Novichok
Based on Wikipedia: Novichok
The Poison That Came In From the Cold
In August 2020, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny boarded a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. Within an hour, he was screaming in agony, then fell silent. The plane made an emergency landing. Navalny was in a coma. German doctors would later confirm he had been poisoned with one of the deadliest substances ever created by human beings—a nerve agent called Novichok.
The name means "newcomer" in Russian. It's a darkly ironic choice for a weapon designed in Soviet laboratories during the Cold War, one that would go on to haunt the twenty-first century as an instrument of assassination.
But to understand Novichok, you first need to understand what nerve agents do to the human body—and why scientists spent decades trying to make them even more lethal.
How Nerve Agents Work
Your nervous system runs on chemistry. When you want to move your finger, your brain sends an electrical signal down a nerve cell. At the end of that nerve, a chemical messenger called acetylcholine crosses a tiny gap to tell your muscle to contract. Once the message is delivered, an enzyme called acetylcholinesterase sweeps in to break down the acetylcholine, clearing the channel for the next signal.
Nerve agents destroy this cleanup enzyme.
Without acetylcholinesterase, acetylcholine accumulates. Your muscles receive a constant, screaming command to contract. All of them. Your lungs can't expand to draw breath. Your heart can't beat properly. Your body convulses. Death typically comes from asphyxiation as the muscles controlling breathing lock up.
The first nerve agents were discovered by accident in 1936, when a German scientist named Gerhard Schrader was trying to develop better insecticides. He created tabun. The Nazis stockpiled it but never used it in combat, fearing Allied retaliation with similar weapons. After World War Two, both the Americans and Soviets captured German nerve agent research and began their own programs.
By the 1950s, the British had developed VX—at the time, the most potent nerve agent known. A single drop on the skin could kill. The Americans and Soviets both added VX to their arsenals.
And then the Soviets decided to go further.
Project Foliant: Building a Better Poison
In 1971, Soviet military chemists launched a secret program codenamed Foliant at a state research institute with the unwieldy name GosNIIOKhT. Their goal was ambitious: create nerve agents so advanced they would render all existing Western defenses obsolete.
The scientists had four specific objectives. First, the new agents should be undetectable by the chemical detection equipment used by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. Second, they should penetrate NATO protective gear—the gas masks and suits designed to shield soldiers from chemical attack. Third, despite being more lethal, they should actually be safer to handle and transport than existing nerve agents. Fourth, and perhaps most cunningly, they should be made from precursor chemicals not listed in any international treaty—allowing the Soviet Union to manufacture them without technically violating arms control agreements.
This last requirement drove the most innovative aspect of the program: binary weapons.
The Binary Trick
Traditional chemical weapons are dangerous from the moment they're manufactured. The nerve agent sits in a shell or bomb, waiting to be deployed—but also waiting to leak, degrade, or accidentally kill the soldiers handling it. Storage is a nightmare. Transportation is worse.
Binary weapons solve this problem through chemistry.
Instead of storing the final nerve agent, you store two separate precursor chemicals, each relatively harmless on its own. Only when the weapon is fired do the precursors mix together, reacting to form the lethal agent in flight or upon impact. It's like keeping the ingredients for a poison separate until the last possible moment.
This approach offers enormous practical advantages. The precursors are easier to manufacture, safer to handle, and more stable in storage. A binary weapon might have a shelf life of decades, while the pure nerve agent would degrade within months. The tradeoff is that the mixing process isn't always perfect—a hastily prepared binary weapon might produce a less potent agent than the pure form.
The Foliant scientists developed binary versions of several new compounds. These binary forms were designated "Novichok" agents.
The Deadliest Substances on Earth
The Russian scientists who created the Novichok agents claim they succeeded beyond expectations.
Some variants are reportedly five to eight times more potent than VX. Others may be up to ten times more potent than soman, another extremely lethal nerve agent. To put this in perspective: the median lethal dose of the agent designated A-234—the amount that would kill half the people exposed to it—has been estimated at just 0.2 milligrams when inhaled. A single gram contains roughly 5,000 lethal doses.
The most toxic liquid variant, A-230, is even deadlier. One gram may contain 10,000 lethal doses.
These agents come in different physical forms. Some are liquids at room temperature. Others are solids that can potentially be ground into an ultrafine powder for dispersal. This versatility makes them adaptable to various delivery methods: artillery shells, bombs, missiles, or simple spray devices.
Five Novichok variants are believed to have been weaponized for military use. The most versatile is A-232, also known as Novichok-5.
But the Novichok agents have never been used on a battlefield. Their targets have been individuals, not armies.
The Whistleblower
The world might never have learned about Novichok if not for Vil Mirzayanov.
