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Meet the writer behind Dune director Denis Villeneuve's next film after James Bond 26 – Nuclear War
Biological War: A Scenario author Annie Jacobsen tells Radio Times: "We should prepare for the terrifying prospect of biological warfare."
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- Graeme Thomson
Published: Monday, 27 July 2026 at 5:00 pm
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This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
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As the reigning queen of fact-based literary dystopia, Annie Jacobsen is in high demand. The impact of her last book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, resulted in invitations to speak at the United Nations and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican. The gripping non-fiction narrative, hypothetical but based entirely in fact, is also set to be turned into a film by the director of the next Bond movie, Denis Villeneuve.
Now, Jacobsen has turned her attention from nuclear to biological catastrophe. Based on interviews with high-ranking experts in US politics, medicine and the military, Biological War: a Scenario paints a devastating picture of the hours, days and weeks following the release of a deadly pathogen into society.
I tell her I found it terrifying. “It’s not meant to cause panic as much as it’s intended to cause pressure for more clarity,” she says from her home in Los Angeles, before acknowledging that the panic factor is indeed considerable. “When I was writing Nuclear War, many of my subject matter experts said to me, ‘You must do bio next.’ When I opened the door to my research and reporting on bio, I realised it was a whole different set of terrifying.”
A Princeton graduate and former Pulitzer Prize finalist, Jacobsen never imagined such dark materials would become her specialist subject. “It’s my great privilege to have spent 20 years interviewing Americans who participated in all wars since World War Two,” she says. “How I wound up writing scenarios about weapons of mass destruction and the dystopian end of the world is because almost all of my sources have told me that it’s what they’re most afraid of.”
Biological warfare, as defined by the US Defence Department, can be caused either by a deliberate attack or an accident. The latter would likely originate from a Biosafety Level Three or Four lab (BSL-3 and -4), maximum-containment facilities designed for studying deadly, aerosol-transmitted pathogens without vaccines or treatments, such as Ebola.
According to Jacobsen, in the early 2000s there were only two BSL-4 labs in the United States. Now there are at least 15, and a total of 110 across 34 countries around the world, many in active war zones. BSL-3 labs, meanwhile – where diseases such as pneumonic plague, hantavirus and rabies are studied – number over 3,000. “These numbers are not public,” she says. “We rely on scientists, academics and researchers to reveal them. We do not know what is going on in those labs, and I think people should be a little more informed and concerned.”
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Biological weapons are illegal, but what happens in BSLs is often shrouded in mystery. “These pathogens are being modified in ways that officials will tell you is disguised as ‘defensive research’, which is the single loophole in the treaty that [otherwise] makes biological weapons illegal,” says Jacobsen.
“Proponents of this kind of research will tell you they’re only modifying these pathogens so they can understand, in the event of a biological incident or attack, how to make a medical countermeasure. Other people will tell you that modification is leading to dangerous environments inside these labs, which have very little oversight.”
A US State Department report speaks specifically of Russia and North Korea having active biological weapons programmes. It also calls China and Iran countries of concern. “One of the things I try to do with any scenario is link everything to history or the present in a scientific fact-based way,” says Jacobsen. “Specifically, the State Department believes that Russia didn’t dismantle its Cold War biological weapons programme, but rather absorbed it into a programme that exists today.”
The scenario in Jacobsen’s book begins at the BSL-4 Vector laboratory in Siberia. In 2019, a gas explosion sparked a fire at the facility; thankfully, the incident didn’t cause an emergency. In the book, set in the near future, she outlines what might happen if Vector did experience a bio leak. Safe to say, it’s not pretty: mass death, societal breakdown and insurrection leave civilisation reduced to plague-stricken rubble.
Is the world in any way prepared for such an event? “We are absolutely not prepared,” she says. “We weren’t prepared for Covid, and it fractured society. Information is an automatic panacea of hyperbolic fear, and fear is always what causes a pathogen to spread because people don’t know what to do. One of the things I think is really important for people to understand is what a BSL-3 or -4 is, and where they are. That would be a beginning point.”
On a lighter note, what news on that film adaptation? “I had my most recent conversation with Denis Villeneuve last month, and he intends to direct Nuclear War: A Scenario after the new James Bond movie.”
She adds, smiling, “I’ve had cardinals at the Vatican and diplomats at the UN saying to me, ‘Get this film made. The world needs it!’ ”
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Graeme Thomson
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