1367: Annie Jacobsen | The Genes and Germs of Biological Warfare

22:11Or there's just a criminal element that's gone unchecked because the police force is checked out and they're taking care of their own family. I mean it's just that's really scary. Or the police force is dead because first responders are the first to go. Sure, nurses, doctors, police fire, yeah.

22:22Annie Jacobsen:But inserting here a sort of comment, which is that the point of my writing this book is not panic. It's pressure. Because this is a human-made problem. This is not an asteroid coming to Earth like that took out the dinosaurs. This, like nuclear, this is a human-made potential catastrophe. Therefore, the optimist in me must believe that there is a human solution. What do you think the solution is? just be prepared with a ton of vaccines and a distribution system? That is certainly one component. And then you get into sort of biodefense utopia and a biological, technological, military-industrial complex, potentially.

23:05Annie Jacobsen:Different subject matter experts will tell you different ideas for the future. What I know as a journalist and as a storyteller, my lane is giving you the narrative, giving you the scenario of what can happen to educate you so that you have a better understanding of what to be aware of and also what to trust and what to ask questions about. I mean, it was stunning to me that I went through COVID not even really understanding how airborne pathogens are just in a wildly different category than anything else. Here's a little anecdote. That anthrax we were just talking about, weaponized anthrax. When Tom Daschle and others opened the envelope, or Tom Daschle didn't open, but one of his staffers did, opened the envelope, which had weaponized anthrax in it.

23:54Annie Jacobsen:The spores had been milled so small that they kind of were like baby powder, so they could be breathed in. Anthrax is what's called a dead-end host. It kills the host. It kills the host and only the host, Meaning it's not transmissible, which is remarkable to think about. And so it's really not nearly the same potential pandemic provider as something like pneumonic plague, as something that is airborne. COVID was airborne. COVID had a case fatality rate of 1%. Pneumonic plague without antibiotics has a case fatality rate of 100%. Wow. So if you survive, you're just a rounding error, you're a statistical anomaly.

24:41Annie Jacobsen:No, you are not a statistical anomaly. According to Dr. Henry Hein, one of the world's experts on plague, you get pneumonic plague, you are without medical countermatch, you're dead. There's no scenario in which you accidentally live. That's crazy. There's no immunity. There's no asymptomatic carriers. Oh my gosh. You get it, you're dead. You have to have antibiotics in your system within 24 hours. That's really horrifying because, of course, the question is how quickly can we distribute antibiotics to literally everyone? And I'm going to guess it's not within 24 hours. It's not within 24 hours, and that is why in all of the Pentagon declassified war games I looked at and discussed with sources and also the unclassified war games, pandemic exercises that are done by public health officials, in all of them, the idea of anarchy and insurrection is top threat for precisely the reason you're saying.

25:41Everybody is scrambling to get antibiotics, to get medical countermeasures, vaccines for their family members under extraordinary conditions, willing to do whatever is necessary. Sure, absolutely. I can understand that. I mean, the airplane delivery system is kind of a funny thing for me in the book, as funny as it could be in a book about biological warfare, because I remember during COVID, they made such a big deal of how, hey, the air is filtered in the airplane. You can't even infect the person next to you. Look at this diagram we drew. And it's like, well, wait a minute. That's not going to happen at all.

26:18You're just going to infect everybody else on the plane or at least the several of the people around you. And so that kind of flies in the face of what they told us, what American Airlines or whatever told us during COVID when they wrote their op-eds in every major newspaper. You can fly. We filter the air. It's totally fine.

26:33Annie Jacobsen:It's such a bad look giving out bogus information. I'm going to give you an anecdote here, which is just the leading example of this. COVID was airborne. Yeah. For the first three months of COVID, the CDC, America's premier public health agency, in charge of things, and the WHO, the international community's chief in charge, these two organizations repeatedly tweeted out COVID not airborne, N-O-T in capital letters. Oh, wow. I reprinted one of the tweets in the book because it's almost impossible to believe. And yet COVID was airborne. Right. COVID was airborne. And even more distressing to me is the fact that all these years later, neither the CDC nor the WHO has provided an explanation or rather sort of like a, you know, a sort of apology for being wrong, which is perfectly understandable when you are dealing with biology.

27:38Annie Jacobsen:It is squishy science. There are many unknowns. But at least let the American people, let the world know, hey, guys, we made this mistake and we're going to work toward not making the kind of mistakes in the future. But by saying nothing, extraordinary conspiracies have developed because of this extraordinary alternative narrative. Sure. As I prefer to call them. Also, they said, hey, don't buy masks. They don't work. And then it was, hey, so the masks do work. We just need them for the first responders. And then after that, people were kind of like, OK, I just don't believe anything you say. You're a completely non-credible source of information, which is pretty dangerous when you're talking about the two bodies that everybody should go, hey, it was the WHO and the CDC.

28:21Let's follow their instructions. Even me, I'm not a conspiracy theorist at all. Everybody in the show, I'm kind of the opposite to that. I do a lot of shows against it. Now I'm thinking, well, if they tweet next, hey, don't buy masks. The first thing I'm going to do is go buy masks because I've seen this movie before. So they've completely blown it. And I don't know how you recover from that.

28:40Annie Jacobsen:And I don't believe that there was any sort of malintent in any of it. It was just simply unknown. Here's another one. Do you remember in those original months when everyone, we were told that you could catch COVID from this tabletop, for example. I vaguely remember. And I remember because trying to buy Lysol at Target was impossible. It was sold out. People would sanitize their grocery delivery, which was completely pointless. People are wearing those blue gloves that they didn't need to. And this went on and on and on. And that is called fomite transmission. That's like the fancy scientific term for it, okay?

29:16Annie Jacobsen:Fomite is when you touch a surface? I've never heard that. Fomite transmission. Okay. Okay, all these years later, now the statistic on how you can catch COVID from a fomite is one in 10 ,000. So that's completely bad information to have pushed for several months. Now, that the CDC entered into a partnership with Lysol, to my eyes, extremely distressing. Wait, that happened? That happened. And again, sourced in the book, your friendly partner, Lysol. That is insane. So it's almost like, hey, I bet we can sell a lot of Lysol if we just convince the CDC to say that it'll disinfect Coe. I mean, that is so sinister and insane to me.

30:01Annie Jacobsen:And again, I have no reason to know that Lysol executives were sitting around twirling their mustache, coming up with ideas. But that is what happened. After writing Nuclear War, which you came on the show before to discuss, what made you decide that biological war was the next thing? And God knows, what are you cooking up now? Am I even allowed to ask? When I was reporting that, I was talking to sort of cabinet-level officials and presidential advisors. And time and again, people would say to me, we're talking about nuclear, but you have to look at bio next. And that was extremely unnerving because it was always said in a way that felt like the shark in the water.

30:39Annie Jacobsen:you know, a kind of... Like, oh, you're afraid of nukes? Yeah. Let me tell you. And here's the real spoiler alert. It's a chart I show in the book also, which is that I found what's called a threat spectrum. It's a presentation within the Defense Department, unclassified but for official use only, that demonstrates WMD, weapons of mass destruction, and where they sit on the scale of destructiveness. And, of course, nuclear weapons are the most destructive. Sure. But biological weapons are considered the greatest overall threat. Because you need a missile, you need an ICBM to launch a nuke. They can be detected, your program can get intercepted.

31:18Whereas, I don't know, the bio stuff, what do you need? Like a university laboratory to not follow safety protocols one time?

31:26Annie Jacobsen:With nuclear, there's an extremely high barrier for entry. You have to have fissile material, uranium, weapons-grade uranium. Look at the news about Iran. We all know about that. Nuclear weapons need a delivery system, a very complex ICBM, submarine, bomber. So these nuclear weapons are kept inside the command and control systems of the nations that have nuclear weapons. That is one argument why we have not had an incident, an accident, or an actual nuclear use in 80 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Biological weapons, totally different animal. The barrier for entry is painfully low. with officials, defense officials, public health officials, anyone in the business of preventing this will tell you a biological weapon can be made in a basement by a high school student with a very limited knowledge of biology thanks to AI computational systems.