Mirzayanov was a chemist at GosNIIOKhT, but his job wasn't to create nerve agents—it was to make sure no one outside the facility could detect them. He headed a counter-intelligence department that measured trace chemical levels outside the laboratories, ensuring foreign spies couldn't identify what was being produced inside.
What he found horrified him.
The levels of deadly substances in the environment around the facility were eighty times higher than the maximum safe concentration. The Soviet chemical weapons program was poisoning its own surroundings, its own people.
In 1992, just as Russia was preparing to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention—an international treaty banning the development and stockpiling of chemical weapons—Mirzayanov and a colleague named Lev Fyodorov published an explosive article in the weekly newspaper Moskovskiye Novosti. They revealed that the Soviet Union and Russia had developed an entirely new generation of nerve agents, more potent than anything the West possessed.
The timing was devastating. Russia was about to sign a treaty promising it had no secret chemical weapons programs. Mirzayanov had just announced that such a program not only existed but had produced weapons specifically designed to evade treaty verification.
The Price of Truth
On October 22, 1992, Russian authorities arrested Mirzayanov and sent him to Lefortovo prison on charges of revealing state secrets. The irony was exquisite: by prosecuting him for treason, the Russian government was effectively admitting that Novichok existed. Three scientists prepared expert testimony for the KGB confirming that the agents Mirzayanov described had indeed been produced.
The case eventually fell apart. Prosecutors couldn't prove that Mirzayanov had revealed anything that hadn't already appeared in Soviet publications—the locations and even some chemical details had been mentioned before. What Mirzayanov had really exposed wasn't a technical secret but a political one: that Russian generals had been lying to the international community about their chemical weapons capabilities.
Mirzayanov was released. He eventually emigrated to the United States, where he continued to speak about the Novichok program. In 2008, he published a book that included the chemical structures of the agents he had helped detect.
Other Russian scientists came forward over the years. Vladimir Uglev, who helped create the A-232 agent, gave interviews in 1994 and again in 2018. He revealed that several hundred compounds were synthesized during the Foliant research, though only four were successfully weaponized. Professor Leonid Rink confirmed that the structures Mirzayanov had published were accurate—though Rink had his own dark history with Novichok. He was convicted of illegally selling a Novichok agent that was used in 1995 to assassinate a Russian banker named Ivan Kivelidi and his secretary.
This was the first known use of Novichok to kill.
Where the Poison Was Made
The geography of the Novichok program spans the former Soviet Union.
The primary research and development occurred at Shikhany, a closed military town in Russia's Saratov Oblast. According to Mirzayanov, a scientist named Pyotr Kirpichev first produced Novichok agents there in 1973.
But testing happened elsewhere. The Chemical Research Institute in Nukus, in what was then Soviet Uzbekistan, served as a major site for testing the agents. Small experimental batches may have been evaluated on the nearby Ustyurt Plateau, a vast limestone desert that straddles the border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Dogs were reportedly used in the tests.
Precursor chemicals were manufactured at the Pavlodar Chemical Plant in Soviet Kazakhstan. This facility was intended to become the main Novichok production site, but its still-under-construction chemical warfare building was demolished in 1987 as the Soviet Union prepared for the Chemical Weapons Convention.
After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Uzbekistan worked with the United States to clean up the Nukus site. Between 1999 and 2002, the American Department of Defense spent six million dollars dismantling the facility under a program designed to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction from former Soviet states.
Yet the program's principal research site at Shikhany remained in Russia, beyond the reach of international dismantlement efforts.
The West Learns the Secret
Western intelligence agencies became aware of Novichok in the 1990s, but their knowledge was incomplete.
The breakthrough came when Germany's foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, obtained a sample of one Novichok agent from a Russian scientist. The sample was sent to Sweden for analysis. Swedish chemists determined its structure and shared the information with NATO allies, who synthesized small quantities of their own to test protective equipment and develop detection methods and antidotes.
A 2008 patent filing for a treatment for organophosphorus poisoning—the chemical class that includes nerve agents—mentioned Novichok by name. The research was conducted at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, with partial funding from the United States Army.
In 2016, Iranian chemists achieved something that changed the international response to Novichok forever. Working at a university in Tehran, they synthesized five of the seven known Novichok agents purely for analytical purposes. They produced detailed mass spectroscopy data—essentially a chemical fingerprint—and contributed this information to the database maintained by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, known as the OPCW.
Before this Iranian research, there had been no detailed descriptions of Novichok's spectral properties in publicly available scientific literature. Now, laboratories around the world could test for these agents. The secret was no longer quite so secret.
Czech researchers followed in 2017, synthesizing a small amount of the agent A-230 to generate analytical data for defensive purposes.
Salisbury, 2018
On March 4, 2018, a former Russian military intelligence officer named Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a park bench in Salisbury, a cathedral city in southwestern England.
Sergei Skripal had been a double agent, passing information to British intelligence before being caught, imprisoned in Russia, and eventually released in a spy swap. He had lived quietly in Salisbury for years.
