Biological War: A Scenario
by Annie Jacobsen
View on GoodreadsAnnie Jacobsen's companion to Nuclear War: A Scenario — a minute-by-minute account of how a biological attack or lab-released pathogen could cascade into global pandemic and societal collapse, built on interviews with senior political, medical, and military officials, and written as forward-looking preparedness journalism rather than fiction.
Core ideas
- The book is the deliberate companion and inverse to Nuclear War: A Scenario — where the nuclear threat is a mushroom cloud, blast, and shockwave, the biological threat is the opposite: something microscopic and silent, where "by the time you know you are a victim, it has turned you into a killer." The horror is invisibility and delay, not force.
- Jacobsen's method is the minute-by-minute scenario: a ticking-clock roadmap of the hours, days, and weeks after a biological agent is released — built on dozens of new interviews with people holding high-level political, medical, and military responsibility — showing how quickly the infrastructure meant to handle the gravest situations would be overwhelmed into a fight for survival.
- The projected endpoint is total systemic collapse: mass death, societal breakdown, insurrection, anarchy, and a "plague-ravaged wasteland," argued as forward-looking preparedness journalism rather than fiction — a warning about how thin the margin is between a contained outbreak and civilizational unraveling.
Published2026
Pages432
ISBN9798217046034
ReadJul 2026