32:31Annie Jacobsen:That is terrifying. Good news, you survived airport security. Bad news, the guy coughing up blood in 7A might have brought a genetically engineered souvenir from Siberia. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Article. My in-laws recently got a brand new kitchen, although my father-in-law was the last person to know about it. It happened secretly while he was on vacation. My mother-in-law planned the whole thing because she knew he never would have approved it. And then, while we were all in China for a month, she had the contractors come in and complete the whole thing. He basically came home from the trip to a completely new kitchen.

33:03Bold strategy, but it definitely worked. Of course, once the kitchen looked so fresh and modern, their old furniture suddenly felt like it belonged in a different house. So we stepped in and got him some new counter stools and a kitchen table from Article. And Article made the whole process incredibly easy. The stools have a clean, modern look. But most importantly, they are substantial and well-made. They swivel. They're sturdy. They instantly made the space feel more polished and complete. Ordering is really simple. Delivery was smooth. The new space now feels finished. And the best part, my father-in-law actually likes the new kitchen.

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35:04So if you're planning to sign up or buy anything, please use our code. It is often Jordan, but double check on the website. It's a win-win. You get an awesome deal and you help keep the show going strong. We truly appreciate your support. Now back to Annie Jacobson. We were talking about this before we hit record, which is that I've done shows on synthetic biology and things like that with Rob Reed. I don't know if that name has come across your desk, but he was saying on the show that eventually there'll be 3D printers that can print biological material. But even before that, like you said, a high schooler who's got a really good chemistry set can ask AI how to make different component parts and order things off the internet.

35:41You can order viruses from a lot of places. Maybe they've clamped down on that a little. I don't know. But if you're a researcher, you can order things from places and they will send it to you. And they'll maybe make sure you have a real laboratory, but maybe they also won't. Or you'll get somebody who's too busy to do that that day. Or your name looks like similar to somebody who they've seen before and they let it go. it's just really scary how little sort of oversight there is. This is not, you're not getting something from the CDC. You're getting something from a supplier. And like you said, you don't have to be a crazy genius to do it.

36:12Someone could even do it almost by accident, trying to make something else. And certainly there are smart people that would love to kill a huge number of people. I mean, look at the Unabomber. Remember that guy who's a genius? And you've got nation states that might decide they have nothing to lose by planting this somewhere and making a dead man switch. I mean, it's just really scary if you've got a good imagination to see how this could all be used or misused.

36:35Annie Jacobsen:Which is part of the point, I think, of it's not about panic as much as it's about pressure. To your point that there is oversight, that some oversight is in place, and this is largely because of incidents that have happened in the past where someone orders plague in the, you know, Yersinia Pestas in the mail, gets it and then makes an announcement, hey, look what I did to make a point because it's not illegal or it didn't used to be. And that's crazy. But to your point, all it takes is one madman. And you see in these unclassified war games I was referring to, and I mention a number of them in the book kind of as these little history lesson type vignettes, officials in the United States gaming out different bad actors that might attempt to do this.

37:24Annie Jacobsen:And so it's not like it's not on the minds of government officials. The question is how to tighten the bolts. Yeah, it's a, oh man, it starts to really, you might have trouble sleeping the night after you read this book. Just saying. It's very interesting and I recommend it, but read it on a Friday so that you can sleep in on Saturday if you have a little bit of a rough go falling asleep. How do researchers decide whether a dangerous biological experiment should even proceed? Because a lot of this stuff is dual use, right? Yeah, I kind of hope somebody here is looking at this stuff so that if Iran or the Soviet Union or North Korea or whoever, sorry, the Soviet Union, no longer quite a threat.

38:04If maybe Russia, that bioweapons program that's been absorbed. I want to know that we have a vaccine or they've seen something like this or they thought maybe it would happen and that there's at least a document that says what needs to be done. But also, I don't know, that same research project that goes to make the vaccine could also have a sample of this frozen somewhere that ends up getting out in the middle of Maryland, right?

38:25Annie Jacobsen:And you've touched upon the essence, the dark heart of the debate, because this is called dual-use research of concern. Genetic engineering began only in the early 1970s when a scientist at Stanford University named Paul Berg, he'd go on to win the Nobel Prize, was the first person who was able to genetically modify a germ, right? And he was doing it for exactly the reasons that you speak of. Like, we are going to be able to solve medical mysteries in the same way that Pasteur, in developing penicillin, was able to essentially stamp out all of these deaths that were occurring from infection, from bacterial infections, among them plague.

39:15and this idea that a scientist wants to do good is the premise, is how it all began.

39:22Annie Jacobsen:But very quickly, and in Berg's own interviews, he says, we weren't thinking about biological weapons and we should have been because that is precisely what someone else is going to be thinking about always, always. And so there you get into the other question that you raise, And this is where it's called gain-of-function research, which almost no one in the world but a group of scientists had ever heard of before COVID. Now a lot of people are familiar with it, gain-of-function. Exactly like it sounds, you are trying to get a pathogen to gain new functions, to become more virulent, to become easier to transmit, to make something that wasn't airborne.

40:07Annie Jacobsen:And most nefariously, to defeat an existing immunity to something. So those are the basic components of biological weapons engineering. But in these same labs, you have scientists saying, we need to be able to create the really bad pathogens so that we can test how to defeat them with medical countermeasures. Now you have a chicken-in-the-egg scenario, which is what's happening. I mean, this is the logic behind almost every arms race, right? We need to develop AI capability to do – for warfare so that we can game it out when China does it first. And everybody's thinking the same thing, especially with bioweapons.

40:44Annie Jacobsen:On that point, like the more countermeasures you do, like you create an ICBM and then you create, you know, interceptor missiles to shoot down the ICBMs. Well, now you have the other side saying, wait a minute, they're preparing to shoot ours down. That's actually an aggressive move, not a defensive move. It's why nuclear treaties, one of the most powerful ones that's now fallen out of effect, was to limit the amount of interceptor missiles that a country could have because it kind of forecasted to their adversaries, their enemies, an offensive posture, if you will. Right, we're trying to erase your deterrent ability.

41:20Yes. Yeah.

41:21Annie Jacobsen:And so this is classic Catch-22. Yeah, this is very disturbing. And this Soviet program, I'd love to go back to this because this, I think it's called like Biopreparat or something like that. I don't speak Russian, so I'll take it. Good job on the pronunciation. Is that close? Biopreparat. Yes. I mean, how you want to transliterate it, we get the idea. But this facility in Obolensk was pretty creative. It was supposed to look like, what, an asylum or something like that? Tell me about this place because it's straight out of a Bond movie, this whole thing. Sometimes the details you get from primary sources are amazing.

41:55Annie Jacobsen:And thank you for noticing one of them, Igor Domorodsky. I mentioned him earlier because he was the sort of the originator of a lot of the Soviet plague-related biological weapons work. But he was also a leading scientist that was working on plague vaccines for the Russian people. And after the wall went down, he ended up spending time in America with a now 90-plus-year-old subject matter expert in biological weapons named Milton Leitenberg, whom I interviewed, who lent me Domorodsky's hand-typed diaries over a number of years. Wow. They're in Russian, though, yeah? No, they were translated into English.

42:39Annie Jacobsen:I think Domoroski or someone translated them. I was reading them in English. But Leitenberg FedExed me this group of documents saying, you have to FedEx them back to me immediately, which I did. But I share them with readers because you get original details which are mind-blowing and really make it human. And the one you point out, Domoroski explains there was a facility that was dealing mostly with bacterial pathogens. The Vector facility was dealing with viruses. That's in Siberia. Oblensk was, interestingly, not far from Moscow, something like 50 miles south. And that is where they were weaponizing bacteria.

43:15Annie Jacobsen:And they were weaponizing plague. But he explained to Leitenberg in these journals that they wanted to keep what was happening there out of the awareness of the evil Americans who were spying on them from space with our early satellite systems in the 70s. And so they dressed people up in pajamas and had them playing volleyball as if the facility was a mental institution and the people were the patients. Jeez, that's crazy. The lengths at which you go to try and trick the other side is really creative. Imagine having that job. Like, Sergei, it's negative five degrees, but we need you outside. Put your pajamas on.

44:02Get the volleyball. Get the volleyball and go outside. It's only four hours. Just play for four straight hours. Sorry, comrade. Aren't you glad you got a PhD?

