ignorant lazy chemically illiterate über-patriots frothing at the mouth as they beat the drums for another round of Cold War
Before posting more asinine comments about tammelin and novichok chemistry, be aware my first academic job, at the University of California, found me teaching synthetic organic chemistry at a time when my research concerned serine protease cascades only chirality-reversed from the target here. (Alert to non-US readers: America had a brief flirtation with science education, ironically after Sputnik.)
Unlike some of our proud patriots, I had no choice whatsoever in my parentage and could just as easily have been born into Swaziland, Swiss, Swedish, or Sumatran citizenship instead of Suburbian. In regards to climate change however, we are all in this together. There's no getting away from it in NZ, private islands, spaceships or whatever. This incident and the response to it will draw huge resources away into militarism that were better spent on mitigation of climate change, not that we were doing enough before.
Meanwhile, back at the fact-gathering stage, the lead UK investigator Bazu said yesterday
many more weeks of work are needed to establish what happened. Right. They're still trying to lay out a time table of the Skirpals' movements and at what point and how they became exposed to toxin. After that they can look at attribution -- who did it and to what end.
Today authorities are belatedly pursuing poisoning of the maroon 2009 BMW 320 with plates HD09 WAO listed with 69,000 odometer miles. The door handle theory runs into various problems: why passenger door too? extreme risk to person applying poison? when were binary ingredients combined? sticky liquid or dry powder? rapid breakdown of A-242 [novichok-5] in Salisbury moisture? highly unpredictable dosage? volatilization loss?.
It's
completely false that this class of agent is sensitive to oxygen. These chemicals are stable in air (but they're made and stored as binaries, below). However you can see at a glance from the structures they will break down in seconds if exposed to water (even humidity). That's why the UK is having so much trouble getting macroscopic amounts.
It's
complete rubbish to say a non-insecticidal nerve gas is "military grade". Who has ever manufactured 'consumer grade' nerve gases? The confusion here is with artillery shells and cruise missiles, the toxin might be purified to near-homogeneity to save on weight impurities might bring in. Here it makes no sense, bathtub-grade would be equally effective.
What part of
b.i.n.a.r.y didn't you understand? Nerve gases are binary weapons: component A stored over here, component B stored over there, transport separately, mix just before use. In the case of novichok-5, both published, both legal, both widely used, both sold by chemical supply houses. The stabilities of A and B in storage also has been taken into account.
On the technical side, it's not been explained how Porton Down is running assays on all the chem swipes. No question, from 1992 on they would have reference samples on hand like the US Army labs concerned with chemical warfare. They would also have antidote in stock to protect their own staff from accidents, to the extent there's anything more effective than atropine and pralidoxime. [However
hundreds of distinct compounds in the novichok category were made and explored to various extents.]
Analytic chemistry can certainly be done below the nanogram scale but it's not clear that the UK has recovered agent in milligram amounts (ie have nothing to hand over to the Russians for validation and not enough for isotopes of signature contaminants). What about reagents developed during the Gulf War, maybe immunofluorescence off the fluorine-phosphorus bond? That would have zero background as it does not occur in nature.
My guess though would be a colormetric inhibition assay for the enzyme acetylcholinesterase. A dual spray bottle, one tube with substrate, the other with enzyme and a reactant changing color when in contact with cleavage product. Spray it on the table at Zizzi's or the side of the BMW, see if color production is inhibited. PD would have had this on hand for decades for in-house safety.
The word novichok means newcomer in Russian but in English it is dog whistle code for commies and bring on the lynch mop. There's been zero analytic documentation released on the agent, they won't/can't provide samples while the Russians make jokes about Sherlock Holmes rolling over in his grave -- has the toxin actually been identified at the molecular level or are they just guessing/bluffing/politicizing.
What's up next,
wave a little vial of fake WMD have guys in hazmet suits running around on tv to launch another war?
At any rate, I looked into other lethal incapacitants Russians have acknowledged using in the past, notably to resolve the Chechen theatre hostage crisis (84% rescued, 16% dead). The gas piped in was initially said to be 3-methylfentanyl but it was actually a carfentanil and remifentanil mix. [Carfentanil is not a controlled substance in China; it is manufactured legally there and sold over the open Internet, payPal accepted.]
Unsurprisingly, the first witness on the scene, the aerobics instructor -- and probably the police -- assumed the Skirpals had overdosed on street fentanyl. The hospital might even have put them on naloxone instead of pralidoxime. None of that is in the timeline so far.
Chasing down the history of countries like the US and UK who have used chemical weapons themselves either in warfare or assassinations would make for an extremely long post. I do recall the open air tests of VX nerve gas that the US Army conducted at Dugway, Utah. A faulty nozzle on a warplane carrying a metric ton of agent drifted off onto a Skull Valley farm, killing some 6000 sheep and poisoning the rancher who was standing out in his yard watching birds drop dead out of the sky and jackrabbits keeling over.
I'm not posting novichok chemical structures nor the recommended binaries here since they're well known, all over the internet, in a $25 book at Amazon (free shipping with Prime) plus the Sun newspaper in the UK published a formula a couple days back.
False flag? I've no idea. It's premature to form an opinion so early in the investigation. If the UK knew what happened, the investigation would have been shut down by now.
Bad for unity on climate change? Absolutely.
