{"id":60638,"date":"2018-03-14T05:56:53","date_gmt":"2018-03-14T05:56:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/?p=60638"},"modified":"2018-03-14T05:56:53","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T05:56:53","slug":"nerve-agent-deadly-use-someone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/news\/nerve-agent-deadly-use-someone.html","title":{"rendered":"The Nerve Agent Too Deadly to Use. Until Someone Did."},"content":{"rendered":"

The Nerve Agent Too Deadly to Use. Until Someone Did.<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

For nearly three decades, since a Soviet whistle-blower told the world of its existence, the nerve agent Novichok has scared American weapons experts. The Pentagon sent teams to destroy abandoned laboratories that once produced the chemical, believed to be orders of magnitude more lethal than sarin or VX.<\/span><\/p>\n

There was no sign of it ever being used. Until last week.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, Britons are taking in the disquieting information that a Novichok nerve agent, a weapon invented for use against NATO troops, was released in the quiet town of Salisbury, its target a former Russian spy named Sergei V. Skripal. Mr. Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, collapsed onto a bench in a catatonic state on March 4, and remain hospitalized, in critical condition.<\/span><\/p>\n

Britain\u2019s Home Ministry on Tuesday indicated that it viewed state-sponsored violence by Moscow as a larger problem, announcing that it would scrutinize a series of suspicious deaths of Russians on British soil. Home Minister Amber Rudd said the police and MI5, Britain\u2019s domestic security agency, would review 14 cases cataloged last year in an investigation by BuzzFeed. The British police also announced an investigation into the death on Monday of Nikolai Glushkov, a close associate of one of Mr. Putin\u2019s most prominent foes.<\/span><\/p>\n

In interviews, chemical weapons experts said it was possible that Novichok nerve agents had been used before on Kremlin targets in Britain, but had escaped detection.<\/span><\/p>\n

Exposure, either by inhalation or through the skin, leads to muscle spasms, secretion of fluid into the lungs and organ failure, sometimes accompanied by foaming at the mouth. But if the victim has already died, experts said, the police could easily mistake the cause of death for a simple heart attack.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s entirely likely that we have seen someone expire from this and not realized it,\u201d said Daniel M. Gerstein, a former senior official at the United States Department of Homeland Security who is now at the RAND Corporation. \u201cWe realized in this case because they were found unresponsive on a park bench. Had it been a higher dose, maybe they would have died and we would have thought it was natural causes.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said on Tuesday that his country had nothing to do with Mr. Skripal\u2019s poisoning, dismissing Britain\u2019s allegation that Moscow was to blame as \u201cnonsense.\u201d Britain had sought an explanation from Russia by the end of the day on Tuesday on how the nerve agent could have been used. But Mr. Lavrov said that Moscow \u201chad received an incoherent response\u201d when it asked London for details, which he said amounted to a \u201crejection of our legitimate demands.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The dispute between the two countries has sharply worsened tensions between Russia and the West, already strained by Moscow\u2019s role in the Syrian conflict and its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.<\/span><\/p>\n

Though American laboratories stopped producing nerve agents around 1970, after the production of so-called third-generation nerve agents like sarin and VX, Soviet scientists continued their work for two decades, producing a \u201cfourth generation.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The Novichok nerve agents came in solid form, like a powder or thick paste, and would not register on the chemical detector paper that NATO troops used.<\/span><\/p>\n

A chemist who worked in the laboratory developing Novichok accidentally inhaled fumes while filling a syringe, and collapsed. Though he was injected with an antidote and eventually awoke, he suffered from depression and epilepsy and died five years later, leaving Vil Mirzayanov, a scientist who helped develop the agent, deeply disillusioned.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAntidotes exist, but what does antidote mean?\u201d Mr. Mirzayanov, who had leaked the project to the press and later immigrated to the United States, told Sky News on Tuesday. \u201cYou\u2019re saving a person who has been exposed to this gas \u2014 but temporarily, not to die this time. But he will be an invalid for the rest of his life.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Andrew C. Weber, a former assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs, recalls picking his way through a secret, abandoned Soviet research facility in Nukus, Uzbekistan, which the United States was asked to helped destroy in the early 2000s.<\/span><\/p>\n