44:10Annie Jacobsen:It's so remarkable because I do know a bit about space satellites. And the satellite systems in the 70s, I'm not so sure they could really tell the difference between an army uniform and a pair of pajamas. It speaks to this idea of the Soviets' perception of American technology. We had them scared, I guess. actually if you know about spy satellites early spy satellites did they just make digital cameras in the 60s and 70s or did they have film that dropped out into and then went and got it what so when i was writing area 51 i interviewed the cia's first director of the directorate of science and technology it didn't exist before the 19 early 1960s and then it suddenly did now it's like arguably the most important component.

44:57Annie Jacobsen:Sure. This is the Q branch type. Yes. Okay. Yes, absolutely. So Dr. Bud Whelon, head of S &T, it was called, was also by his own qualifications, the mayor of Area 51. He was in charge of the U-2 spy plane and the A-12 ox cart spy plane, both CIA programs, espionage platforms being developed out at Area 51 in the middle of a nuclear test site because it would keep everybody away. But Whelan is also the father of satellite technology. He developed the very first American system called Corona. And in our interviews, this was back in 2010, he took me through a lot of that early technology, which was remarkable.

45:40Annie Jacobsen:And you're absolutely right. The first Corona satellites, literally they took wet film, actual wet film made by Kodak. Okay. The film would drop out of the sky with a parachute attached to it. The film would literally be in a sort of basket-like contraption. And then an Air Force plane would work with a hook to try and hook the falling. I kid you not, there are actually photographs that have been declassified. You can go to the NRO website and look at them. So you think about the trial and error. If the aircraft misses and is unable to, you just lost all the satellite photos into the sea. Really?

46:25Annie Jacobsen:They didn't float? Come on, guys. Well, they would be waterlogged. I interviewed different pilots that were assigned to go and find the missing footage because, God forbid, somebody else gets into it. It's really interesting old school tech. That is so insane to me. And then they go and they develop this and it's like, all right, what's it at these coordinates? And they're like, um, bunch of crazy people playing volleyball in the snow. That's it. Yeah. Good thing we flew over the ocean and zap this film basket because we need, this is all we're getting from it. That to me is just absolute madness.

46:59Annie Jacobsen:I have the great fortune of having interviewed a lot of these sort of individuals right there at that cusp of history in the sixties when technology was really shifting. And by the way, so much of it came out of the Vietnam War. And it's fascinating to look at that and consider where we are now with science and technology moving not just at the speed of light, but faster than any kind of governance can keep up, certainly faster than the courts, faster than democracy itself. I've got a friend who's, I actually don't know what he does for real, but he's got all kinds of crazy stories. He's an older guy.

47:40And before Vladimir Putin was the enemy of the West, he was maybe a friend of the West. And so he was teaching Vladimir Putin stuff about Western economics. And he said that Vladimir Putin called him once after he was dropping his kids off at school. He said, Vladimir Putin calls my cell phone and says, hey, do you have a minute? And he says, sure. And he goes, great. Pull into the next driveway. Well, not the next one, the one after that. Literally, so he wanted me to know he was watching me in real time. And I thought, oh, that's real? Because I assumed that was some nonsense movie stuff. And this is like 2001, probably, or 2002.

48:14I don't remember when Putin sort of, when we decided he was up to no good. Maybe 2005, 2008. So this is early enough where I thought, you can't really watch someone live from a satellite. Apparently, the Russians could already do that, even then. So God knows what they can do now. Take your temperature, probably.

48:32Annie Jacobsen:That's a great story. It's very spooky. Yeah, it's very spooky. And this is an older guy. He's not, this was not even a, I'm 100 % sure he's not making it up. He's just one of those types of guys. So the technology is unreal. They also might have had tagging, tracking. They could have been watching him on the road too. Yes, you don't know. But that's an important part of all of it is this sort of paranoia factor. The idea that you would make someone think, oh, my God, they can see me anywhere and make them wonder, are they watching me from space? Is it a tagging system? Do they have cameras on me on the ground?

49:07That's all part and parcel to kind of control and paranoia. Yeah, that's a good point. Now that I think about it, I wonder how he knew they were watching him from space and not just some guy in traffic behind him, which is a far more plausible actual explanation for that.

49:21Annie Jacobsen:Same result. Yeah, that's true. Same result. you get this feeling of omniscient power. Yeah. And that was his, the whole point was to intimidate him, which is strange because he was like going to Vladimir Putin's dacha to teach him stuff. He's like, why, you don't need to do this. Like I already, I'm already, I understand that you control a massive army and spy force. You don't have to freak me out. There's no benefit to this. And the phone call was pretty benign. Apparently it was like a logistical phone call. The whole point of the phone call was to actually scare him. The message wasn't even important.

49:51Apparently.

49:51Annie Jacobsen:Absolutely. So I thought that was interesting. People on their toes. Yeah. What was going on in this building? They're doing the bacteria gain-of-function research. Is it specialized by flora? I'm so curious about this villain layer. Yeah, it's really interesting. I refer to an event, a conference, that took place there in 1989. And we know about this from the memoir of Ken Alabek, who was the deputy director of Biopreparat. We know about this from another Soviet bioweapons engineer that had since defected to the United States named Sergei Popov. And the men gathered in an auditorium, which was in the middle of this building.

50:37Annie Jacobsen:And by the way, you can Google Oblensk and you can see images of this facility. It's very spooky. It's still there. It's still there now, by all means. But the images from like, I believe it was the 90s, it looks like a giant whale. It's like a glass whale. I see. It's very spooky. I Google mapped it. I didn't think to look for older photos. And then there's an auditorium in the side with no inside in the very middle with no windows. And the scientists were not allowed to bring any notes inside. Or rather they could take notes, but they weren't allowed to take them with them. So the minders picked up all the notes.

51:13Annie Jacobsen:from what I understand, research of the different bacterial pathogens were being worked on on different floors. You know, you'd have anthrax on one floor and plague on another floor. What a cheery working environment that must have been. But in this 1989 conference, that was a very groundbreaking moment because it's when Sergei Popov, who was an engineer who had been sent to Oxford in England to commandeer genetic modification techniques from the West. Of course, actually it was Cambridge, I believe. They had no idea what he was doing there. They just thought, oh, nice Russian scientist on sabbatical.

51:51Annie Jacobsen:And he had been ordered to steal the secrets and then brought them back and with his team worked on what became known as a booby trap weapon. So nefarious in nature. And not only was it built to defeat medical countermeasures, but very specifically, it had a super paranoid evil component to it, which is it was designed to insert a pathogen into the pathogen. So that when you took, like they were working with plague, you would take plague, you would get plague. You would immediately know I must take antibiotics within 24 hours or I will die. But the Soviet bioweapons engineers had then manipulated the plague pathogens so that in taking the antibiotic, it would trigger like a booby trap weapon, a second disease, encephalitis, the swelling of the brain, which would kill you in an equally horrific way.

52:54Annie Jacobsen:But even worse was the idea behind it. They wanted Americans to die en masse with the last thought in their mind being, I've been betrayed by my government that told me to take this antibiotic and now it's killing me. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Then people are going, don't get the antibiotics. That actually kills you faster. I mean, it kind of reminds me of the disinformation around COVID. Like, oh, the ventilators are killing people. Well, no, you're very near death already, and this is the last resort. So it's like a causation thing. But here it really was causing the encephalitis. When you consider that that sort of dark, nefarious idea was built into the biological weapon, it really sends a shiver up the spine.

53:45Annie Jacobsen:Yeah. Because it's so based in paranoia. It's so based in disinformation. And it's a really big plug for why good information, good dialogue in the United States of America today is such an important ideal that people, I believe, must be working toward. Call me a Pollyanna. But if we continue on this path of tribalism and scorekeeping and self-righteous indignation about the other individual's idea about what COVID really was, rather than taking a real hard look at what happened and what we can do better. Yeah. We're just destined for a really bad situation in the future. I agree 100%. I was pretty fired up about COVID and disinformation.

54:35I still am. But I've become a little bit more sympathetic, maybe, or empathetic to people who had distrust in the medical system, especially people who are, this sounds very, I suppose, lefty, and I'm not that guy, but people who've been mistreated by the medical system historically. No one, of course, they don't trust what's going on. And what reason did poor black people in the South have to trust the medical system in the beginning? Like your grandpa was in the Tuskegee experiments. Of course you don't trust this or you have a distrust for the system in general. So that whole thing, I've gradually come around a little bit more on this.

