
The Nerve Agent Too Deadly to Use. Until Someone Did - montrose
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/13/world/europe/uk-russia-spy-poisoning.html
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dpwm
This must be a new record for the New York Times. The first sentence in that
article highlights a fundamental misunderstanding that should put anyone's
guard up:

> For nearly three decades, since a Soviet whistle-blower told the world of
> its existence, the nerve agent Novichok has scared American weapons experts.

Cursory research would reveal that Novichok is a _family_ of nerve agents,
connected by the fact that they were likely to be unknown to NATO.

More generally, it seems a strange claim for the UK government to make that
the nerve agent was definitely a Novichok. This admits a level of knowledge of
the substances that leads to serious questions, that nobody is asking, about
whether this knowledge comes from having synthesised it. In order to study the
effects and the time it takes for effectiveness, both details which the UK
appears to have, synthesis would be very useful.

If this is the case then Russia is not the only party capable of synthesis and
this partly explains what the mysterious Porton Down facility has been working
on since the Chemical Weapons Convention came into force in 97.

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brudgers
Yes, the NYT is weaving a tale. Those US concerns tasked with finding and
helping to destroy facilities after the USSR collapsed needed detailed
knowledge of its synthesis, production, and weaponization in order to perform
the task professionally. And they were professionals.

On the other hand, it is highly likely that different production processes and
even batches have unique chemical signatures that allow origin of a specific
sample to be determined with a reasonable probability. This is the sort of
information that US weapons experts would have collected during the USSR
collapse...again simply because they were professionals.

To me the most likely case is that the story is partially horseshit and that
the identification of the origin is reasonably derived from evidence (there's
also other intelligence that could indicate the origin).

