Annie Jacobsen with Elliot Ackerman: Nuclear War Scenarios

What would happen if the next global catastrophe arrived not with a flash, but a fever?

Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen, whose previous book laid a chilling framework for understanding the risks of nuclear war, is back with a riveting study of another existential threat to humankind. In a conversation with former US Marine, CIA special operations officer, and novelist Elliot Ackerman, Jacobsen discusses Biological War: A Scenario — a deeply reported new book examining the terrifying realities of biological warfare.

Tracing a chilling scenario — a lab leak or deliberate bio-attack that spirals into worldwide contagion, social collapse, and existential crisis — Jacobsen draws on extensive interviews with senior military officials, intelligence operatives, scientists, physicians, and government leaders to map the hours, days, and weeks following the release of a weaponized pathogen. What would happen in a worst-case scenario? How fragile are the systems underpinning modern civilization? How are biological threats fundamentally different from the threats Jacobsen explored in Nuclear War?

Expect a gripping, urgent conversation about our preparedness for the next great threat to humanity, drawing on Jacobsen’s extensive reporting and Ackerman’s years of service in the US Marines and the CIA — a conversation about what our governments know and fear about weaponized pathogens, and what it reveals about a world under pressure.