Something Scary Is Happening In Biolabs - Annie Jacobsen

2026-07-23 - 97 min - source - Read full transcript

Chris Williamson (host)Annie Jacobsen

Key insights

Biological war is more survivable to prevent than nuclear war, but psychologically worse to experience, because it has a warning window nuclear war does not.

Jacobsen frames nuclear war as an 'event without warning' that is nearly impossible to protect against once launched, while a biological release has a roughly 12-to-36-hour window in which containment can still stop a pandemic before it starts, but if that window is missed, victims face a slower, more uncertain death than instant nuclear annihilation.

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Independent existential-risk modeling rates engineered pandemics as roughly 300 times more likely than natural ones over the next century.

Citing Toby Ord's 'The Precipice' risk chart, Jacobsen and Williamson note naturally arising pandemics carry about a 1-in-10,000 chance of global catastrophic risk in the next 100 years, versus roughly 1-in-30 for engineered pandemics, putting them close behind unaligned AI (1-in-10) as the era's dominant risk category.

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The U.S. government has a continuity-of-government evacuation plan for a biological catastrophe, but no equivalent protection plan for the general public.

Jacobsen contrasts this with nuclear war, where former FEMA director Craig Fugate told her there is no population-protection plan because 'everyone will be dead.' For biological war, a plan exists, but it covers only a small pre-selected group of officials evacuated under the classified 'devolution' program, not ordinary citizens.

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Biological weapons face almost no barrier to entry compared to nuclear weapons, which makes them structurally more dangerous despite being less individually destructive.

Nuclear weapons require fissile material, a nation-state's resources, and a delivery system, which is why there has been no nuclear attack since 1945. A pathogen, by contrast, can in principle be engineered with limited equipment and desktop DNA synthesizers, removing the state-level chokepoints that have historically limited nuclear proliferation.

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The Soviet Union secretly continued and expanded its biological weapons program after publicly signing the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, and the West only learned this from a 1989 defector.

Scientist-engineer Vladimir Pasechnik defected to Britain, revealing to intelligence officer Dr. Christopher Davis a program that manufactured tons of weaponized plague and smallpox; CIA verification by Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg confirmed the scale, and Jacobsen says the State Department still assesses today that Russia's program was absorbed rather than dismantled, alongside active or suspected programs in North Korea, China, and Iran.

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The Soviet super-plague weapon was allegedly engineered with a euphoria gene specifically to increase transmission before death.

Jacobsen says plague researcher Dr. Henry Heine told her the Soviets engineered a euphoria-inducing gene into weaponized Yersinia pestis so infected people would feel good and go out (to 'go to a disco') rather than isolate while sick, maximizing the spread before they collapsed once the euphoria wore off; she incorporated the same mechanism into her book's fictional pathogen.

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Homeless populations are a critical, largely unaddressed blind spot in U.S. outbreak surveillance.

The CDC's post-9/11 Biosense syndromic-surveillance system draws real-time data from over 7,000 hospitals and clinics to catch outbreaks early, but America's roughly 800,000 homeless people, including 75,000 in Los Angeles and 4,000 on Skid Row, fall outside that system; Jacobsen says every epidemiologist she interviewed named this population as their greatest fear for undetected transmission.

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Speed of containment is the single most important variable in stopping a biological release from becoming a civilizational collapse, and it depends entirely on the host nation's transparency.

Jacobsen says defense officials repeatedly told her that stopping a release within 12 to 36 hours can prevent a pandemic entirely, but because biological weapons are illegal under the Biological Weapons Convention, host nations have every incentive to deny or cover up an accident, as the Soviets did for decades after the 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax leak, which forecloses the window.

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In real government pandemic war-game exercises, the scenario is deliberately stopped once mass death and societal breakdown begin, because officials do not want to model what happens next.

Jacobsen says unclassified war games consistently end once tens of millions are dying and insurrection starts, prompting her to investigate what actually comes after: the classified continuity-of-government plan known as devolution, under which a pre-chosen group of officials evacuates to preserve a functioning government while the broader population is left to fend for itself.

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Widespread public distrust of institutions, accelerated by COVID-era miscommunication, is itself a major driver of how catastrophic a future biological event would become.

