A Brief History of Nerve Agents

Hello, now this is going to be a recap video on nerve agents. I did talk a lot about nerve agents recently because I was doing my chemical weapons series on them, or other chemical weapons that nerve agents are obviously included in that list because they're some of the most famous chemical weapons in existence. But with all the stuff about nerve agents being in the media again, I thought I'd do a quick summary video so some people might prefer to watch this rather than watching a series on nerve agents. So, prior to nerve agents existing, so if we look at all the World War I agents, chlorine, phosgene, things like mustard gas, blister agents, with all of these chemical weapons you could protect yourself by wearing a respirator or a gas mask. The reason being that all of these chemical weapons to do the most damage had to get into your body, into your lungs, you know, through inhaling it. The exception of mustard gas, that it damages the skin or damages anything it touches, causing blisters, hence the name blister agent. The majority of these chemical weapons, especially phosgene, are very dangerous when inhaled, can kill very efficiently if inhaled, but they can't do much if you haven't got a mask. So, obviously, you've now got to the stage where chemical weapons are great as a terror kind of weapon, but they're not that great for killing people anymore because people can simply put a mask on, like this one. Obviously, this is not a World War I mask, but just bear with me, it's a respirator. You could put a mask on, you know, any working mask of a working filter, and these chemical weapons weren't such a big threat anymore. So, obviously, people wanted to develop more deadly chemical weapons, and in Nazi Germany, surprise, surprise, they were developing new kinds of pesticides or insecticides, and one of the things they came across was a chemical they named Tabun. Now, the issue was Tabun was too deadly to be used as a pesticide because it would kill the person spraying it as well. So, they then said, you know what, this will be a really good weapon of war. We will develop it into a chemical weapon. So, what they then did is they developed Tabun and into Tabun gas, and Tabun gas, the reason it was so much more deadly is a very small amount would kill you through inhalation. So, if I didn't have my mask on, I would die, but what made Tabun so dangerous was the fact it could kill through skin contact. Now, I think with Tabun, it was something like half to a third of a gram was needed to kill something like 300 mg of that sort of number, but the point was that unlike the previous agents, which would cause damage to the skin potentially, but would kill you through inhalation, Tabun itself was able to actually kill through skin contact. A mask was not enough. Now, lots of the countries during World War II were making civilian respirators, but they didn't make them anything more than that. So, your respirator itself would protect you. If I put this mask on, and there was a Tabun gas attack, for example, I'd still die because I'd absorb the Tabun through the pores of my skin, or any cuts on my skin, things like that. Tabun still gets into my body. It shuts my body down. So, how does Tabun and nerve agents work? Well, nerve agents are primarily, primarily, so I should say, sorry, organophosphates, and as I said before, I'm not a chemist or a biologist, so I can't give you all the details on how these chemicals work, and I wouldn't want to be a Dunning-Kruger and assume I know and make an arse of myself. But, in plain layman's speak, what they do is your body's nervous system has on and off switches. Chemicals in the body with reaction from the brain turn these things on and off constantly. It's the reason why your heart beats on its own and you can't turn your heart off, and for the most part, until you think about it, like, sorry, I'm gonna do it to you now, your breathing isn't manual. Your breathing is done by your body. Of course, once you think about it, you're now breathing manually, aren't you? But, for the most part, your nervous system controls all these things. So, what happens is once this nerve agent, or organophosphates, are absorbed into the body, what they do is they block your ability to turn, your body's ability to turn off these functions. So, basically, your heart rate would accelerate or deaccelerate to the point it kills you. You can die from suffocation because your lungs aren't gonna actually be breathing in or out. They're gonna go one way and not the other. You'll have muscle spasms, things like that. So, basically, nerve agent exposure normally starts with twitching, salivating. You know, you can't stop dribbling saliva everywhere because your saliva glands are just working nonstop. You'll start having bigger and bigger spasms. You'll then wet yourself, you know, poo yourself, all that sort of stuff because you lose control of overall your body's functions until you eventually suffocate or have a heart attack. So, nerve agents are very efficient. And what Nazi Germany did was they said, you know, the tab on it is not really deadly enough. They need to make it more deadly. So, they came up with sarin gas, sarin gas being the very famous one, and then soman. Each of these are more deadly than the last. You know, less was needed to be inhaled or come into contact with the skin to kill. Sarin has become the most famous of the chemical weapons, probably because it's the one that's been used the most, actually, against people. The soman is the more interesting one because it's the hardest to have an antidote against. Now, there's a chemical called atropine or antropine. And what that does is if you're injected with it, it basically is very good at kind of blocking nerve agent