55:08And that's, of course, going to be a big problem when we face a real pandemic. So one thing that's just occurred to me, the Russians, the Soviets back then said, we're just trying to prevent this from happening to us, right? That was the justification. We're trying to engineer this so that we can make a vaccine against it. But that whole sort of Trojan horse with the second encephalitis virus in there, I don't know, that makes it seem far less credible that this is just them trying to prevent something.

55:35Annie Jacobsen:Oh, well, hard correction there if I misspoke. In the Cold War, from the sort of advent of genetic modification, from the signing of the BWC, the treaty, all the way through the defector, Pesachnik, coming and revealing the biological weapons program, which happened in the late 1980s, that entire time, the Soviets were absolutely doing biological weapons engineering. They were building an arsenal of biological weapons. They were not called medical countermeasures. People like Domorodsky was also working on vaccines. So that Cold War, biowarfare 101, vaccinate your own people, kill theirs. That, yes, you want to have a medical countermeasure of your people.

56:17Annie Jacobsen:But there was no, absolutely no question that what they were working on were biological weapons to kill tens of millions or hundreds of millions of their enemies in the West. Because now here is a real hinge, according to the Soviet defectors, when people would ask them, but wait a minute, you're a scientist. How could you have done this? It's so dark. And they said, because we were told by our handlers, the Americans are cheating and doing this too. Right. But we so far were not doing that? Or did you find any evidence of us doing it also? As far as I know, there exists no evidence that the United States was working on biological weapons during the Cold War period, after the signing of the treaty.

57:06Annie Jacobsen:We most certainly had built a colossal arsenal of biological weapons before. I write about this in Operation Paper Club. Not even a question. We brought Nazi scientists who were running Hitler's biological weapons program over here. So we were not saints. Everyone was building biological weapons. Treaty happens, 1972. Okay, we're all going to destroy our arsenals. Not only did Russia not destroy their arsenals, but they amped up their program. And we now know that is actually on the record true. And in theory, they're still doing it? According to Russia, when the wall came down, they had a big denouement where they were like, we are so sorry.

57:46Annie Jacobsen:They even admitted to having this, or at least Yeltsin sort of did. We will dismantle it. There are a number of people, some of whom I interview in the book, who went to Russia in the years after the wall came down, Andy Weber among them, who worked really hard with Russian scientists to destroy these arsenals, but more importantly, not to sell them. Because think about how poor everyone is. And for example, Andy Weber tells me a story that at the Vector Research Facility, the BSL-4 lab, where he was in the early 90s, dealing with the chief scientists negotiating, like, let's destroy these, or at least we'll take them and destroy them.

58:29Annie Jacobsen:The Iranians were there at the time. I was just going to say, yeah, but this guy from Iran offered me$10 million. Your offer is to take it and wreck it? No, thanks. Exactly. Well, you know, if you could meet their price, they would destroy it. And Weber was responsible for a lot of that. He'd be a really interesting person to come talk to you because he has decades of experience in this world. And interestingly, he has a very, you know, on the one hand, he's very practical about understanding what the threat is, but he also does have a kind of belief that biotechnology can solve a lot of these problems, can result in medical countermeasures to quickly deal with outbreaks.

59:07Annie Jacobsen:At the same time, he calls gain of function a euphemism for biological weapons engineering. Apparently, dual-use technology means it can either cure cancer or erase humanity, depending on which grant proposal gets approved. And now, capitalism. This episode is sponsored in part by Bowlin Branch. It's been over 90 degrees lately over here, and for some reason the bedrooms in our house get ridiculously hot. The rest of the house feels fine. The second you walk into the bedroom, it's like entering a different climate zone, and I absolutely hate trying to sleep on hot, sticky sheets. They cling to your legs.

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1:01:18Yes, it's that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Annie Jacobson. I think a lot of people are scared of gain-of-function research. You listen to Sam Harris. He's got a few episodes on this, and it is terrifying. Like, oh, we just want to see if we can make, I don't know, smallpox, airborne and more deadly. Okay, you did it. Congratulations. You have a solution for this? Yeah, but it's a solution that runs. What's that thing they say about lying? It's halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on. The plague is going to be halfway around the world before the vaccine gets its shoes on, at least in the United States, judging by our COVID countermeasures or lack thereof.

1:01:55And that was what, 1 % deadly? So imagine something that's 98 % deadly or 90 % or just 50, a mere 20%.

1:02:02Annie Jacobsen:I mean, look, there are lots of other diseases that are, like, Hantavirus has a 30 % case fatality. Right. I did think of that when I read the book. And imagine COVID, 1%. Okay, so just 2%. Think of twice as many people dying. I mean, this is really on a scale of disaster, of catastrophe. Was this a great intelligence failure of the Cold War that we didn't know about this place in advance? Most certainly, yes. So Pasechnik defects. Did he go to the Canadian embassy first and get tossed out the door? That's a little terrifying. He did. Another anecdote that's pretty shocking. They didn't believe him.

1:02:37Annie Jacobsen:He said, you know, I'm part of a Soviet weapons program and I need to talk to someone. And they said, bug off. Then he called the British. They took him very seriously. And a day later, he found himself in a safe house in London across from Dr. Christopher Davis, who at the time was a surgeon commander with the Royal Navy and also had the job title of, you know, handling biological weapons, which was almost, as he explains to me, a non-job because no one believed that anyone was actually making biological weapons. Right. He was the man in charge of fighting ghosts. And it's like, OK, but it was like the X-Files, you know, and then this guy walks in and he realizes, oh, my God.

1:03:19Annie Jacobsen:And he became this incredible source for of information and actually ended up winning the highest one of the highest honors from the Queen of England. It's really scary that this guy walks into an embassy and a state department, well, Canadian State Department official just says, I don't know, I'm hungry. This is a bunch of crap. I don't believe it. And not like maybe I should refer this to the U.S. and see if they care, but just get out of here. That is really, really scary because we basically came this close to missing him because what he could have done is gotten killed by the Russians on his way out the door, gone somewhere else and said, screw it.

1:03:54I'm just going to go to Venezuela and live out the rest of my life and disappear. No one's going to believe me. But luckily, he gave it another swing and managed to get a hit. I mean, that's just luck at that point.

1:04:04Annie Jacobsen:It is. And even more remarkable is the fact that Pesesnik was one of a very rare group of individuals, you can probably count them on one hand, who were actually allowed to leave Russia. He was on a laboratory equipment buying trip. I see. And like Domorodsky, for example, in his notes, he explains how he was always trying to leave. He'd be invited to these conventions. And at the last minute, the Russians would refuse him, you know, the ability to leave. He'd have to tell everyone, you know, I broke my leg, you know, something like that. And so Poseshnek was so important that he not only had all this information, but he was important because he needed to go buy the sort of unique laboratory equipment.

1:04:49Annie Jacobsen:and disguise what he was doing as public health related and not weapons related. And he had this moment of a crisis of conscience where he was like, I can't keep doing this. Wow. He must have known some absolutely just very disturbing. He was losing a lot of sleep, I think, over this. Did he describe how they plan to disperse this? I'm curious. What do you do? Do you spray it somewhere? Like, how does it work? Yes. What's interesting now where we are, this idea of an airborne pathogen is so simple and so clear that the weapon system, the delivery system, is essentially the human lungs. Yeah. So you don't need cruise missiles.

1:05:31Annie Jacobsen:But back in the Cold War, the idea was to fill a warhead with a biological weapon and fire it in an ICBM at the United States, which involved so much engineering. When you think about temperature, you know, you're talking about a living weapon. You have to keep it alive. I mean, it was incredible what they were doing. And then they developed systems to fire cruise missiles essentially out of submarines, sneak up close to the east or west coast of America, fire a missile that would go under radar, and then let loose a warhead and disperse plague or anthrax or smallpox over the population. It was a lot of work.

1:06:12Annie Jacobsen:And Paseschnek was also in charge of that engineering team, which added serious credibility and threat level to what he was describing, first to his British handlers and then to the CIA. What's crazy is then, of course, you know it came from – you'd know immediately it came from the Soviets. You could fire nukes back. Boom, everybody dies. It's nuclear winter at that point. Now you could do it with – you could hire 200 girls off of Instagram, infect all of them and say, all right, we're sending you to party. We're sending a cameraman with you to make some content and send them to every major Western city.

