3-12-18 Thanks to the Russian nerve agent “Novichok,” I once got to see the inside of an interrogation room at Lefortovo, the old KGB prison on the east side of Moscow.
It was in 1993. The Russians were not pleased that I had written an article the year before disclosing the existence of Novichok, identified Monday by British investigators as the weapon used last week in the attempted murder of former Soviet spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury.
On March 12, British Prime Minister Theresa May said it was "highly likely" that Russia was behind the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy.
The nerve agent was top secret back then, especially sensitive because the Soviet Union, under Mikhail Gorbachev, had renounced the use and production of chemical weapons. Its existence came to light thanks to the scruples of a brave scientist named Vil Mirzayanov, who had worked at the State Union Scientific Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology. The institute was described by one of its top officials as “the leader in the technology of chemical destruction.”
On a gray September afternoon, Mirzayanov and a scientist-activist named Lev Fyodorov came by the Moscow office of the Baltimore Sun, where I was working. The Cold War was supposedly over, and Mirzayanov had been growing more and more angry over the secret weapons work. He decided to go public, and the two scientists told me that they had arranged to publish an article the next day in the Moskovsky Novosti newspaper. But, they said, they thought they could ensure some measure of security for themselves by also getting the story out in the West. After all, they reasoned, the United States and Russia were on friendly terms, American aid was crucial to Russian stability and no one should have any need of nerve agents.
They told me Russia had a nerve agent 10 times more powerful than VX, a powerful chemical weapon, and that work on it was continuing. I wrote a story that day after checking in with Western experts, who were skeptical of the claim — to put it mildly. But in the month that followed, I tracked down more scientists who worked at the institute and wrote a fuller story that named the new agent: Novichok No. 5.
I learned that research on Novichok had begun in 1987, even as the Soviet Union said it would unilaterally halt all its chemical-weapons programs. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/03/12/what-is-novichok-the-russian-nerve-agent-and-the-scientist-who-revealed-it/?utm_term=.66d2b38dde08
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Russi's Fukushima is Putin/KGB, America's Fukushima is monopoly capitalism, Europe can always eat its Darwin and Marx for lunch, and China is so very suave. Ho!
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