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<\/p>\nEarly last week, in an airport in Kuala Lumpur, two women approached Kim Jong Nam—estranged half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un—from behind. They swiped what the victim described to nearby customer service agents as a \u201cwet cloth\u201d across his face, and fled. Shortly after, he was dead. <\/p>\n
Now, Malaysian authorities say they\u2019ve identified the substance that took Jong Nam\u2019s life: VX, a nerve agent that the United Nations classifies as a weapon of mass destruction. And while it\u2019s not an entirely uncommon substance—or particularly difficult to produce—its apparent use marks a troubling break from international norms. And if officials manage to link it back to North Korea, it could have serious consequences.<\/p>\n
Special VX<\/h3>\n
If you\u2019re already familiar with VX agent, it\u2019s likely because of seminal 90s action flick The Rock<\/em>, in which a disgruntled Ed Harris brings over a dozen VX-laden warheads along with him to seize Alcatraz. <\/p>\n VX doesn\u2019t work quite the way The Rock<\/em> depicts it. Specifically, contact with it doesn\u2019t cause human skin to bubble and sear. But it plays havoc with the human nervous system. Like other nerve agents, VX interferes with the signals that pass between your brain and your muscles. \u201cIf you have a nerve impulse that tells a muscle to contract, you have to turn off the impulse. Otherwise the muscle will stay contracted,\u201d says Matthew Meselson, a geneticist at Harvard and member of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation national advisory board. \u201cThe one that primarily kills is a spasm of the diaphragm, so you can\u2019t breathe. You die of asphyxiation.\u201d<\/p>\n VX can work through skin contact or respiration, and while it\u2019s part of a broader class of nerve agents that all accomplish roughly the same effect, experts consider it to be especially dangerous, even among banned substances. \u201cIt\u2019s heavier than other nerve agents, so it settles on an environment and can be persistent on the ground. If it was used in larger quantities, it could make an area non-usable,\u201d says Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security.<\/p>\n As the Kim Jong-nam incident showed, though, smaller quantities are also dangerous. \u201cEven a tiny drop is lethal,\u201d Inglesby says.<\/p>\n And while an antidote exists—atropine, which unlocks the muscles that VX causes to seize up—the nerve agent works so quickly that it\u2019s no use unless there\u2019s a hypodermic needle on scene.<\/p>\n So dangerous is the stuff, in fact, that all but a handful of countries agreed to destroy whatever stockpiles they had of VX as part of the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993. One of the handful of holdouts: North Korea.<\/p>\n In 1995, Japan\u2019s Aum Shinrikyo cult turned the nerve agent on a small number of its members, whom leaders believed to be police informants. On a larger scale, VX was one of the chemical weapons deployed in the Iran-Iraq war. The Kim Jong Nam case, though, would be the first VX assassination on record, and the first time chemical weapons were used to that end since a ricin pellet—fired from an umbrella gun—took Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov\u2019s life in 1978.<\/p>\n \u201cThat this particular chemical weapon would be used in a political assassination in a third country is very alarming. It\u2019s a red line,\u201d says Ingelsby. \u201cIt should be considered a new threshold that\u2019s been crossed in terms of unconventional weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n Those norms matter. After decades without any nation deploying chemical weapons, Syria used sarin and chlorine gas. If a nation-state such as North Korea uses VX once, they or other actors may well do it again.<\/p>\n \t‘It should be considered a new threshold that’s been crossed in terms of unconventional weapons.’\tDr. Tom Inglesby, Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security<\/span> <\/p>\n That\u2019s all conditional for a reason. While North Korea maintains a VX stockpile, and Kim Jong Un may well have considered his half-brother a threat to his rule, there\u2019s no direct link between the VX airport incident and the hermit kingdom. And there may well never be, at least from the weapon of choice.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not very hard to produce, so it\u2019s doubtful that the specific use can be chemical-traced back to North Korea,\u201d says Sigmund Gartner, director of the Penn State School of International Affairs. Any decent organic chemist can make the stuff.<\/p>\n Meselson also says that it may not have been VX at all; if it was, it\u2019s remarkable that the two women survived the attack as well.<\/p>\n All of which underscores how critical the next several days of investigation will be. If it turns out to be a random or untraceable act, it may at least prove to be an isolated incident. Should a direct link to North Korea exist, the world will find itself in potentially dangerous, uncharted waters.<\/p>\n \u201cThe political reaction should be very strong internationally, once all the facts are in,\u201d says Ingelsby. \u201cResponsible countries around the world should make it very clear that this kind of behavior is unacceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n Unfortunately, that\u2019s the thing about red lines. Once you cross them, there\u2019s no going back.<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.wired.com\/category\/security\/feed\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Credit to Author: Brian Barrett| Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2017 00:39:55 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n The apparent assassination of Kim Jong-un’s half-brother sets off alarms for chemical weapons experts. The post Killing Kim Jong Nam With VX Nerve Agent Crossed a ‘Red Line’<\/a> appeared first on WIRED<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[10378,10607],"tags":[11465,1553,714,11466,11467,11046],"class_list":["post-6782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-security","category-wired","tag-chemical-weapons","tag-north-korea","tag-security","tag-vx","tag-vx-nerve-agent","tag-weapons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6782\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Red Line<\/h3>\n
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