from, you know, stopping your nerve endings, you know, responding to each other, however it works in scientific terms. So, what atropine does is it basically, it's not a pleasant thing to do. Apparently, you know, if you use atropine and you don't need to, you can kill yourself that way. But if you come into exposure of nerve agent, inject yourself with atropine very quickly, what ends up happening is your body is able to fight off the worst effects of nerve agents. You might be ill for quite a bit, but you're protected. So then, Nazi Germany was the only country to develop chemical nerve agents during World War II. However, once Nazi Germany surrendered, all their research was taken by the Soviet Union and the Allies, lots of their scientists worked for either side. So then, you know, everybody else now had access to nerve agents. So, what was known as the G-Agents, Tabun, Sarin, and Soman were developed by the Soviet Union, Soviet Union and the Western Allies. Now, there was also, I think, Cyclosarin. Somebody came up with it at some point, but that wasn't, that's not very well, you know, widely known about, and it was kind of a stopgap one. So then, we need to go on to the V-series of agents, where VX will ultimately come in. And how these agents worked is apparently the Soviets had developed, I think it was VE at some point on their own, and they stuck with that for ages. What happened is, in Britain, there was a pesticide, again, a pesticide, because they always were, developed that ended up being, you know, making people very ill and killing them. And then they said, oh, we're onto something here. So, this was what's known as VG, and it happened the exact same way as with the Nazis. You know, they came up with a nerve agent because there was a pesticide that was too dangerous for agricultural use. So then, Hortendown kept working on the V-series of nerve agents, often trading lots of the stuff of America for thermonuclear weapons research. And obviously, soon, the Western Allies had lots of really dangerous nerve agents. Now, when it coulombicates, coulombicates, I can never pronounce my word, accumulates, maybe, is the word I'm looking for, with VX, Venomous Agent X, which was, you know, widely thought of as the most dangerous substance on the planet. Now, VX can kill through only 15 milligrams of skin contact, far, far less if you inhale it. To give you an idea of how small 15 milligrams is, there's 1,000 milligrams in a gram. Think of how tiny a gram is. If you think of a couple of little grains or something, that's pretty much a gram. So, basically, it's about almost a hundredth of a gram is needed to kill somebody. So, if you think of the point of a needle covered in VX, something like that, a very small surface area object, you know, there's enough VX on that to kill several people through skin contact alone. So, that gives you an idea of how dangerous VX is. Now, it was thought the Soviets hadn't come up with VX themselves. They, you know, said probably using VE or something similar, very deadly still, but, you know, not as deadly as VX. But, anyway, with VX, the important thing of the V Agents compared to the G Agents was that they were persistent. So, what that means is the G Agents are non-persistent. So, the V Agents, if you sprayed them somewhere, they sit around for ages. They don't get blown around by the wind as much. They don't evaporate. The sunlight doesn't destroy them as quickly. You know, you could coat an area with V-series Nerve Agents and then, you know, it's like a no-man's land. You walk in there without the proper protective gear on and you're dead. So, V Agents became very, you know, scary in the idea, a bit like where you'd have a nuclear war and then you'd have nuclear winter for the people who survived it. With Nerve Agents, it'd be, there'd be massive areas of land that are just completely uninhabitable because if you step on them, you know, you come into contact with a Nerve Agent and you're dead. So, another thing I don't know if I mentioned is how efficiently and quickly Nerve Agents kill. Through inhalation, they can kill in minutes. Through skin contact, they can kill, again, in minutes, potentially, but normally within, you know, 10, 15 minutes to an hour kind of time. Depends, of course, on the quantity and everything else, the purity of it, which is something we need to get onto. Because there was the sarin attack on the Japanese underground in, I think it was 1995. And only about 12 to 20 people died in that, depending on which sources you look at. However, thousands, I think it was between four and 5,000 people were ill, had to go to hospital with temporary blindness, headaches, nausea, muscle spasms, things like that. The reason was, the sarin made wasn't proper sarin. It was like, if I tried to make sarin, I was probably something with a bit more chemistry, knowledge than me and the equipment, but they'd almost got it, but not quite. And what that meant was, thankfully, lots of the people who would have died just became ill and recovered. Obviously, people did die, but for the most part, their sarin was impure. So, how does Novichok come in? Because, as I said, I mentioned that for the first time in a video the other day, because, you know, Novichok is now in all the news media and they're definitely saying stuff about it that's not true. So I've tried to do quite a bit of reading on Novichok, because for quite a while, Novichok was considered, it's a theoretical chemical weapon, we don't know if it really exists. So Novichok is apparently Russian for like noob agent or new kid agent, you know, like newbie agent. And what it basically means is, you know, it's the newcomer. And apparently, the Russians or the Soviets' idea of designing Novichok was that they wanted a chemical