Claims are surfacing in 听today that two Russians charged by the UK government for the Novichok nerve agent poisonings in Salisbury were carrying enough of the stuff to kill 4000 people.
Given that only Russia is known to have a stockpile of Novichok agents, the suspicion levelled at the Russians seems reasonable. But could they really have killed thousands?
Claims like this are regularly made about chemical and biological weapons, which are usually lumped together as weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) although they are quite different 鈥� even by .
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Chemical cloud
In order to kill large numbers of people with these weapons, you need to expose them to an airborne cloud at heavy enough concentrations. Some biological weapons can spread from person to person, so even if they are inhaled by only a few, they can potentially cause mass casualties.
Chemicals, however, disperse on the wind. They can sometimes kill dozens or even hundreds at once when aimed at, say, trenches of soldiers听辞谤 densely packed civilians听with no good protective gear. But chemical weapons experts say it is a misnomer to call them WMDs.
So where did the Novichok toll of 4000 come from? In the bioweapons scares of the late 1990s, it was commonly听calculated听that thousands would die in an anthrax attack 鈥� which resembles a chemical attack, as anthrax does not spread person to person 鈥� by dividing the amount of spores supposedly released by the amount needed to kill a person. That, however,听assumed听that all the spores were inhaled, and everyone who did got the required quantity.
Similar leaps of logic might apply here, with someone dividing the amount of Novichok thought to be in the perfume bottle allegedly used to deliver it, by the milligram or so that is enough to kill a person.
The real question is, how could anyone deliver those doses to 4000 people? Somewhat prettier Russian agents might have got jobs spritzing听people in the perfume section of a department store, but the stuff acts fast enough that suspicions might well have been aroused before long.
In fact, the targets of the attack, Sergei and Yulia Skripal, survived exposure to the Novichok smeared on their doorknob, although to be fair the two were lucky to be near a top chemical weapons lab, where their doctors had just had a course in chemical weapons diagnosis. Perhaps Sergei chose Salisbury out of fear that this might happen.
It was sheer bad luck that in July two nearby residents rummaging through bins stumbled on a spiked perfume bottle the Russians allegedly dumped there. One became the only Novichok death in this attack.
