The former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was deliberately poisoned with a nerve agent in a case that is now being treated as attempted murder, the police counter-terrorism chief has said. Chemical weapons experts said it was almost impossible to make nerve agents without training and dismissed the theory that an amateur could have assembled the substance using materials obtained from the internet. Show Hide Nerve agents are not hard to make in principle, but in practice it takes specialised facilities and training to mix the substances safely. The main five nerve agents are tabun, which is the easiest to make, sarin, soman, GF and VX. All pure nerve agents are colourless organophosphorus liquids which, after they were discovered to be highly poisonous in the 1930s, became the dominant chemical weapons of the second world war.

Source: The Guardian March 07, 2018 11:43 UTC