Answer: Sometime during the next President’s term, her or his national security team may be summoned to the Oval Office to discuss a catastrophe of historic proportions: more than one million deaths in just a few weeks in a far corner of the world, sparking the fall of several governments, giving rise to violent regional conflict over scarce resources, and unleashing a refugee crisis as fleeing victims encounter panic and closed borders at every turn. Worse still, the President will be told, there is an increasing risk that such death and disruption may soon arrive in the United States.
