Book Review: Biological War

It’s 6 October 2026, I turn on the news to discover the World Health Organization has asked Russia for more information on the death of a worker at a Siberian plague research laboratory.

Unsurprisingly Russia is giving limited information about the risk of pneumonic plague becoming airborne and sweeping through the world to wreak death and destruction.

Only the night before I was reading Biological Warfare by Annie Jacobson which examines a terrifying scenario of a lab accident in Russia releasing an uncontrollable “super plague” against its enemies, only to discover it cannot be controlled.

The fact I am not writing this review in a hermetically sealed bunker proves the 320-page disaster has not happened…yet. I might have failed GCSE science but even I know top secret plans to create genetically modified biological weapons is a bad idea.

This book was an airport purchase. My son read it first, then me. That kind of knowledge almost qualifies us as experts by today’s social media standards of authoritative voices. I keep advising people to work in biosecurity because it is a growth industry. This book can help with essays. If you want to be hot talent in learn about biosecurity and drone technology, maybe specialising in developing antidotes for deadly pathogens.

Jacobson was a screenwriter for the brilliant first series of Jack Ryan which sees the CIA planning large-scale attacks against the United States and its allies. For this scenario, the Russian biological weapon is a chimera pathogen; a monstrous biological hybrid that is "a genetically modified, airborne bacterium as deadly as pneumonic plague that releases a second pathogen when treated.”

“In military nomenclature, a wicked problem is a problem without a solution. The term is borrowed from systems theory and refers to a problem so dynamic that by the time it reveals itself, the conditions of the problem will have already changed. The army reveals four wicked problems that will never go away”

· Biological attacks are invisible – Silent and odourless, they won’t be detected until people start dying and contagion levels are already out of control.

· An aerolised pathogen is the ultimate nightmare scenario - Humans must breathe air to stay alive; with an airborne pathogen incident or attack, breathing becomes the primary dispersal mechanism of death.

· Law enforcement, first responders, doctors and nurses will be exposed – the people best equipped to respond and help will become sick and die, leaving few professionals left to care for the sick and the dying.

· Mass panic will likely collapse the medical system – the sudden onset of dying people will lead to a crushing wave of infected people and not infected people, overwhelming local emergency medical systems before diagnoses can be made. The noninfected will become infected while waiting for aid.

Most first responders will die. In America, a large-scale biological incident or attack, state and federal troops act together as one massive force. The Weapons of Mass Destruction Response Forces comes into play too. But in biological warfare, time is an Achilles’ heel. It takes time to mobilise forces and they are playing catch up with the killer pathogen, social media and widespread civil unrest. And America is a nation of gun owners. In a mad rush for lifesaving antibiotics, it is every man for himself.

One infected person infects another 11 people. In a metropolis the infection rate can be one person infects 44 people. The pathogen is uncontrollable and the death count will be huge. Nuclear bases, missile silos, submarines and command centres remain critical national security assets even during a biological catastrophe. Even when under biological attack, America lets the world know it is still a nuclear superpower.

“Millions of corpses will attract millions of scavenging rats. The rats and fleas will continue to spread plague, neither of which can be barred from entry by high walls, barbed-wire fencing, or a small army of soldiers with guns.”

There is nothing uplifting about this scenario. Surviving the killer plague would be a relief as dying from it would be hellish. The lonely President of America sitting alone reminds me of Walter White in Breaking Bad when he hides in an isolated cabin in the woods under an alias.

In America, “it is not the fittest who survive, but those who refused to take off their gas masks. People with the discipline to never remove their respirator, even when they sleep. People willing to live alone, and to remain alone. People prepared to kill from a distance, even before knowing if the person thy were killing was infected or not.”

In Russia, the “plague vaccine caused birth defects across an entire generation on a nationwide scale. Russian women refused to have babies and there hasn’t been a single healthy child born in more than a year.”

I don’t know what happens to prisons. Maybe the world becomes a prison. I wonder what the plans are to repopulate the world. Will people remember how to do it? Will there be chimera babies made from different animals merged into one monster?

This must never happen.

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