Annie Jacobsen, Torva (UK); Dutton (US)
A high-security laboratory in Siberia, Russia, contains one of the most disturbing memorials to a scientist in existence. In 1988, Nikolai Ustinov was injecting guinea pigs with the Marburg virus, a pathogen that causes uncontrollable bleeding and death. He accidentally pricked himself with the syringe, and knew instantly he was doomed. Two weeks later, after Ustinov died alone in a quarantined room, his colleagues harvested his organs and isolated a new, deadlier strain of Marburg that had mutated in his body. They named it Marburg Variant U, in his honour, and turned it into a weapon.
This horrifying story is one of many in Biological War: A scenario by Annie Jacobsen. The lab in question, the Vector Institute, is one of just two repositories for the deadly smallpox virus, which has otherwise been wiped off the planet. The other is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. Both play a key role in the book, a sequel of sorts to Jacobsen’s horrifying Nuclear War: A scenario.
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I read Nuclear War in a single sitting, late into the night. I was gripped and stunned by Jacobsen’s excellent, minute-by-minute reporting of how a nuclear conflict could play out, informed by interviews with key scientists and officials. It is a truly great book, if you can stomach it. In comparison, Biological War is merely a good book, one I read in a much more leisurely fashion, and so it comes with a much more caveated recommendation.
The Soviet Union went on developing deadly pathogens despite signing the Biological Weapons Convention
As Jacobsen explains, biological weapons are far more taboo than their nuclear counterparts, which are covered by an international treaty on non-proliferation, meant to limit their spread rather than to force nations to disarm. By contrast, the Biological Weapons Convention, which came into force in 1975, prohibits any development, stockpiling or use. In theory, biological weapons shouldn’t exist. And yet they almost certainly do.
Despite being a key signatory to the convention, the Soviet Union went on developing deadly pathogens. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia signed an agreement with the US and the UK to end its secret programmes and steer its labs to peaceful purposes. Yet US and other Western intelligence agencies believe Russia is still developing bioweapons.
The starting point for Jacobsen’s scenario is an explosion at Vector, mirroring one that happened in 2019. While that real incident was thankfully free of biohazards, the fictional one releases a genetically engineered version of Yersinia pestis – the bacterium that causes plague. This strain has been spiked with a gene to release endorphins, encouraging its victims to socialise and spread the pathogen.
Jacobsen reports that, according to former US Army bacteriologist Henry Heine, such a weapon does exist. “When we first heard Soviet scientists were inserting the endorphin gene… into plague… we were appalled,” he told her. Heine would certainly be in a position to know, but this weapon’s existence hasn’t been previously reported, as far as I can tell, and this mention is Jacobsen’s only source. It is true Soviet scientists experimented with combining genes from different pathogens to make a superweapon, but this specific blurring of a newly unearthed fact (the endorphin gene) and fiction gave me pause as I struggled to keep straight what was real. After finishing the book, I had to confirm with Jacobsen that, yes, her fictional bioweapon is based on one that was really created.
In her scenario, this single outbreak leads to the bacteria spreading globally. The result is essentially the covid-19 pandemic on steroids. If you cast your mind back to the early 2020s, you may recall constant discussion of the R number, the average number of people a single infected person will infect. The first variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind covid-19, was estimated to have an R of around 2.5, although later variants were more infectious. Jacobsen gives her bioweapon an R of 11, making it far more virulent, and much more severe symptoms.
Unfortunately, parallels with the recent pandemic overshadow much of the book. In some ways, this is unavoidable. While almost no one alive has experience of nuclear weapons, practically all of us know what it is like to live in fear of a widespread deadly pathogen. But Jacobsen makes strange choices that puncture the reality of her scenario, which occurs in a post-covid world.
One of the first superspreading events occurs on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, as happened with covid-19. The plague also copies the pandemic by popping up on the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Jacobsen’s fictional US president occasionally speaks like Donald Trump and is even depicted watching a documentary about his wife, in a nod to a film about Melania Trump released earlier this year. None of this feels necessary.
The biggest problem, however, is what Jacobsen calls “the Covid origin story fiasco”, a dispute that “unravelled the fundamental concepts of truth and of science”. Here, Jacobsen and I must agree to disagree. We may never know the true origins of SARS-CoV-2, but the idea it was released from a Chinese lab (accidentally or intentionally) has no basis in science.
There should be no debate about this, and yet many US intelligence organisations, from which Jacobsen draws a lot of her sources, believe otherwise. The CIA and FBI have called a lab leak the “most likely” explanation for the pandemic, for example. Some people in US intelligence also believe aliens have visited Earth, and that improbable microwave weapons are being deployed in Cuba, so you will forgive me if I don’t hold their scientific chops in great esteem.
I asked Jacobsen whether she believed that a lab leak or natural spillover from an animal (the leading scientific explanation) was responsible for the covid-19 pandemic. “I leave that conclusion up to readers to decide,” she says. But if that were her intention, it wasn’t the impression I got from the book, which constantly leans towards a lab leak. When the fictional US president’s advisers convene their initial meeting to respond to the Vector explosion, Jacobsen writes: “Mistakes made during the [covid-19] pandemic cannot happen again. If something managed to escape from this lab, it must be stopped before it spreads.” The fictional Russia releases a statement with “almost identical phrasing” to that used by real Chinese health officials when first announcing the illness we now call covid-19.
Such “vague declarations” are a “disinformation signature” in intelligence parlance, writes Jacobsen, “designed to mask or reshape the truth about an event”.
While reading the book, the phrase “difficult second album” kept circling my mind. This is grossly unfair: Jacobsen is a highly experienced, Pulitzer-shortlisted journalist with over half a dozen books to her name. But with Nuclear War being such a success, I wonder whether Biological War was published before it was fully developed. It can be repetitive and could use an edit. The fictional aspects feel less real than in the previous book and, at times, the factual elements feel concerningly fictional. It’s a good read, but it isn’t going to keep you up all night.
Two great reads on pandemics: fiction and fact
by Stephen King
Stephen King’s post-apocalyptic doorstopper is a classic for a reason. The US accidentally releases a weaponised flu virus, killing most people. We follow disparate groups of survivors and the rise of a supernatural villain.
by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green
For a more positive outlook, read this inside story of the development of the Oxford-AstraZeneca covid-19 vaccine, written by two of the researchers who helped to bring billions of people out of lockdown.
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