Where I learned about lockdowns

I read a lot of Tom Clancy novels as a teenager. Something about the extremely detailed writing and overly elaborate plotting scratched an itch. I was also a big fan of the Splinter Cell games.

The 1996 novel Executive Orders—the one where Clancy’s self-insert hero Jack Ryan becomes president—has always stuck with me. Like all Clancy doorstoppers (this one is nearly half a million words), it has many subplots. The most memorable one involves terrorists backed by the Ayatollah of Iran starting an epidemic in the United States using aerosolized Ebola. The attack has two purposes: to kill Americans and to paralyze the country so it cannot respond to Iran’s invasion of its neighbours.

What makes the subplot memorable is that the biological attack just…doesn’t work that well. It kills thousands instead of millions. It is fairly successful at preventing the normal deployment of American military forces to the Middle East, but luckily for America’s allies, the available units are sufficiently badass to hold off the Iranian invasion anyway.

The epidemic fails for two reasons. First, although the terrorists successfully aerosolize the virus in shaving-cream canisters and release it at roughly twenty conventions and trade shows across the country, Ebola simply does not transmit very well under ordinary circumstances. Most of the secondary infections come from close personal contact.

Second, once Jack Ryan realizes that this is a deliberate attack, he orders the closure of all schools, non-essential businesses, and places of public assembly, as well as banning interstate travel and invoking martial law. These measures crush the ability of the virus to generate secondary infections. To enact these orders, Ryan overrules his own Cabinet. After most of its members vote against the measures, he looks around the room and announces, “The ayes have it.”

The doctors tracking the outbreak later conclude that the interstate travel ban may not have accomplished much directly. Its real value was that it frightened people into reducing contact. “This quarantine stuff has scared the shit out of people,” one says. Clancy does not present this as an unfortunate side effect: scaring people into taking the emergency seriously is part of why the policy works.

Today we would call this response a COVID skeptic’s paranoid fever dream. But Tom Clancy viewed emergency public health powers as an obvious extension of competent national defence in the face of a biological weapon attack. When a CNN reporter asks Ryan about the legality of the measures, he responds: “Whether they’re legal or not, I am convinced that they are necessary.” (In the next sentence, White House staff begin passing surgical masks to the assembled reporters.)

I am amused by how much the political valence of all this changed between 1996 and 2020. Imagine if the story had been about a biological attack from China!