The Secret Government Playbook For A Bioweapon Attack - Annie Jacobsen - #1127

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Last time we talked was about how we could blow ourselves to death, and this time we're talking about how we could infect ourselves to death. Which one's scarier, nuclear war or biological war?

**Annie Jacobsen** (0:11)
It's equally scary in completely different ways. I think, you know, with nuclear war, the response to that was so many people calling me up and saying like, okay, I read your book, I just want to die instantly.
Biological war is tricky and scary because you don't have to die instantly. And then you have to wonder, I wish I did. That's the sort of bad news first.

**Chris Williamson** (0:41)
That is there any good news with biological war?

**Annie Jacobsen** (0:44)
There is because it can be prevented. I mean, unlike nuclear war, which is like a just an event that happens without warning. It's literally called an event without warning. Biological war is event with warning.
And that warning window, it's literally like 12, 24, 36 hours max. But that is the window of time when something can be done.

**Chris Williamson** (1:08)
Why do you think biological warfare receives so little public attention compared with nuclear war?

**Annie Jacobsen** (1:13)
Yeah. I mean, terrific question. For starters, biological war is illegal. Biological weapons are illegal. And yet biological weapons exist, including now today, 21st century, genetically modified biological weapons for extreme transmission, hypervirulence, and designed to defeat existing vaccines and countermeasures.
But it's illegal, so no one has them except for they do.

**Chris Williamson** (1:46)
Is there something about it being invisible as well? There's no smoke in the sky.

**Annie Jacobsen** (1:50)
I mean, that's what makes it incredibly sinister, I think. It's invisible, it's silent. And when you really just think of this simple idea that a biological weapon, any pathogen really, is a living munition.
It's alive and it replicates.

**Chris Williamson** (2:07)
It's a bullet with a mind of its own.

**Annie Jacobsen** (2:08)
And it's like, it's self-reproducing. And so it's just go once it gets unleashed.

**Chris Williamson** (2:18)
Do you think bioweapons are the most underappreciated existential risk of the modern world?

**Annie Jacobsen** (2:23)
Well, I came across this chart in the DoD that really freaked me out when I was reading, when I was working on nuclear war. And it's like the weapons of mass destruction, WMD threat spectrum. And of course, nuclear weapons are like at the far end of the worst, most destructive. But biological weapons are a very close second and even more frightening. They are considered the most likely to occur and therefore the most dangerous.
And this has to do with, you know, laboratories doing defensive research on biological weapon countermeasures. So this is where you get really into a lot of, you know, sort of catch 22 very politicized debates, which we're going to stay away from and just talk about it as like a, or at least I am, you know, because it shouldn't, no one should be for biological war.

**Chris Williamson** (3:21)
What surprised you most about comparing the two, nuclear war and bio war?

**Annie Jacobsen** (3:29)
Well, equally shocked in two lanes. So nuclear war, I remember when Craig Fugate, who's Obama's former FEMA director, told me that there is no plan for population protection in the event of a strategic nuclear attack because everyone will be dead. I mean, that was stunning to me because this is coming from the guy in charge of it.
Equally stunning is that there is a plan for protection in the event of biological war. But it's not for the population, it's not for you and me, it's for the government. It's for a tiny group of government officials that will live out the attack or the incident, by the way. It doesn't have to be an attack, it can be an accident. But this is super creepy and people should definitely know about it.

**Chris Williamson** (4:19)
They should be very upset when they do.
Let's start to creep people out then. Starting at the beginning, how did we learn to engineer biotechnology?

**SPEAKER_3** (4:27)
What's the story there?

**Annie Jacobsen** (4:29)
Yeah. I mean, people talk about CRISPR now, the CRISPR-Cas gene editing. That's pretty much third or fourth generation gene editing. So the origin story of gene editing is 1971 in a laboratory in Stanford, at Stanford University in Stanford, California. And a Nobel laureate named Paul Berg, he won the Nobel laureate for the work he did, figured out how to create what is called a chimera pathogen. So mix chimeras like that ancient Greek idea of a monster made up of two different parts.
And Berg figured out how to create recombinant DNA. That is the real fundamental word for gene editing. And that was way back in 1971