Welcome to the episode number 36 of the Authors of Mass Destruction podcast. My name is Natasha Bajema, aka WMDgirl on Twitter. I’m a fiction author, national security expert and your host for this podcast.

• If you’re interested in science & technology, in reading good fiction, or want to write fiction based on technology, you’re in the right place.
• Before we get started, a few notes:
  • The views expressed on this podcast are my own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.
  • The AOMD podcast is proud to be part of the Authors on the Air Global Radio Network. Check us out at www.authorsontheair.com
  • If you enjoy my podcast and want me to keep it up, I hope you’ll become a patron for only two dollars a month at Patreon at www.patreon.com – p a t r e o n / natashabajema
• Personal Update:
  • I released my last episode on March 15. I had the opportunity to interview Joe and Kimberly Holley and we talked about the pandemic, which was still in its early days in the United States. At the time, world tallies were around 124,000 cases and 4,600 deaths. That was the worldwide count. As of April 5, there are 1,225,360 cases and over 66,000 deaths. That’s less than month ago.
  • It feels like months have passed when it’s only been a few weeks. And many of us have spent those weeks mostly inside and staying away from other people.
  • Three weeks ago, I came to the difficult decision to postpone my Kickstarter campaign for American Doomsday. My goal as a creative is to help people cope with dramatic technological change through entertaining stories. In early March, I started to wrestle with whether I could ask people to worry about a bad scenario when we’re going through one in real-time. By mid-March, my answer was no. I don’t want to ask people to care about anything at the moment except getting through this with our loved ones and our country in one piece.
  • I’m not sure when the time will be right for me to pursue that project. I fear it could be delayed by a year. In the meantime, I’ve shifted around my creative production schedule. I’ve just put my finishing touches on my latest novel about nuclear weapons and AI. If you’re interested in being a beta reader, shoot me a note on Twitter to @WMDgirl.
  • Next week, I’m starting a dystopian science fiction novel set in 2044, 16 years after a second U.S. civil war. It will be a bit like Hunger Games meets George Orwell’s 1984.
• This week, I’d just like to highlight a few articles from my vast pandemic reading:
  • “How to Counter China’s Coronavirus Disinformation Campaign.” This is a piece by myself and my colleague Christine Parthemore published in Defense One on March 29.
    • This is about the political spin surrounding the coronavirus outbreak and how the U.S. should take back the narrative.
  • “Modernizing biotechnology for the fight against COVID-19 and the future of pandemic response,” published on Medium on April 2 by Alexander Titus, Michelle Rozo and Diane DiEullis, another colleague of mine.
    • Discusses various advances in biotechnology that can be leveraged to fight the pandemic
  • “How the Coronavirus became an American Catastrophe,” published in the Atlantic on March 21.
    • If you’re still wondering whatever happened with testing in the U.S. This article does a great job discussing the various failures.

• Let’s go to the interview.