1:06:49Just dance with a bunch of guys. I mean that's really all you would need to do to disperse something like this now. It would cost you a few million dollars. Attribution is a huge problem.

1:06:58Annie Jacobsen:But, you know, working against that is, of course, this idea that biological catastrophe, the unleashing of a genetically modified pathogen with a high case fatality rate, everybody's going to die. You can't save yourself. And so you're into the madman theory of use, of intentional use, or you're into the lab accident conundrum. Yeah, wasn't there a guy who, Ustinov or something, he'd injected something into his thumb? That's right. That was the vector lab. These little anecdotes or stories, rather, that one is able to source from firsthand sources, sometimes people write memoirs and they reference these things, and also looking at declassified documents are really insightful.

1:07:43Annie Jacobsen:It's kind of a weird word. And I write them out as little history lessons in the book to kind of pause from the horrific drama going on to give you some context, again, that while a lot of this reads like science fiction, it is science fact based. That man who injected the Marburg virus into his thumb, he documented his own death. So what were his last days like? So Dr. Ustinov was working with Marburg. It's a viral hemorrhagic fever that's like a cousin to Ebola. So it's just horrifically gruesome. You know, you bleed to death out your eyeballs and your ears and your nose and your mouth and every other orifice.

1:08:25Annie Jacobsen:And there is no cure. The Soviets were weaponizing it inside the vector lab, which is the locus of the inciting incident in my scenario, biological war scenario. And this was in the 80s. And Ustinov is working to weaponize Marburg to make it more transmissible because it's transmissible through fluid contact. Just like Ebola, right? Yes. So, you know, it's good to know that, like, if somebody in the other room has Ebola, you and I are not going to get Ebola. No. I might leave anyway, but yeah. You and I might go out the window or out the fire escape. But if somebody in this room has pneumonic plague.

1:09:06Annie Jacobsen:What's too late for us? We're going to get pneumonic plague. Like, that's airborne. And so Ustinov was trying to make this more transmissible, among other things. And he is injecting Marbug into a guinea pig, a small animal to kind of test this. And he injects himself. It goes into his body. And there is a death sentence immediately. He calls his superior. You can kind of imagine, like, him picking up one of those red analog bones, you know. And the superiors like go to, you know, the biosafety facility slash hospital, which is really just a room. And he goes in there and there is a notebook left by his bedside table, which he writes his thoughts as he dies over the next two weeks, bleeding out.

1:10:00And those who saw the notebook describe it as being, you know, spattered with blood. Well, I guess they couldn't help him. But you think like they didn't even euthanize this guy. They wanted the journal. I don't understand. Why did they leave him alive for so long?

1:10:14Annie Jacobsen:Euthanizing him, it would probably cause unrest among the other scientists, maybe. He was probably begging for it by day three, though. I mean, they gave him what we would call here in the West palliative care. You know, when you know someone's going to die and you're just trying to make them more comfortable. Sure. But what was also interesting is after he died, they came up with this idea because when a pathogen moves through the body, it mutates. This is by Mother Nature's own design. And we saw that with COVID, whereby there were different strains that would happen. The Delta variant. Yes.

1:10:47And then it became less deadly, I believe, over time.

1:10:50Annie Jacobsen:And that's what happens as the pathogen moves through people through the environment. And so they wanted to look at Ustinov's organs after he died. And they harvested them very quickly. And they came up with this idea that they could make bioweapons out of his organs. And so allegedly stored in that vector lab is what's called Marbug variant U for Ustinov. Patient zero, basically, ready to be thawed out. That is really grim. Do you think they're still there? There's organs just sitting in a freezer somewhere? I think transparency is something that is radically missing from all of this. You know?

1:11:32Annie Jacobsen:You think? Well, look, it's why the nuclear treaties were so important. We're now out of them. But nuclear treaties meant that weapons inspectors could go and look at what a country was holding. And if you could do that with bio, it would take a lot of the mystery out of it. It would take ultimately a lot of the paranoia out of it. And that is certainly something in my push for pressure, not panic. You know, most certainly should happen. And diplomats in the United States will tell you that time and time again, that were there some kind of a come to Jesus moment about bio, then weapons inspectors could look at what people have.

1:12:16Annie Jacobsen:And the individual nations would be perhaps a little more inclined to destroy the most deadly, most nefarious pathogens that are clearly for nothing other than being a biological weapon. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. That is really grotesque that they recovered his organs and then froze them for research material. I mean, that's just, this is like watching a low-budget horror movie, which is, you go, oh, okay, they're straining credibility a little here. It's a little extra, but this is actually real. It's unbelievable. The hypothetical was the explosion in the lab, correct? Actually, quite the opposite, because the reason I chose that as the inciting incident is because there was an actual explosion.

1:13:02Annie Jacobsen:Really? At the Vector lab. So I wrote this down, and I was like, ask if it's a hypothetical, just a very realistic one. So there was an explosion in a biolab? In 2019, there was an explosion at Vector, at the BSL-4 lab. Oh, my gosh. In Siberia, in Russia. and allegedly no pathogens were released because allegedly the explosion occurred in a building where pathogens weren't stored. But that is not the case in the scenario. Right. So just luckily the place where all the pathogens were stored wasn't the building that blew up. Buildings are not typically supposed to spontaneously explode. Do we even know what caused the explosion?

1:13:40Annie Jacobsen:I think they blamed it on a gas leak. Of course they do. But Vector is a very big facility. I mean, look, if you want to see a big facility, Look at the BSL-4 lab in Fort Detrick. That is just one of many labs on that campus. So the facilities where biological research takes place, sure, they can be very small. I went to a BSL-3 lab, by the way, in an office building that looked a lot like the office building we are in. And it was just a few miles from Orlando Airport. That's a BSL-3 lab where you can work with anthrax and plague. BSL-4 labs are high containment facilities, and they have different sets of where they can be.

1:14:26Annie Jacobsen:But nonetheless, they are often located right in the middle of a city with millions of people. What was the lab in Wuhan? Do we know which one, what level that was? That's a terrific question. I mean, some will tell you it was a BSL-3 lab, but others will say it was a BSL-2 lab. And there are photographs that you can look at where you see the lab in disarray with very few safety protocols. So that's a whole other discussion. Yeah, that's scary. It's a totally different show, but I'm so curious what the safeguards are on three, maybe four. It's classified. You're not even supposed to know. I don't know.

1:15:04But obviously airlocks. But what else? I mean, I'm just my imagination.

1:15:08Annie Jacobsen:A BSL-4 lab. Like you think about, you know, the submarine airlock system, right? Like you have to go through double doors. The scientists are taking a chemical bath before they step out. They're wearing suits where if there is a cut, the air goes out, not in. Was that called positive pressure? Yeah, they get sprayed and then they got to take the suit off. And then I don't know. It's just it's so interesting to me. Like what sort of safeguards are there? Because whatever it is, it's not enough, right? Whatever it is, it's not enough to. I have a statistic on that that will not make you sleep well.

1:15:43Annie Jacobsen:And first of all, there is no government organization, either in the United States or internationally, that is keeping track of all the BSL-4 and BSL-3 labs. We, the public, relies upon the good work of academics and scientists, whom I credit and source in the book if anyone wants more information. Okay. Here's their statistic. There are 3 ,500 or more BSL-3 labs around the world, 91.6 % of which have no safety standards. So how does it have a safety classification but no safety standard? There's no safety standards. So they're just working on things that should be protected under biosafety level 3, but they just didn't bother doing that.

1:16:29Annie Jacobsen:Exactly. Well, those are the pathogens that they're supposed to be able to be working on. Right. So they got smallpox and it's like, hey, this should be BSL-3. And they go, whatever. We wash our hands when we're done. Precisely. Oh my God. There are no specific protocols. And the BSL-4 labs are really interesting and worrisome because before 9-11, actually in the late 90s, there were two BSL-4 labs in the United States of America, two only. One at Fort Detrick, which is the Defense Department's only BSL-4 lab. and the other in Atlanta at the CDC. After 9-11, there was an explosion, no pun intended, of BSL-3 and 4 labs to the point where we now have 15 and another two are under construction, so 17.

