Biological War: A Scenario

I used to be scared about climate change; but then I read Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario. Now I think that the world will be lucky to reach four degrees. Annie Jacobsen’s nuclear war book described what might happen after a ‘bolt-from-the-blue’ nuclear attack (the same scenario as in Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite). It’s an interesting mix of non-fiction and fiction. People can quibble about the exact scenario, but the facts are clear: any nuclear attack will be an atrocity. I’d thought Jacobsen’s latest book would be less horrific. I didn’t expect something easy, but plague seemed less of an existential threat than nuclear annihilation. I was wrong. I had no idea about some of the biological agents that have been produced in laboratories around the world. There are four bio-safety levels used to classify laboratories. BSL-3 is the sort of lab that works with covid-style pathogens (Jacobsen does not endorse the covid lab-leak theory, but certainly draws attention to…