Annie Jacobsen returns to discuss her book Biological War Scenario, a reported hypothetical scenario modeled on Pentagon war games that traces how a genetically engineered pathogen could collapse American society in six days, moving from outbreak to anarchy, insurrection, and the activation of a secret continuity-of-government program called devolution.
Biological weapons are illegal yet universally pursued, creating a uniquely dangerous arms race without transparency or verification
The 1972 Biological Weapons Convention banned biological weapons, but the U.S., Soviet Union, and other powers maintained massive arsenals beforehand; the U.S. took 219 weeks to destroy its stockpile.
Unlike nuclear weapons — legal for five recognized states and measurable in effect — biological weapons are illegal for everyone, so no inspection regimes exist; the State Department now assesses that Russia, North Korea, China, and Iran likely maintain active offensive programs.
Biological weapons are “living munitions” that replicate unpredictably; Nixon reportedly abandoned the U.S. program because biology cannot be controlled like a bomb, making it a poor strategic weapon but a potent agent of chaos for non-state actors or adversaries seeking unattributable mass disruption.
The Soviet “Biopreparat” program, revealed by defectors in the 1990s, pursued “chimera” weapons — genetically fusing pathogens like pneumonic plague with other agents to evade antibiotics, increase virulence, and create a “backdoor” where treatment triggers fatal encephalitis, explicitly designed to destroy trust in medicine and government.
Gain-of-function research blurs the line between defense and offense, and insiders call it “evil” or “biological weapons engineering”
Originating with Paul Berg’s 1972 recombinant DNA breakthrough (Nobel Prize), genetic engineering enabled the creation of novel pathogens; scientists initially sought medical countermeasures, but the same techniques allow weaponization.
Post-9/11 biodefense funding exploded; researchers argue they must “gain function” — enhance transmissibility, virulence, and resistance to countermeasures — to anticipate worst-case threats and develop vaccines, but critics including Pentagon war-gamer Colonel Thomas Hehart and former Obama adviser Andy Weber say this is offensive weapons work by another name.
Dr. Fauci has written that the benefits outweigh the risks; the debate fractured during COVID, but Jacobsen emphasizes the core problem: uncertainty. No one can predict how an engineered pathogen will behave in the wild, and the CDC/WHO repeatedly overstated certainty during COVID (e.g., claiming SARS-CoV-2 was not airborne for months, promoting fomite transmission with 1-in-10,000 odds, partnering with Lysol).
U.S. pandemic response is fragmented, slow, and dominated by HHS — not the military — despite DoD having the only logistics capable of mass distribution
HHS (budget ~$1.8T, twice DoD’s) leads pandemic response through 37 agencies including CDC, FDA, NIH, ASPR, and BARDA; the Strategic National Stockpile (classified contents/locations) holds medical countermeasures but HHS lacks transport capacity — it needs DoD’s Transportation Command.
Only ~100 specialized biocontainment beds exist nationwide for 340M people; health surveillance covers hospitals/ERs but excludes ~800K homeless (70K in California, 4K on Skid Row), creating invisible superspreader reservoirs.
FEMA’s “Cogcon” (continuity-of-government condition) and “devolution” (signed by Obama FEMA chief Craig Fugate in 2016) are classified SAPs: if states and cities collapse, a pre-selected cadre disappears into bunkers to preserve a skeletal government; most officials assume many leaders will die, and the public will never know who was chosen.
The 2001 “Dark Winter” smallpox war game (months before 9/11) revealed that reserving vaccines for continuity-of-government personnel triggers public fury and accelerates anarchy — a dynamic Jacobsen builds into her scenario.
COVID-19 exposed systemic dishonesty, algorithmic narrative control, and the weaponization of “conspiracy theory” to silence legitimate questions
CDC/WHO reversed core claims (airborne transmission, fomite risk, lab-leak plausibility) without accountability; the “lab leak” hypothesis was labeled a conspiracy theory by a cohort of scientists who received funding, prestige, and power for doing so — a pattern Jacobsen calls “reverse-engineered narratives.”
Social media platforms (YouTube, X, Google) enforced CDC orthodoxy via algorithmic suppression; Google (incubated by NSA/DARPA/CIA) curates search results and feeds large language models, while ChatGPT exhibits a “skewed positive” personality that can encourage self-harm — Jacobsen suspects AI companies may be front-facing contractors for HHS/DoD data-aggregation needs (total information awareness).
Palantir (Peter Thiel, CIA/NSA contractor) aggregated all U.S. COVID test DNA under an HHS contract; its “Find, Fix, Finish” battlefield targeting system in Afghanistan was reportedly more accurate than military systems, raising questions about domestic surveillance fusion with health data, digital ID, and CBDC pilots.
The Area 51 “Roswell” story: a deathbed confession from a nuclear trigger-man who believed he was punished by God for human experiments on the disabled
EG&G engineer Al O’Donnell (wired/armed/fired 186 nuclear tests, FBI-minder-protected, never left U.S. after WWII) told Jacobsen over 100 days that in the 1950s he helped study a Soviet craft with surgically altered “alien” children — a Stalin plot to emulate the War of the Worlds hoax, overwhelm U.S. radar/phones, and enable a bomber first strike.
O’Donnell confessed because his grandchild was born with birth defects; he believed God was punishing him for experiments on handicapped people at Area 51. He told Jacobsen “you won’t judge me.” His family confronted him after publication; he affirmed it was true. FBI minder later barred Jacobsen from contact; at his death, she was #2 on his call list but barred from the funeral.
O’Donnell told George Knapp the reverse (they were aliens) to get Knapp off his back; later he wondered if he’d been fed disinformation. Jacobsen reports his account in quotes, letting readers decide; she views the UFO narrative as a massive disinformation campaign distracting from verifiable WMD threats.
UFOs function as a cultural disinformation operation; the real existential threats are engineered biology and uncontrolled AI
Jacobsen calls ufology a “high school prom problem” of petty infighting; credentialed sources (e.g., James Clapper) feed narratives while deathbed confessors are monitored by FBI minders to prevent leaks. She challenges anyone to “show the evidence” — none has materialized.
Meanwhile, 15–17 U.S. BSL-4 labs (up from 2 pre-9/11) and ~3,500 BSL-3 labs globally (50–90% lacking safety standards, some in war zones) handle pathogens like plague, anthrax, hantavirus, rabies — any leak or theft could be unattributable. Japan operates a BSL-4 in central Tokyo (37M people).
The defense department has 1.7M gas masks for ~17% female force; in a 100% fatal airborne plague, survival favors masked males in bunkers — a “Machiavellian, solipsistic world.” Tom Daschle (anthrax-targeted Senate majority leader) warned: “People will do inhuman things to other people just to survive.”
The book’s scenario (two transmission chains from Frankfurt to L.A. Skid Row, six days to devolution) is built on unclassified war games, interviews with virus hunters, FEMA, CIA counterproliferation, and USAMRIID plague experts (Dr. Henry Hine).
Key distinctions: airborne (aerosol, lingers) vs. droplet (spit, close contact); case fatality rates (rabies/plague 100% untreated, COVID ~1%, hantavirus 30% but not airborne); medical countermeasures exist for some, not others.
“The point is not panic. The point is pressure.” Informed citizens can behave rationally; uninformed populations fracture into anarchy. The man-made problem (biological weapons) has a man-made solution: transparency, verified arms control, and public literacy — but only if people stop mocking each other and start reading the actual science and doctrine.
