Newt Gingrich and Annie Jacobsen examine the growing threat of biological warfare, lab accidents, genetic engineering, and America’s ability to respond to a catastrophic outbreak.
Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author Annie Jacobsen has spent years investigating the threats most capable of reshaping civilization. After examining nuclear war, she turned to a danger that senior national security officials repeatedly urged her to investigate next: biological catastrophe. In her new book, Biological War: A Scenario, Jacobsen explores how an engineered pathogen, a laboratory accident, or a deliberate biological attack could spread across a globally connected world faster than governments and public health systems can respond.
On Newt’s World, Newt Gingrich and Annie Jacobsen examine the history of biological weapons, the extraordinary advances in genetic engineering, the rapid expansion of high-containment laboratories, and the lessons America failed to fully absorb from COVID-19. Their conversation also raises a larger question about preparedness. Technology may now give us the ability to identify emerging threats in near real time, but bureaucratic systems can still move far more slowly. For Jacobsen, the answer is not panic. It is using what we know to put pressure on institutions to prepare before the next crisis arrives.
Listen to their conversation below, or scroll down for an edited transcript:
Edited Transcript
This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Newt Gingrich
You spent years immersed in nuclear annihilation. Why did you decide biological warfare was the subject that had to come next?
Annie Jacobsen
When I was interviewing very high-level officials who deal with the nuclear threat, including presidential advisers, STRATCOM commanders, and former secretaries of defense, often toward the end of those interviews I would hear some variation of, “Annie, you should really look at bio next.”
It was said with a deeply disquieting, shark-in-the-water feeling that I could not ignore. When I began looking at the biological threat, I realized just how great it is.
Newt Gingrich
Nuclear war almost works as a scenario because it is mathematical. If there is a ballistic missile launch, you know where it came from and what is likely to happen next.
Does biological warfare break out of that logic and create a much more complex management challenge?
Annie Jacobsen
Precisely. Nuclear war is a system. You can track the hardware, the locations, and the sequence of events.
Biology, by its nature, is much more uncertain and complex. I began looking at declassified Pentagon war-game scenarios involving catastrophic biological incidents and unclassified pandemic-planning scenarios from public health officials.
I noticed something remarkable. No matter which pathogen was involved, there was always a point where the scenario stopped. That point was when anarchy broke out. It was essentially “game over.”
As a national security reporter, I thought: These people know what happens after anarchy breaks out. They are simply not telling us.
That is what I wanted to know.
Newt Gingrich
How much were you shaped or informed by the actual experience of COVID?
Annie Jacobsen
Most certainly. The long shadow of COVID underpins the narrative.
I use examples people can relate to, such as a superspreader event on a cruise ship, an adversarial government not being transparent with the United States, and an infection arriving in the country by airplane.
I hoped people would come away realizing COVID could have been an incredible cautionary tale from which government and society learned and became better prepared.
Unfortunately, I believe we are actually a more fractured society over COVID than we were when I began working on the book.
Newt Gingrich
You go back to 1971, when Paul Berg was putting together DNA from different viruses in a Stanford laboratory. Why did that experiment matter so much to the development of the potential danger of biological warfare?
Annie Jacobsen
That is really the origin story of genetic engineering.
One of the things I try to do as a journalist is take complex ideas and make them easy to understand. Genetic engineering, genetic modification, and gain-of-function research can sound incredibly complicated.
Paul Berg, who would later win the Nobel Prize, created what was essentially the first chimera pathogen by putting organisms together in a laboratory.
That was an early moment in genetic engineering. Today, we are far more advanced, with systems such as CRISPR.
Newt Gingrich
Can you describe CRISPR? It is one of the great breakthroughs that makes all of this dramatically easier and potentially more threatening.
Annie Jacobsen
Think of what Paul Berg was doing in 1971 as old-fashioned film editing. You have strips of film, scissors, and tape. You cut two pieces and put them together.
CRISPR is more like sitting at a modern computer and editing digital images with a few keystrokes. Something that was once extremely complicated can now be done much more quickly and precisely.
Newt Gingrich
The Soviet Union had an enormous biological warfare program during the latter stages of the Cold War. What did we learn about what they were trying to accomplish?
Annie Jacobsen
The Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 outlawed biological weapons. The United States destroyed its arsenal.
The Soviet Union signed the treaty but secretly built a colossal biological weapons program.
We later learned from Soviet defectors that the goal was to develop the ability to kill tens or even hundreds of millions of people in America and the West while leaving the infrastructure intact.
Unlike nuclear war, which could leave a radioactive wasteland, biological warfare offered this horrific vision of killing the population while leaving the buildings standing.
Newt Gingrich
My understanding is that Russia and North Korea probably still operate biological weapons programs, while China and Iran remain serious concerns.
Annie Jacobsen
The U.S. State Department has stated that Russia and North Korea have active biological weapons programs and identified China and Iran as programs of concern.
But there is another important issue. The Biological Weapons Convention allows countries to maintain dangerous pathogens in laboratories if the research is being conducted for prophylactic purposes, such as developing medical countermeasures.
That creates a dangerous gray area. Countries around the world can conduct experiments on extremely dangerous pathogens, raising questions about whether some of that work could itself resemble biological weapons research.
Newt Gingrich
In your scenario, you do not begin with a terrorist attack. You begin with an accident at Russia’s Vector Institute in Siberia.
Why did you choose an accidental nightmare rather than a deliberate attack?
Annie Jacobsen
What astonished me was discovering that biological catastrophe planning often pairs the language “biological attack” with “biological incident.”
The consequences of a laboratory accident can be as calamitous as the consequences of a deliberate biological attack.
That is precisely why I began the scenario with a lab leak. Something gets out, it gets out fast, and almost immediately events begin moving beyond anyone’s control.