1:17:14Annie Jacobsen:And that is what has just been sourced by the scientists and academics. So that is essentially the figure that the public has. Right, so if the military has made other secret ones, we just don't even know about those. Why is there such an increase? I mean, is it just because now we can edit genes more easily, so pharma's getting into the game? Or what's the reason? It's tied very specifically to the war on terror. It's tied to 9-11, to the anthrax attacks. I see. It's tied to the Bush-Cheney administration. Dick Cheney himself was terrified of a biological weapons attack. I write about this in other of my books.

1:17:51Annie Jacobsen:And so after 9-11, there began a buildup of a new industry, the biodefense technological military industrial complex. There was an extraordinary amount of money that suddenly got pumped into this. Most of it happening behind closed doors because most of it was classified. So it's kind of a double-edged sword, right? Oh, good. We're bringing attention to this. We're bringing pressure. There's funding now. okay, great. Now, instead of two labs, we have 17. It's like, oh, that's not exactly what I was hoping for. And the reason that I point this out is not necessarily to bring, you know, self-righteous indignation to the table of my, at the feet of my own government, but rather those are the facts.

1:18:38Annie Jacobsen:And what happened as a result, which I think speaks a bit to our discussion on measures and countermeasures and offense, defense, and paranoia, and your enemies and adversaries wondering what you're doing. What was happening in the United States had a ripple effect around the world. Suddenly, all these other countries from China to India, they're all in the game now. And they are saying, America is doing this. We must do it too. And that is why now today there are 110 BSL-4 labs in 34 countries around the world, some of which are at war with their neighbors. Sure. So Pakistan and India kind of situation.

1:19:21Annie Jacobsen:And when you're thinking that there's like kinetic explosions going off, that, you know, certain areas of said city is under the control of rogue bad guy, it's really raising a lot of concern about the safety and security of what's in that lab. Especially when you realize that the BSL-4 is just the classification of the pathogens in the lab, not the level of safety that the lab actually has. It's the level of safety it's supposed to have. That's really scary. Yes, and you have to believe that in many countries, certainly in more modern countries, scientists that are working there are seriously concerned about their own health and safety.

1:20:03Annie Jacobsen:And so they would, one would presume, be very, you know, adamant about having proper gear. But in other labs, the BSL-2 labs and 3 labs, in countries that are not as scientifically advanced or experienced with this kind of research, you can run into a problem with a lack of knowledge. Sure. Especially if it's maybe an authoritarian regime, what's the scientist going to say, hey, look, I'm not going to work under these conditions. My hazmat suit has a puncture hole in it. They're going to say, here's a roll of duct tape, comrade. Get after it. We got work to do. You know, you can't just go work for a competing lab.

1:20:43Annie Jacobsen:That is a wonderfully terrifying point. Imagine earning a Ph.D. in molecular biology only to spend four hours wandering around outside in the winter in pajamas so American spy satellites think your bioweapons lab is a psychiatric hospital. Your parents must be thrilled. We'll be right back. This episode is brought to you in part by Lufthansa. When people talk about travel, they usually focus on the destination, the hotel, the restaurants, all the stuff that happens after you land. But the flight is part of the experience too. Just like a great hotel can shape an entire trip, so can a great flight.

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1:22:11Annie Jacobsen:Respect, but that's not the Mount Rushmore. Listen, cash rules everything around me. When that line dropped, it changed the whole hustle. The greatest tracks are never finished. They're just debated forever. Introducing the Sprite Living Tracklist, 50 tracks that shaped the culture from six decades of hip-hop. Scan the QR code on a Sprite or Sprite Zero Sugar to see the full breakdown. Obey your thirst. Sprite. Come check out our newsletter, Wee Bit Wiser. It is specific and practical. It'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, psychology, relationships, in under two minutes just about every Wednesday.

1:22:44Actually, that's kind of a lie. It's often on Wednesdays. How's that? And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Now for the rest of my conversation with Annie Jacobson. So you're advising that this is a hypothetical as well. You're advising the president. We know BSL for lab has an explosion, little gas leak in air quotes, but we don't know what escaped. What are the first five questions we should be asking?

1:23:13Annie Jacobsen:You mean, what is the intelligence community and the Defense Department doing in those moments immediately after it? Yeah, essentially that. Yes. And I take the reader through precisely that because it's profoundly interesting. Only later do we learn that the Defense Department only takes the lead in the initial investigation and then has to let U.S. Department of Health and Human Services take over, which is its own set of problems. But initially, it's really the work of the intelligence community that is looking at the facility from space, looking at the facility from the ground where there may be covert sensors using signals intelligence, imagery intelligence, satellite images, trying to discern if a pathogen got out and then what pathogen got out.

1:24:02Annie Jacobsen:And you learn as I take readers through this and kind of the first act of the narrative that This is a complex and really frustrating journey because unlike nuclear weapons where you know that's an ICBM, there's a nuclear weapon in the warhead, essentially. You don't know. And there are so many different pathogens. And so you have all these different components of the government working to try and determine what it is. And at the same time, in the United States, you have the president's biodefense council now beefed up because of COVID, working overtime to try to figure out when are we going to brief the president?

1:24:40So you have to figure out what organism was maybe present there and if it was breached. And I suppose there's some pretty bleak options, right, because you have to go, OK, is the foreign government responding in a way that we think is honest? You know, because if Russia says we had an explosion at a BSL level four lab, we're going to be honest, guys, there's some pretty gross stuff in there. Heads up, right? Like Chernobyl exploded. We're not trying to hide this anymore. We're not giving you propaganda numbers. There was some research stuff in there that looks a lot like smallpox or hentavirus, but way more contagious.

1:25:08We don't think anything got out. We're working on it. That's one thing. But if they go gas leak, no problem. It's just the cafeteria. And the intelligence agency says that was not the cafeteria. area. We've seen liquid nitrogen trucks going in and out there. We've seen all kinds of stuff going in. They're lying to us. What do we do? Do we drop a tactical nuke on the whole facility and anything around it? I mean, we have to sort of decide what we're going to do. Are we going to start World War III over this because it could kill everybody anyway or what? And that might not even work if you wait too long to make the decision, right?

1:25:41Thank you very much for the

1:25:42Annie Jacobsen:precise read on precisely what happens in the book, which, by the way, comes to me from different sources in the field who have explained to me exactly as you describe it, in a little bit longer form. And yes, once the president convenes, once the SecDef is there presenting options, once you learn very quickly in the scenario that I write that Russia is essentially gaslighting everybody, like, no, no, no, not even responding, which often happens in these situations when something illegal is going on. Then you have the SecDef, in the scenario I write, bring to the table the idea of using a nuclear weapon against a biological weapons facility.

1:26:26Annie Jacobsen:And again, this is not from Annie's imagination. This is an actual program that existed in the late 1990s and was revived during the Bush-Cheney administration, the details of which were leaked to the Washington Post. And I take readers through what that looks like. Now, we don't know if in 2026, this is still a viable program, but I have a strong feeling that it probably is. And then it would be classified under something called a PEAD, a Presidential Emergency Action Directive, which would allow for nuclear use against a biological weapons facility. Now, people may say, why not just put a couple 2 ,000-pound bombs on it?

1:27:11Annie Jacobsen:And the reason is very— We want some heat, right? You want incineration because 2 ,000-pound bombs, as the science reveals, the blast wave would likely push the pathogens out into the atmosphere, whereas a nuclear weapon with its extreme temperatures would incinerate everything before it had a chance to be pushed out. Now, whoever's designing this is they've got their work cut out for them. Right. And making a decision like this would be so hard because you would almost have to say, look, Russia, we think you're lying about this. We're going to drop a tactical nuke on you. We're not trying to start a war.

1:27:47We just want to contain this. And we don't believe that you're doing a good job. Imagine how that's going to go over with the Russian government.

1:27:54Annie Jacobsen:Of course. And, you know, my understanding from having looked at a lot of this, if I had to speculate here, would be that would be one level of consideration. Were it a biological weapons facility in, you know, said nation with a terrorist organization as having a host country? That would be or maybe even a North Korea situation. Probably not because they have nukes. But as soon as you're considering using a nuclear weapon against a biological weapons facility inside a nuclear armed nation, that's endgame right there. Because we know no matter how nuclear use begins, it ends only one way. Right.

1:28:35I mean, you would almost have to say either you put a tactical nuke on it or we are going to. And North Korea says we don't have the capability to do it. Go ahead, but we're going to protest about it and make a big deal about it. But we're not trying to kill everyone. I mean, how do you even begin to negotiate that particular scenario? I mean, it's actually totally insane to think about.