Entering a basement room, Mr. Weber saw a disturbing sight: \u201cdozens and dozens of restraining devices\u201d used to immobilize dogs while their skin was exposed to Novichok agents in the form of a powder or paste. He said that he believed each test involved 50 to 100 dogs, and that at least 1,000 dogs had been killed at the facility.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Pentagon, Mr. Weber said, \u201cdevoted a lot of resources to improving our protection, detection and countermeasures against it.\u201d But it did not anticipate its use in an assassination, he said, in part because it was so easily traced to Russia.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s obviously tightly controlled by the Russian government,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s implausible to me \u2014 possible, but not probable \u2014 that this chemical weapon would have been diverted from a Russian facility. It would be well guarded.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Dan Kaszeta, a chemical weapons specialist who once served as an adviser to the Secret Service, said the agents were \u201cso shrouded in mystery that I don\u2019t know how many chemical compounds are in the Novichok family.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In Salisbury, where Mr. Skripal and his daughter were stricken, residents described mounting anxiety on Tuesday as they learned more about the nerve agent. The authorities reassured residents that there was no significant health risk. But they ratcheted up their precautions as the days went on, finally advising people who had been near the victims to wash or wipe everything they were wearing or carrying at the time.<\/span><\/p>\n

Adam Langley, 44, a construction worker, said his 13-year-old daughter had been peppering him with questions, among them: \u201cIs it true that it can stay in your body for years, and make you sick later?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cShe sends me texts throughout the day, asking if I\u2019m sure we\u2019re not going to die,\u201d Mr. Langley said. He recalls swearing aloud when he researched Novichok on the internet.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lisa Patterson, a local estate agent, had a similar reaction. \u201cWe\u2019re not talking about rat poison,\u201d she said, with a nervous laugh. \u201cThis stuff could kill a herd of elephants.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Kaszeta, who now heads a British-based security firm, said the nerve agent could have been transported in a glass jar and spread on Mr. Skripal\u2019s steering wheel, or on items he handled at a restaurant. The agent then could be transferred to anything Mr. Skripal touched for the next two hours, he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

While the chemical would take effect \u201calmost instantaneously\u201d if inhaled, Mr. Kaszeta said, it would work much more slowly, perhaps over a matter of hours, if absorbed through the skin. The agent is activated when it comes in contact with water and would be absorbed through the pores, slowed down by subcutaneous fat, Mr. Kaszeta said.<\/span><\/p>\n

At first the effect would be felt locally, around the point of exposure.<\/span><\/p>\n

Once the chemical entered the bloodstream, it would cause the victim\u2019s muscles to go into spasms, pupils to shrink to pinpoints, and breathing to become very labored, said Alastair Hay, an emeritus professor of toxicology at the University of Leeds. At this point, the victim\u2019s life could be saved only by the administration of atropine, which counteracts the agent and allows the body to metabolize it.<\/span><\/p>\n

The attack on Mr. Skripal and his daughter occurred a short drive from Porton Down, Britain\u2019s premier chemical weapons laboratory, which went to work isolating the agent from blood samples, breaking it into fragments and examining it through a mass spectrometer. Researchers would have initially looked for more common chemical agents, like sarin, and then proceeded through a long series of more obscure ones until they found a match, Mr. Hay said.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen they get an unknown chemical, they will compare it with the information that\u2019s in the library and, bingo, you\u2019ve got all your strawberries lined up,\u201d he said. Given how lethal the agent is, Mr. Kaszeta said, it seems probable that the two victims survived by happenstance.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a few ways this could play out, and one is that something got screwed up in the delivery,\u201d he said. \u201cThe other is that he washed his hands and got most of it off. The third is that this dosage was sublethal, just to send a message. It could have been the horse head in the bed.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Source:-\u00a0https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/03\/13\/world\/europe\/uk-russia-spy-poisoning.html?mtrref=news.google.com&gwh=364AFB1F04295EA323C3F4E9B41AB78C&gwt=pay<\/span><\/p>\n

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