After Catastrophe of Covid, Imagine How Much Worse ‘Biological War’ Could Prove

Three months before 9/11, some former Cabinet-level officials and subject-matter experts met near Washington to conduct a war game testing the nation’s ability to respond to a biological weapons attack. The postulated weapon was a smallpox pathogen.This exercise assumed that a Russian scientist, working at a lab in Siberia, sold smallpox to Al Qaeda. The game, code-named Dark Winter, began with the airborne pathogen — which incubates for about 12 days — released in Atlanta, Oklahoma City and Philadelphia. Smallpox, which had killed perhaps 300 million worldwide in the 20th century, was declared eliminated by 1980, so there were no substantial vaccine supplies. Infections spread exponentially, with a 30 percent fatality rate, collapsing health care systems nationwide and igniting violent disorders.After 25 years of scientific advances, Annie Jacobsen says, biological war today could be immeasurably worse, with pathogens out there that have a 100 percent fatality rate. The only recent book more disturbing than Ms. Jacobsen’s previous one, “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” is her new one, “Biological War: A Scenario.”A reporter and historian, Ms. Jacobsen specializes in hypothetical catastrophes, including one made possible by a scientific advance capable of life-enhancing blessings. It is recombinant DNA, a.k.a. genetic engineering.This enables “gain-of-function” research, which American funding supported at Wuhan, China, where a lab leak might have unleashed Covid-19. Such research gives a virus or bacterium new abilities — to spread faster, infect easier, evade immunity and live longer in the environment. Such research can enable scientists to develop defenses against a biological accident or attack. Yet, Ms. Jacobsen says, subject-matter experts told her it “is indistinguishable from illegal biological weapons work.”She says the rapid worldwide expansion of laboratories conducting gain-of-function experiments has been “an American-led, post-9/11 affair.” She does not condemn this, but she wants readers to understand the implications of what the first Homeland Security secretary, Tom Ridge, and Senator Joe Lieberman wrote in 2018: “Some of the biggest threats to the nation come from the smallest organisms on the planet.”Ms. Jacobsen’s scenario envisions a leak from a Russian lab in Siberia. It lets loose a pathogen genetically engineered for hypervirulence in human-to-human transmission. And designed to produce in the unwitting infected not plague’s natural lethargy but a brief burst of euphoria — hence hyperactive socializing.The biological weapon that Ms. Jacobsen imagines, based on her research among American experts, is a living munition that delivers a silent, odorless, invisible, airborne, self-replicating, disease-causing organism. “Forty thousand plague bacteria can,” Mr. Jacobsen says, “fit side by side on the head of a pin.” As few as 1,000 of them infecting one sailor can, within a few days, quickly neutralize an aircraft carrier with a full load displacement of 100,000 tons and a crew of 4,500.Ms. Jacobsen’s Russian lab leak quickly infects a few tourists, business travelers and others who, suspecting nothing for 24 hours, avail themselves of an efficient driver of modern pandemics — air travel. They disperse through, for example, the Frankfurt and Dallas Fort Worth airports (170,000 and 200,000 travelers a day, respectively). Infections increase exponentially.Scarcities — of water, food, medicine — produce panic. “Conspiracy makes sense,”Ms. Jacobsen writes, “when nothing else does.” Confronted with the inexplicable, the public becomes susceptible to explanations (rumors of conspiracies) that cause the evaporation of trust, society’s glue. Some product of gain-of-function research, says Ms. Jacobsen, “could be twenty-first-century humans’ last invention.”Ms. Jacobsen reminds us that in the 14th century, a pandemic killed between one-third and one-half of Europe’s population. If you think humanity’s subsequent political maturation has matched its galloping scientific sophistication, look around.Because the cultural and social dynamics of biological warfare are so dystopian, and so impossible to target and contain, perhaps no state actor will ever risk it. Yet given the surfeit of fanaticisms today, it is horrifyingly easy to imagine an accident, or a rogue scientist, putting an engineered demon pathogen into the hands of religious lunatics who are eager to please God by cleansing the planet of sinners, in order to start the human story over again.Few Americans will think, even intermittently, about the unthinkable. Biological weapons are (rightly) enveloped in secrecy. And Americans’ electoral choices are almost entirely irrelevant to the dreadful challenges of weaponized biology. Yet not entirely irrelevant.Ms. Jacobsen’s summons to seriousness arrives during a political season in which progressives are warning against an unpopular minority (the rich), and conservatives are warning against an unpopular minority (progressives). Ms. Jacobsen’s message is: Cascading, irreversible, extinction-level events are possible, so sometimes government is a serious business. Vote accordingly.The Washington Post

After Catastrophe of Covid, Imagine How Much Worse ‘Biological War’ Could Prove

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