1:28:55Annie Jacobsen:Which is why you need to be having these conversations before. You need to be having these conversations now. I do not envy the people who have to put their, you know what, on the line and make a decision like this. That's just absolutely, this brinkmanship is just crazy to me. In my experience interviewing so many of these individuals who are dedicated public servants, who've been working on counter-proliferation their whole lives. They have brilliant minds and great ideas and possible solutions that are not based in drop a nuke on it. That's a relief, I suppose. Yes, that are based in diplomacy, that are based in let's revisit certain treaties.

1:29:34Annie Jacobsen:But, you know, these individuals, as they explained to me, they can only get so far. Another one of the problems is always that you've got – And these efforts take years and administrations change and suddenly they have a whole new idea about bio or about nuclear, which is why I believe the United Nations is so important. And I think it's so distressing to see the United Nations. And by the way, the WHO is a component of the United Nations. It's very distressing to me to see these international organizations lose their stature in the world in which we live today because I think we need these outside international, allegedly nonpolitical organizations to be leading the charge on behalf of everyone.

1:30:27Here in the States, if we have an outbreak like that, I think a lot of people will go, all right, we just have to send a few thousand people as soon as they get symptoms into the hospitals that can contain it. And then you wrote about how many beds we have for these kinds of things. And it's like a hundred for some. And for the most severe stuff, it's like two. That's right.

1:30:46Annie Jacobsen:These special pathogen suites are required for patients with what's called a tier one select agent airborne disease, like pneumonic plague. This is where, by the way, those who were on the Hantavirus cruise ship outbreak situation, many of them were taken to these special pathogen suites. Was that airborne, by the way? I don't even know anything about Hantavirus. Hantavirus was very complex because it's fluid transmissible. So if you spit on someone, and then you wipe the spit and you by accident put it in your nose, your eyes, your mouth, Now you're talking you could have the disease. It is not airborne.

1:31:23Annie Jacobsen:True airborne is aerosolized. I see. But you're just one sneeze away. It can float in the air. Yeah, okay. And you're one sneeze away, and there was a lot of unknown, uncertainty around that strain of Hantavirus, whether or not it was something called the Andes strain, of which there's only been one or two scientific papers written that I know of that suggest maybe it could be airborne. So this was a lot of unknowns. I actually followed that pretty closely and felt like the WHO did a responsible job in tracking that. It's a longer conversation, but the special pathogen suites are essentially like a mini biosafety fortress.

1:32:02Annie Jacobsen:And there are only about 100 beds in the entire United States of America. Gosh. In a country for 340 million people. And so one of the things I learned very quickly in reporting this is that the medical facilities in America become overwhelmed on day one. Because if you're on a plane and you spread it to everyone on the plane, now there's 400 % or whatever more patients than we have beds for just landing an SFO. And those people disperse because they don't know that they're ill. Right, yeah. And there was so much to learn about, for example, what a super spreader event is, you know, a term that kind of only came out and came into the public consciousness because of COVID.

1:32:46Annie Jacobsen:But a super spreader event, there's no metric agreed upon about what it exactly is required. Right. The metric that is scientists use is kind of based on COVID. It was times four. So in other words, the transmissibility of a pathogen is very important. If it's airborne, if it's fluid transmissible, or if it's like Ebola, it's in the other room, you're not going to get it. Or if there's a dead end host like an anthrax, there's those components. But then there's also how contagious is it? So that's called the R naught or the R zero. Oh, I remember learning about this. And the most transmissible with an R naught of maybe even 18.

1:33:27Annie Jacobsen:again, all these are approximate, is measles. Another one that's super contagious, chickenpox. It has an R0 of 12. COVID had an R0 of about 2.5. When it mutated into the Delta variant, it was about five. So what that means is each person is going to infect 2.5 more people, or in the case of chickenpox, 12 more people. So you kind of get the idea. This was explained on the show, again, I think by Rob Reed, where he said something like, it was, he did a better job and it's been years, but it was like, if you walk into an elevator and somebody had COVID in there right before you, you're probably not going to get it.

1:34:04But if somebody took the elevator and they had measles and then you went to lunch and came back and went in that same elevator, you might actually get measles. And it was like, just whatever analogy he used was very scary. So something that has an R0 of 18 or whatever it is, is just, you're just infecting a gazillion people with it.

1:34:22Annie Jacobsen:And with a super spreader event, you multiply the R0 times four. So if COVID was 2.5, in a super spreader event like the Diamond Princess cruise, which is what we now know, how COVID spread outside of China, that was the first super spreader event. And I interviewed the number two at HHS at the time, Admiral Brett Gerard, who was in charge of rescuing, sending two epidemiologists in hazmat suits to rescue the 300 and some odd Americans on that ship after they got out of quarantine. And the super spreader component was that it was times four. So what ended up happening, because everybody was self-contained on the ship, one original patient with COVID, with the SARS-CoV-2 virus in his lungs, ended up infecting 712 other passengers.

1:35:18Oh, my gosh.

1:35:19Annie Jacobsen:Many of whom disembarked in Hong Kong, a city of 7.5 million people. Holy moly. I mean, when you think about this, it just seems impossible to stop anything like this from happening. It is impossible. unless you get it in the first 12 to 24 hours. Again, the reason why communication is so important, you're, you know, when you were telling me, replaying the scenario to me, if you did call Moscow in a situation like this, or if Moscow called the United States and said, look, we have a real problem, this happened, we need help. I mean, I spoke to military commanders who would say, we would deploy soldiers immediately to help.

1:36:00Annie Jacobsen:Now, sure, that's easy to say in an ideal world. Right. And Russia would never go for it because they would believe it was some kind of a sneak intent to get information to hold against them. The paranoia is real. I had Jonna Mendez on the show. She was – do you know who that is? She worked for CIA head of disguise, but it was like in the 80s and she worked in Moscow. Yes, Argo. The Argo story. Yes. So her husband organized that. And she said that one day they had, I think, a fire at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. And they were like, well, obviously you call the fire department. And the CIA people were like, no, you can call the fire department, but we're not letting them on at whatever, the fifth floor.

1:36:41So they were in there with an actual fire throwing documents into another fire, which is, you know, their incinerator. And then she said the fire department that showed up all had like brand new boots, brand new equipment, totally non-untouched everything. and some of the guys looked pretty out of shape and she was like, this is not the fire department. This is the KGB. Touche. Yeah.

1:37:00Annie Jacobsen:And so, but like, I get it because we would do the same thing. Yes. That's that degree of paranoia. And of course, paranoia plays a major theme in this book because that is a hallmark of Soviet Cold War thinking. And to my eye, that lingers. and it has also kind of infected the United States, whether or not that's intentional or just a byproduct, I don't know. But when people refer to conspiracy theorists, which I prefer to call, you know, alternative people who think in wildly alternative narratives, there is often a degree of paranoia underpinning that. Now, what's the saying? It's, if it's real, it's not paranoia.

1:37:48Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. Yes, so there is that.

1:37:52Annie Jacobsen:You know, you want to have healthy—it's not even skepticism. What would be the word? You want to have a healthy mistrust balanced with a desire to trust. Sure. The old Reagan adage, you know, trust then verify. Yes, so let's suppose the pathogen kills a bunch of—a couple billion people. Unfortunately, a lot of the people who are left are—sorry, but a bunch of politicians and the people who live in the woods and don't trust anyone already, that's a rough hurdle to rebuild civilization. That's a rough start to the new humanity. Yes. You know, in Nuclear War, I end the book with a section on nuclear winter.

1:38:30Annie Jacobsen:And again, sounds like science fiction, but totally science fact. And I had the great fortune of interviewing one of the last remaining original authors on the nuclear winter theory with Carl Sagan. His name is Professor Brian Toon. He's still working on nuclear winter. in looking at biological war. There is no nuclear winter version of that on the books. And so I wrote something called Biological Twilight, where I imagined, it's the one part of the book that is speculatively about the future of what the world would look like literally after time passes, the kind of stage that you're referring to.

