Pandemic Shock Therapy and Planning Zylberman, Patrick. 2013. Tempêtes microbiennes. Essai sur la politique de sécurité sanitaire dans le monde transatlantique. Paris : Gallimard. Zylberman, Patrick. 2016. ‘L’avenir, “cible mouvante”. Les États-Unis, le risque NRBC et la méthode des scénarios.’ In Serge Morand and Muriel Figuié, eds. Émergence des maladies infectueuses. Risques et enjeux de société. Versailles : Eds. Quae. New Epidemiological Threats With the end of the Cold War, the future suddenly was no longer a matter of extrapolating the present and the standard way of preparing for threats (strategic planning for the short term) was replaced by scenario planning for the short to medium term (Zylberman 2013: 28). The appetite for the virtual kept growing: In a world entirely open to exchanges and relations, the circulation of stories has accelerated to the point where local cultures only survive as secondary resources for a kind of unified world market of fantasy (Zylberman 2013: 29). The socio-technical risk society is being replaced by the society of threats, which replaces it with a speculative universe based on imaginary experiences, scenarios and other staff exercises. The question is at which point it abandons the pretence of science and becomes theatre (‘comédie’) altogether (Zylberman 2013: 489). What is taking place is a politicisation of epidemics and a medicalisation of terrorism, both based on the same pattern of thought: low probability, enormous consequences (Zylberman 2013: 187). This began already in the Cold War, although a series of international agreements outlawed the development and use of biological weapons. To get the Soviet Union to squander its resources on militarily useless chemical and biological weapons programmes, the CIA fed Moscow with false intelligence concerning mysterious, top- secret US programmes in these areas. This led the Soviet leadership in 1973 to launch a programme on biological warfare, which top specialists in the USSR recommended could be hidden by dual-use pharmaceutical research (‘BioPreparat’) (Zylberman 1