Jacobsen argues the two biggest lessons of COVID were that the U.S. was unprepared despite billions spent on biodefense, and that the pandemic fractured public trust in science and government; she says a future biological crisis would face even less public cooperation because institutions burned credibility by asserting certainty (like early claims that COVID was not airborne) rather than admitting uncertainty.

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Trust, not physical danger alone, is what biological warfare uniquely destroys, because no one can tell who is infected.

Unlike other disasters, a biological outbreak makes every other person a potential vector, breaking down the basic social trust needed for coordinated resistance, cooperation, or law and order; Jacobsen cites former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's line that in the scenario she models, 'people doing inhuman things just survive.'

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Large language models can currently be manipulated into revealing sensitive, allegedly classified information such as the likely locations of U.S. Strategic National Stockpile facilities, and dual-use security researchers routinely demonstrate this to AI company leadership.

Jacobsen describes prompting ChatGPT with the right technical vocabulary to surface a plausible Strategic National Stockpile warehouse location (later corroborated via satellite imagery, e.g. a dead-end rail spur and double perimeter fencing), spoke directly with Sam Altman about it afterward, and says the behavior was patched but has since started reappearing, which she frames as a broader pattern of AI capability now outpacing both institutional safeguards and the Defense Department's own technological lead.

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Books referenced

Nuclear War: A Scenario - Annie Jacobsen - Jacobsen's prior bestseller, referenced throughout as the point of comparison for how biological war differs from nuclear war
Biological War: A Scenario - Annie Jacobsen - the new nonfiction book discussed in this episode, a hypothetical scenario of a genetically modified pneumonic plague outbreak built from real interviews with Defense Department and intelligence officials
The Pentagon's Brain - Annie Jacobsen - Jacobsen's earlier history of DARPA, cited to establish her claim that the Defense Department used to lead technology development but has now fallen behind private tech companies
The Precipice - Toby Ord - cited for its existential-risk chart estimating a 1-in-30 chance of an engineered pandemic causing global catastrophe in the next 100 years, versus 1-in-10,000 for a naturally arising pandemic
The Decameron - Giovanni Boccaccio - cited as a contemporary eyewitness account of the Black Death, used to illustrate how people actually behaved during a mass-fatality plague (abandoned children, feral foraging)

Media referenced

The End of the World with Josh Clark - podcast - Williamson's favorite limited-series podcast, referenced regarding desktop DNA synthesizers and the green/amber/red biosecurity screening system
Plague Inc. - other - mobile game referenced as an analogy for designing a pathogen's incubation window and transmissibility, used to probe why Jacobsen chose a short incubation period for her scenario

Companies

Vector Institute (VECTOR State Research Center) - the Russian BSL-4 facility near Novosibirsk where the book's fictional outbreak originates; had a real, non-release explosion in 2019
USAMRIID - the U.S. Defense Department's only BSL-4 lab, where plague researcher Dr. Henry Heine worked and studied dose response and the Soviet euphoria-gene weapon
OpenAI - Jacobsen describes a direct conversation with Sam Altman after discovering ChatGPT could be prompted into revealing the likely location of a Strategic National Stockpile warehouse; the behavior was subsequently patched, then apparently loosened again

Techniques and frameworks

Gain-of-function research - genetically modifying a dangerous pathogen so that, if a bioweapon version were released, scientists would already know how to build a countermeasure; Jacobsen says most sources she interviewed in the biodefense community privately call it a euphemism for biological weapons engineering
Bostrom's urn-of-balls thought experiment - Nick Bostrom's model of technological progress as drawing balls from an urn of unknown color; most are white (net positive) or gray (positive but riskier), but pulling one black ball, or enough gray ones, means civilizational catastrophe
MASINT (measurement and signature intelligence) - the U.S. intelligence collection method Jacobsen says can be used to detect a foreign biological release, via chemical-signature sensors placed in sewers, walls, vehicles, and drones near suspected facilities
CogCon / devolution - the classified Continuity of Government plan under which a pre-selected group of officials is evacuated to preserve functioning government during a catastrophic event; in Jacobsen's scenario it is triggered six days after outbreak
WARN ORD to EXORD - the Defense Department's escalation sequence from a warning order to an execution order for CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear) response forces; Jacobsen says by the time EXORD is issued in real war-game scenarios, it is already too late to protect the general population, only critical infrastructure
Biosense syndromic surveillance - the CDC's post-9/11 nationwide system pulling real-time data from over 7,000 hospitals and ERs to catch outbreaks early; Jacobsen notes it excludes America's roughly 800,000 homeless people, who epidemiologists fear most as a transmission blind spot