1:39:08Annie Jacobsen:And one of the conclusions I came to was, and this also has to do with having looked at contemporary writings from the 14th century, the Black Death, the actual bubonic plague epidemic, pneumonic plague epidemic, pandemic. Who would be left? Would be mostly male, because a lot of the survivors in the United States would be military. The Pentagon has issued 1.7 gas masks, full respirators to military personnel. You would most definitely need one of those to keep yourself from inhaling genetically modified airborne plague in the scenario I write. And the U.S. military has only 17 % women. So now you're talking about mostly men, and you're also talking about a world that is filled with, you know, Machiavellian-type psychopaths.

1:40:00Annie Jacobsen:And solipsis, people who would be willing to kill someone from a distance because they think I can't have anyone around me. Sure. They might infect me. Right. That is a very dark and grim world. Yeah, that's some Mad Max type of stuff right there. Really, really crazy. So, OK, let's wrap with something possibly slightly optimistic. If you could force governments in the scientific community to make one change tomorrow that would, well, attempt to reduce the chance of the scenario ever happening, what would it be? On a practical level, I don't think there is a single magic button. I think it's a long, deliberate, and whole-of-government effort to devise a list of priorities of what has to happen.

1:40:43Annie Jacobsen:You know, certainly the current administration stopping gain-of-function research until more is known isn't in my eye a very solid move in the right direction because that is making – it's drawing a line in the sand also for other nations to follow. So there's that. And then there is – you know, and this is probably because I'm in the business of dialogue. I'm in the business of conveying information, of communicating with my fellows. I think there must be an effort to depoliticize the threats of weapons of mass destruction, both nuclear and bio. You said, or you wrote, I should say, that there are scenarios that are far worse than the one in the book.

1:41:25Without giving anybody a blueprint, what is the category of threat that you deliberately chose not to put on the page?

1:41:31Annie Jacobsen:Most certainly AI-enabled biological threats. That is something that the presidential advisors that I interviewed are very concerned about. And interestingly, over the past year, as I was kind of winding down my research, really focusing on the reporting, and then even moving into production when I'm still doing interviews so that I could prepare for dialogues like this, the threat of AI systems mixed with biology has grown dramatically in my discussions with people to the point now where it is an actual major topic of discussion. I was invited to a Q &A at DARPA's summer session with its BSAT organization.

1:42:16Annie Jacobsen:That's the Biological Science and Technology Study Group that's a bunch of Nobel laureates based out of Caltech just last week. And I was participating in obviously an unclassified component of their work. But on the table and heavily discussed with a very serious sort of fear factor built in, and I do not say that lightly, was the threat of biology and computational systems with the human in the loop losing control of the ability to control the AIs as far as bio is concerned. So what would that look like? The AI just decides I'm going to make a weapon and we can't do anything about it? That is exactly what it would look like.

1:42:58Wow.

1:42:58Annie Jacobsen:And this is DARPA talking. And by the way, the solution is even more haunting, I learned. Again, not classified. The hurdle is that the six individual CEOs who are running the world's AI companies have to, to the Defense Department's eye, be persuaded to agree to actual, quote, pull the plug on bio plus AI. And so that really threw me because being someone who essentially wrote the book on DARPA called The Pentagon's Brain, I was a Pulitzer finalist for it. This was in 2015. I can no longer say that based on listening to the DARPA scientists themselves, in essence, saying the CEOs of these AI companies have more control than we do.

1:43:51Yeah, that's really scary. So you're actually going to be speaking with a group of senators on this exact topic in the next few days. I mean, we had to rearrange this so that it could happen. So tell me about that.

1:44:01Annie Jacobsen:That's right. And maybe I'll report back in. We'll do another podcast on. But what's interesting is I am a journalist. I am a storyteller. I am going to the Senate to talk to senators about what I write about in my book, Nuclear War. And, you know, the general public may be saying, my God, what good can she do? I mean, aren't these guys really supposed to be in charge of what's going on here? We all saw the Facebook thing where they didn't know how the Internet worked. So they need your expertise. But I think this is an interesting and, you know, it's sort of like a it's positive in an enigmatic way.

1:44:33Annie Jacobsen:When I was asked to speak at the United Nations about nuclear weapons, I was truly speaking to the world's subject matter experts because these were all the individuals that are responsible for trying to get us back into the treaties or in this new treaty, the TPNW that's on the table. And one of the leading diplomats said to me at a small reception afterwards, he said, Annie, thank you for doing what we subject matter experts forgot to do, which is make this subject easy to understand. And so that gives me hope that you need subject matter experts with their high level understanding of systems of systems, of weapons of mass destruction.

1:45:15Annie Jacobsen:But you also need the storyteller like me to perhaps bring it home. I think so. In a very easy way. And so I am going to the Senate and then I am going to the White House at the behest of HHS to bring them some books at their request, biological war scenario, so that they can get a jump on reading it. Hopefully they do. And hopefully they lose enough sleep over it like I did, but actually are able to do something about it. That would make me rest a little bit easier. Is the final failure of human imagination that we could not foresee this or that we foresaw it perfectly, in fact, and just continued anyway?

1:45:53Annie Jacobsen:I think the latter, because I think having lived through COVID, we all now know that a pandemic actually can just happen. It seemed to have come out of the blue. But that no longer should be the ostrich head in the sand approach, because we know better. Annie Jacobson, thank you very much. Well, again, people even just listening to this are going to have a little bit of trouble falling asleep tonight. I do recommend the book. I think it's a good read. And I jokingly say that it'll make you nervous. I think it's an informative and fun read. It will make you a little nervous, but I don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing.

1:46:30I think people should be thinking about this, even if you quote unquote can't do anything about it. I think it's good to have this even in the back burner of your brain, because it's a hell of a lot more likely than nuclear winter.

1:46:41Annie Jacobsen:The point is pressure, not panic. That's right. Thank you. Thank you. What could happen if humans mess with genes and if labs leak superbugs? In this clip, Rob Reed chats about DNA printers that could either save us or, well, not by churning out vaccines or viruses right from our living rooms. The terrifying thing is COVID is pretty damn benign compared to what could have easily happened this time around or what could very easily happen next time around, particularly if the next bug is maliciously designed. Society produces a certain small but terrifying percentage of people every year who for whatever reason go to such a dark place that they become suicidal mass murderers and their death toll is limited only by the weapons that they have.

1:47:29Technology is the force multiplier. the 1918 flu virus, which killed at a much, much, much greater scale than COVID, and the smallpox genome. Both of those are online, and anybody could find them within a short number of minutes. The time would soon come where somebody could take that and reanimate that. And something which scares the bejesus out of me, which is an influenza virus on a coronavirus, is H5N1 flu that kills 50 to 60 % of the people that it infects. Two independent research groups, one in Holland and one in Wisconsin, took it upon themselves and they basically made it capable of aerosolized transmission through the breath.

1:48:13No lab is secure enough to keep this stuff running out. And this is a pathogen that could quite literally topple civilization if it's contagious enough. If the lights shut off on a countrywide basis after a shockingly small number of days, civilization starts to teeter and eventually topple. For more things that'll keep you up at night and whether we can handle the power we're playing with, check out episode 510 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Annie Jacobson's new book is Biological War. It'll be linked in the show notes. Please use those links on the website if you buy the books from our guests.

1:48:49It really does help support the show. A lot of people go, the link is not in the show notes. Yes, it is. The show notes is not the little blurb in your app. It's on the website at jordanharbinger.com. Anyway, this is scary stuff, huh? America has roughly 100 high-level isolation beds for more than 340 million people. So what, once patient 101 arrives, we unfold the plague cot and put it next to the vending machine? What happens then? After researching this book, Annie, she purchased respirators, protective suits, emergency supplies. I bought a case of bourbon and changed my Netflix password. I don't know, maybe I still have some work to do here, but a biological catastrophe would not actually require society to stop functioning.

1:49:29That's kind of the spooky part here. It would use our functioning society, airports, hospitals, technology, compassion, and distrust to spread itself. And the most disturbing possibility of all may not be that we failed to foresee such a disaster. It may be that we foresaw it in extraordinary detail, ran the simulations, documented all the failures and then just continued on exactly as before. All things Annie Jacobson will be in the show notes on the website. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show.

1:50:02Don't forget about 6-Minute Networking over at 6minutenetworking.com. I'm at jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in scenarios like these, war games, biological threats, or just a little bit of sci-fi that might not be sci-fi, unfortunately, definitely share this episode with them.

1:50:38In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. you