Newt Gingrich
One of the most disturbing parts of your scenario involves a pathogen engineered with a gene associated with euphoria. Why is that so important?
Annie Jacobsen
This is not something I invented for the book. It was explained to me by Dr. Henry Hein, a subject-matter expert on plague who worked at USAMRIID.
Scientists were aware of Soviet work involving a plague weapon engineered with a gene associated with euphoria.
Normally, a deadly pathogen can begin to burn itself out if infected people become so sick that they remain home or die quickly.
The malevolent idea was that an infected person might instead feel terrific, go out, socialize, and spread the disease to more people before becoming critically ill.
It is an example of using human behavior itself to increase transmission.
Newt Gingrich
You reported that one former Pentagon official said learning the details of the Soviet biological weapons program changed how he understood the word “evil.”
Why?
Annie Jacobsen
Pentagon officials do not casually use words like good and evil.
I think what disturbed him was the deliberate manipulation of a deadly pathogen to prey upon human nature and social behavior.
With many conventional weapons, military planners believe they can estimate the effects of a strike. Biological warfare is fundamentally different because once infection begins spreading, the consequences become deeply uncertain.
There is something particularly twisted about manipulating a pathogen so it exploits mankind’s instinct to socialize.
Newt Gingrich
One of the things your scenario demonstrates is the extraordinary speed at which an outbreak could now move around the planet.
Annie Jacobsen
When I was researching the Black Death, I came across an observation that plague moved across Europe at roughly the speed of human travel. In the 14th century, that might have been about a mile per day by ship or caravan.
Now consider modern travel. A person can cross the world in half a day.
That realization became an important part of my scenario. A scientist becomes infected after an accident at a laboratory in Siberia. He encounters a group of international hunters, and those people eventually travel to six of the seven continents.
It demonstrates how quickly an infectious disease can move in the modern world.
Newt Gingrich
There is also the problem of blowback. If a country deliberately released a biological weapon, it would have to worry about infecting its own population.
Annie Jacobsen
Exactly. Cold War biological warfare thinking assumed you might develop a vaccine, inoculate your own population, and then deploy a biological weapon against an enemy.
But as the world became increasingly interconnected, it became obvious how dangerous that assumption was. A biological weapon can come back to the country that released it.
That is one reason the danger of an accident is so important.
Before 9/11, there were two BSL-4 maximum-containment laboratories in the United States. Today, there are many more. Around the world, there are also numerous BSL-4 facilities and thousands of BSL-3 laboratories conducting research involving dangerous pathogens.
The question becomes: What happens if there is a lab leak?
Newt Gingrich
That scale is part of what makes your book so relevant. Sooner or later, somewhere, something could break down.
You also investigated the U.S. government’s planning for what happens if fear and civil unrest begin to overwhelm society. Were you surprised by what you found?
Annie Jacobsen
I was shocked.
I kept wondering why biological catastrophe and pandemic scenarios ended when anarchy began.
Eventually, former FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate helped me understand that there is a classified continuity plan. The name itself is unclassified: the Devolution Plan.
There are individuals who have been selected and who have rehearsed for continuity-of-government scenarios.
The disturbing part is considering a system designed to preserve and reconstitute government after catastrophe while asking a fundamental question: What is the plan for the people?
That leads to two things I hope people consider. First, we need to address the risks associated with dangerous laboratories and potential lab leaks. Second, we need better planning for the population.
Newt Gingrich
You also make clear that there are technological breakthroughs that could dramatically improve public health’s ability to respond almost in real time. What did you learn about the positive side of technology?
Annie Jacobsen
Social media has demonstrated how quickly information can spread during fires, disasters, and other emergencies.
The World Health Organization also has an AI-based computational system in Germany examining enormous amounts of data about outbreaks around the world and trying to determine whether they are connected.
The challenge is the human component. Information can move extraordinarily fast technologically, but officials still have to decide how and when to communicate that information to the public.
There remains a lag between information reaching the top and officials deciding how to distribute it, in part because there is always concern about panic.
Newt Gingrich
That is fascinating because public health agencies are often classically bureaucratic.
We now have billions of smartphones around the world capable of being connected and, with AI, analyzed in virtually real time.
The gap between what we can do technologically and what we can do bureaucratically is getting larger. In the kind of scenario you describe, that gap could become a matter of life and death.
After immersing yourself in nuclear war and now biological catastrophe, are you ultimately an optimist or a pessimist about our ability to get through the next half century?
Annie Jacobsen
I am, by nature, an optimist.
I believe knowledge is power. The more you know, the more confident you can feel navigating the world.
The point of the book is not panic. It is pressure.
With information, something can be done. It is often a lack of information, ignorance, or an inability to face difficult realities that gets people into trouble.
I believe we absolutely can get through the next century.
Newt Gingrich
I think of myself as a strategic optimist but tactically very worried.
Your central point is exactly right. It does not have to be a biological war. With so many people conducting experiments in so many places and with different levels of capability, the possibility of something much worse than COVID breaking loose is very real.
That is why rethinking our entire public health system should be a very high priority.
Annie, thank you for joining me. Your new book, Biological War: A Scenario, is available now wherever books are sold. I think it is a real contribution to helping America understand what we have to do to remain safe, prosperous, and free.
Annie Jacobsen
Thank you so much for having me.
About the Guest
Annie Jacobsen is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, investigative journalist, and New York Times bestselling author whose work explores national security, intelligence, warfare, and government secrecy. Her books include Nuclear War: A Scenario, Area 51, Operation Paperclip, The Pentagon’s Brain, First Platoon, Surprise, Kill, Vanish, and Phenomena. Her latest book, Biological War: A Scenario, examines the consequences of a catastrophic biological incident and the systems designed to respond to it.
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