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 it). There are hundreds of BSL-3 labs around the world, some of them engaging in gain-of-function research. Then there are BSL-4 labs, which deal with the worst pathogens, some of them synthetic. Dozens of these exist around the world.
Jacobsen is a great story-teller, and saves an awful twist for the afterword. There are worse scenarios possible than the one she chose for her book. Biological weapons require much less infrastructure than nuclear ones, and technology is bringing them within the reach of individuals.