Summary

Journalist and author Annie Jacobsen returns to Modern Wisdom to discuss her new book, "Biological War: A Scenario," a nonfiction follow-up to her bestselling "Nuclear War: A Scenario." Where nuclear war is instant and unstoppable once launched, Jacobsen argues biological war is scarier precisely because it comes with a warning window, roughly 12 to 36 hours, during which containment could prevent a pandemic outright. She opens by citing Toby Ord's existential-risk chart from "The Precipice," which puts engineered pandemics at roughly a 1-in-30 chance of causing global catastrophe over the next century, dwarfing the 1-in-10,000 odds for naturally arising pandemics and trailing only unaligned AI among modern threats.

Much of the conversation traces the history of biological weapons: the 1971 invention of recombinant DNA by Stanford's Paul Berg, the secret Soviet weapons program that continued for decades after the USSR publicly signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, and the 1989 defection of scientist Vladimir Pasechnik, whose testimony first revealed the program's scale to Western intelligence. Jacobsen details the Soviets' alleged engineering of a euphoria gene into weaponized plague, designed to keep infected people mobile and spreading the disease before symptoms hit, a mechanism she deliberately wrote into her book's fictional pathogen. She contrasts nuclear weapons' high barrier to entry (fissile material, delivery systems, state resources) with biological weapons' near-total absence of one, arguing this asymmetry is what makes bioweapons the more structurally dangerous technology going forward, especially as desktop DNA synthesis becomes more accessible.

The bulk of the episode walks through Jacobsen's fictional outbreak scenario step by step: an explosion at Russia's real-world Vector Institute near Novosibirsk releases a genetically modified, antibiotic-resistant pneumonic plague; international hunters and a returning UCLA student unknowingly carry it home; and the outbreak takes hold in a Los Angeles homeless encampment, a population Jacobsen says every epidemiologist she interviewed flagged as the country's biggest blind spot because it falls outside the CDC's post-9/11 hospital-surveillance network. She traces the government response through NSA signals intelligence, satellite reconnaissance, and MASINT chemical sensors, through the escalation from a Defense Department "warning order" to an "execution order," to the point where officials privately admit the goal shifts from protecting the population to protecting critical infrastructure. In her scenario, outbreak turns to anarchy within six days, triggering "devolution," the classified continuity-of-government plan that evacuates a small group of pre-selected officials while offering no equivalent protection for ordinary citizens.

A recurring thread throughout is COVID as a symbolic near-miss: Jacobsen argues its 1% case fatality rate meant most people never experienced real loss, but the pandemic still fractured public trust in institutions by asserting false certainty (early claims that COVID was not airborne) instead of admitting uncertainty. She warns that this eroded trust, combined with the fact that a genetically modified pathogen could push case fatality rates toward 100%, would make a future biological event far less survivable at the societal level, not because of the disease alone but because no one could tell who around them was infected.

The conversation closes on a striking, more contemporary risk: Jacobsen describes discovering she could prompt ChatGPT, using precise technical vocabulary, into revealing the probable location of a classified Strategic National Stockpile warehouse, which she corroborated using satellite imagery of a dead-end rail spur and double perimeter fencing. She raised this directly with Sam Altman, and says the behavior was patched, then later loosened again, framing it as emblematic of a larger shift: technology and AI capability have now outpaced both public conventional wisdom and the Defense Department's own technological lead, a reversal from a decade ago when she wrote "The Pentagon's Brain" and DARPA still led the field.

Notable Quotes

"It's a bullet with a mind of its own... it's self-reproducing." - Annie Jacobsen, on why any pathogen functions as a living munition

"No one wants to admit they have biological weapons in their freezers." - Annie Jacobsen, on why host nations cover up lab accidents

"People doing inhuman things just survive." - Tom Daschle, quoted by Annie Jacobsen as the line that shaped the book

"Biological weapons have no barrier to entry anymore. You can essentially engineer a pathogen with very limited biology in your basement." - Annie Jacobsen

"This is not Annie's imagination. These are wargaming situations that are gamed out... and they always end right when insurrection happens. It's too painful to know what happens next. But the government certainly knows what happens next." - Annie Jacobsen