America's latest biowar nightmare does not begin with a mushroom cloud or a missile warning. It begins with a pathogen moving faster than public-health systems, and a government trying to decide what can still function after the country starts coming apart.
The immediate trigger is a new report about Annie Jacobsen's book Biological War: A Scenario, which follows a fictional genetically engineered plague attack and the extraordinary government measures that might follow, according to the New York Post. The book was published by Dutton on July 28 and is based on interviews with experts in government, medicine, the military, and national security.
That distinction matters: This is a reported scenario, not an announcement that a biological attack has occurred or that the United States has publicly confirmed every contingency described in the book. The publisher frames Jacobsen's work as an exploration of what could happen after a lab accident, deliberate attack or pandemic overwhelms the infrastructure built to respond, according to Penguin Random House.
The “Devolution” Plan Is About Continuity, Not Rescue
In the account summarized by the Post, a contingency known as “devolution” would transfer authority to backup leaders and hidden command centers if officials believed the catastrophe could bring down the country. The scenario also imagines a president being moved to a secure facility, martial law, a possible internet shutdown and the military shifting attention toward protecting the nation's nuclear power plants.
The book's most unsettling premise is that there may be no clean defensive victory once a highly transmissible biological agent is loose. Instead, the objective becomes keeping enough government, communications, energy and medical capacity alive to prevent a catastrophic outbreak from turning into permanent national collapse.
A Denver Exercise Already Showed How Fast Systems Can Break
That bleak premise is rooted partly in a real federal exercise held in metropolitan Denver from May 20 through May 23, 2000. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that Operation Topoff simulated pneumonic plague released at the city's performing-arts center, with more than 2,000 cases, many deaths and hundreds of secondary infections.
The exercise escalated quickly: By its third day, officials were working through a simulated 3,700 cases and 950 deaths, while hospitals faced too many patients, too few workers and inadequate isolation space. Colorado public-health officials concluded that surveillance, triage and treatment would all have to move at once because focusing on only one part of the crisis would not reduce demand on the health-care system.
America Has A Biodefense System But Not A Guarantee
The United States does have a large biodefense apparatus, including disease surveillance, emergency exercises and research into vaccines, diagnostics and other countermeasures. But the Government Accountability Office has warned that federal agencies have struggled with fragmented leadership and that the country has not consistently used exercises to identify and fix preparedness problems, as outlined in a GAO review.
The Pentagon's current approach is built around faster development of chemical and biological defenses, closer coordination with allies and capabilities that can protect troops against both known and novel threats. The Defense Department's 2024 strategy says the goal is to deliver those capabilities at speed and scale, but that is a very different promise from preventing every biological catastrophe described in Jacobsen's scenario.
The Legal Ban Is Stronger Than The Enforcement System
The Biological Weapons Convention effectively prohibits the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use of biological and toxin weapons, according to the United Nations. The treaty allows peaceful and defensive research, which is why biodefense work can continue even as weapon development is banned.
But the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs says the convention has no equivalent implementing agency, leaving the Secretary-General's investigative mechanism as the only international route for examining alleged biological-weapons use. That gap helps explain why the book's “secret plan” feels less like a superhero shield and more like an admission that, in the worst case, governments may be planning for survival after prevention has failed.
Jacobsen's book is designed to make the invisible threat feel immediate, but the more practical warning is already visible in America's past exercises and government audits. The country has plans, agencies and stockpiles; what remains uncertain is whether they could move together quickly enough when the first symptoms look like something ordinary.
