WASHINGTON — The baby had so many pustules ravaging his face he could barely open his right eye, a photograph that left the president, national security adviser and close aides nearly speechless with horror.
A global pandemic had begun in a hospital in Oklahoma City. Doctors soon diagnosed smallpox, a virulent, deadly and disfiguring infection that had disappeared from the planet two decades before. What would the president do?
This was the scenario that a cast of Washington power players sought to tackle over two days at Andrews Air Force Base in June 2001. The exercise, code-named Dark Winter, has passed into Washington lore as the first high-profile alarm of the dire consequences of a pandemic. For months after Dark Winter, advisers to President George W. Bush attempted to come to grips with what they predicted would happen in such a contagion: overwhelmed hospitals, broken medical supply chains and frenzied grocery buying.
Three months later, the 9/11 attacks mad
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Quantum technologies have long sounded like they belong in the realm of science fiction. But in recent years, China, led by the brilliant physicist Pan Jianwei, has made huge quantum strides. Now, recent U.S. sanctions targeting Chinese quantum companies underscore the reality that these technologies are no longer theoretical.
