction, books don't go as viral as they do in the fiction space, and you're one of a handful of nonfiction writers who kind of blow up. To hear it in your voice is just incredible, and like you said, I think you've just gotten better and better and better.
Listeners, Biological War: A Scenario, written and read by Annie Jacobsen, is available on Audible now.