weapon that wasn't classed under current chemical weapon laws, you know, getting around it like all the countries try and do with various things. You know, when America used Agent Orange, it was the defoliant, so that's okay, it's not actually a chemical weapon, despite all the horrors that's done since. So, the idea with Novichok was that they could produce it themselves, and it could be produced by pesticide factories and chemical factories, you didn't need special chemical warfare equipment to make it. Now, another interesting thing with Novichok is it's two chemicals that made it, that you mix together. And the idea was that you could make each of the chemicals separately, which were, you know, like not really scary, horrible chemicals on their own, made it much safer to transport when you want to use it as a weapon. You have some sort of machine, I guess, where you put one vial of one thing in one vial of the other thing, it mixes it for you, and then you can spray it. Or pressurize it into cans, or shells, or however you're gonna distribute it. So, the other interesting thing of Novichok is apparently it has the same things as Soman, and Soman, as I was saying earlier, was the one that's very resistant to Atropine. It's very hard to treat people if they're poisoned with it. You know, they're almost guaranteed to die. The other thing with Novichok is there are several in the Novichok group, apparently, of chemical things like Novichok 5, Novichok 7, Novichok 10. I don't know the difference between all of them. Lots of this is classified information. When the journalists on the mainstream media try and tell you that they know all this stuff, they don't, because a lot of this information is not out there. Anyway, the West became aware of Novichok, supposedly, because one of the main Soviets working on it, or Russians working on it, defected. He took his research with him, and now, you know, America and everybody else who wants it can manufacture Novichok if they want to, if they bother to, you know, all this sort of stuff. Apparently, Novichok is quite complicated to come up with, but once you've got all the stuff for it, it's very simple to make, so you don't need, as I was saying, all these proper military kind of facilities to make it and get it working just right. So, Novichok is, I'm assuming it's persistent. I don't have that knowledge, but it's supposedly eight to 10 times deadlier than VX, depending on how you look at it. Now, this is the bit I find kind of crazy, because, as I was saying, VX could kill through 15 mg through skin contact, not inhaling skin contact. This is eight to 10 times deadlier. So, let's say it's 10 times deadlier. That's 1.5 mg needed to kill an adult man. 1.5 mg is tiny. As I was saying, 1,000 mg in a gram, 1.5 mg. If we said it was 1 mg or 2 mg, that means it could kill 500 to 1,000 people with one gram of the stuff through skin contact. Not inhaling it, skin contact. So, you know, very, very dangerous stuff. This is why I have my doubts that it was obviously used in this poisoning thing we've had in the UK, where they keep changing their story nonstop about it, because they don't let the facts come in first. They blame Russia before doing anything else. So, you know, the story does keep changing. But, yeah, Novichok, if it did exist to the degree it was meant to in all those things, it's, you know, a real doomsday weapon. I mean, all the nerve agents, the WMDs, weapons of mass destruction, but Novichok is one where, you know, if you sprayed a canister of it somewhere, people would just drop, you know, through inhaling it or skin contact. I mean, if only 1.5 mg was needed to kill people, you know, like, let's just say 2 mg, you could kill 500 people through one milligram of it. One gram, you know, one then to two milligrams could kill 500 people. Far less is normally needed to be inhaled, so I guess that if everybody inhaled that one gram, you'd then kill several thousand people with it. So, yeah, Novichok is really scary. So, nerve agents are obviously banned for the most part under, you know, like, all the weapons and sort of conventions acts as they should be. Nerve agents are really nasty, horrible things, as said, because of the fact that, as well as being, you know, killing through skin contact as well as inhalation, quite hard to treat, lead to all sorts of horrible symptoms. For the most part, though, if you're poisoned of nerve agents and you recover, apparently you don't really have any lasting damage, at least for most people, from everything I've read. You can sometimes have depression and weird, like, anger fits or, like, hysterical fits for months, but then they eventually go as well. But nerve agents are, for the most part, are colorless and odorless. You know, you don't know they've been sprayed by that point and it's too late, and then you'll be spasming out on the floor as you die. So, nerve agents are obviously banned for good reason. They are a very scary and horrible chemical weapon. You know, if they were used in a big exchange, like nuclear weapons, it'd be the death of everything on the planet, just like with nuclear weapons, because the destructive power of them is insane. As I was saying, if you imagine that, let's say a liter water bottle would have enough of a strong nerve agent in to kill maybe, you know, a few hundred thousand people, you start to get an idea of how deadly this stuff is, especially then when it's made into massive shells, you know, and spray tanks for airplanes and everything else. So, yeah. Nerve agent is horrible stuff, so it started off with the German G agents, then the V agents, and now apparently Novichok. But again, there's not enough information on it, so we'll have to wait and see what happens with that. But yes, very scary stuff.