Someone had smeared Novichok on the front door handle of his home.
Both Skripals survived, though their recovery took months. A police officer who responded to the scene was also hospitalized. The British government, backed by independent confirmation from four laboratories coordinated by the OPCW, determined that a Novichok agent had been used.
Russia denied any involvement. Russian officials insisted they had never produced or researched any agents "under the title Novichok"—a carefully parsed statement that many observers found unconvincing.
The story took a tragic turn four months later. In nearby Amesbury, a British couple named Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess fell ill after Rowley found a discarded perfume bottle and gave it to Sturgess as a gift. The bottle contained the Novichok used in the Skripal attack, apparently disposed of by the assassins.
Dawn Sturgess died on July 8, 2018. She remains the only confirmed fatality from the Salisbury poisoning.
Navalny, 2020
Two years later, history repeated itself with a higher-profile target.
Alexei Navalny was Russia's most prominent opposition figure, a lawyer and anti-corruption activist who had spent years documenting the alleged theft of public funds by Russian officials. He had been arrested repeatedly, attacked with green dye that damaged his eye, and warned that his activities put him in danger.
On August 20, 2020, Navalny drank a cup of tea at Tomsk airport before boarding his flight to Moscow. He never arrived. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk after Navalny lost consciousness. Russian doctors treated him for two days, claiming they found no evidence of poisoning, before allowing him to be evacuated to Berlin.
German military laboratories confirmed within weeks that Navalny had been poisoned with a Novichok agent. He survived after months of treatment and rehabilitation, only to later die in a Russian prison in 2024 under circumstances his supporters considered suspicious.
The Chemistry of Death
The Novichok agents belong to the organophosphorus family of compounds—the same chemical class as many pesticides. This is not a coincidence. Mirzayanov revealed that many less potent derivatives of the Novichok compounds were published in open scientific literature as new insecticides, allowing the secret weapons program to disguise itself as legitimate agricultural research.
The core structure typically features a phosphorus atom bonded to oxygen, nitrogen, and fluorine atoms in various configurations. Some variants replace the oxygen-phosphorus double bond with sulfur or even selenium. Many include phosgene oxime or similar compounds as part of their structure—phosgene oxime is itself a potent chemical weapon, classified as a "nettle agent" for its ability to cause severe skin irritation and damage.
What makes Novichok agents particularly terrifying is how they interact with acetylcholinesterase, the enzyme they're designed to destroy. Some structures appear to contain chemical groups that can bind to multiple sites on the enzyme simultaneously, like grappling hooks anchoring to several points at once. This may explain reports that Novichok agents cause unusually rapid and permanent damage to the enzyme—more so than older nerve agents.
The agents are also resistant to standard treatments. When someone is exposed to a nerve agent, doctors typically administer drugs like atropine and pralidoxime that can counteract the effects and potentially restore enzyme function. Novichok agents are reportedly harder to treat than VX and resistant to these therapies, particularly if treatment is delayed.
After Salisbury: A New International Response
The 2018 poisonings in England forced the international community to confront a gap in chemical weapons law.
The Chemical Weapons Convention, which had entered into force in 1997, maintained lists of controlled substances that member nations agreed not to produce. But the Novichok agents weren't on these lists. They had been specifically designed to avoid regulation—precursor chemicals that could plausibly be used for legitimate purposes, novel molecular structures that weren't covered by existing schedules.
In November 2019, the OPCW added Novichok agents to the Convention's list of controlled substances. It was one of the first major changes to the treaty since it was negotiated in the 1990s. Member states are now required to declare any production of these compounds and are prohibited from developing them as weapons.
Russia, which is a member of the Chemical Weapons Convention, continues to deny that it ever produced Novichok agents or that it was responsible for the Skripal or Navalny poisonings.
The Shadows of History
There's a strange footnote to the Novichok story.
In his book "Cassidy's Run," journalist David Wise suggests that the entire Soviet fourth-generation chemical weapons program may have been an unintended consequence of American deception. According to Wise, the United States ran an operation called "Shocker" in which a double agent fed misleading information to the Soviets about a discontinued American nerve agent program codenamed "GJ." The Soviets may have launched their own research to match a capability that didn't actually exist.
If true, it would mean that Novichok—the weapon that poisoned the Skripals, killed Dawn Sturgess, and nearly killed Alexei Navalny—began as a response to a phantom.
But whether or not the program started as a misunderstanding, its products are grimly real. The newcomer has arrived, and it shows no signs of leaving.
Understanding the Scale
Numbers can be abstract. Here's another way to think about Novichok's lethality.
The deadliest natural toxin known is botulinum, produced by bacteria. It's so poisonous that a single gram could theoretically kill a million people if distributed with perfect efficiency. Nerve agents aren't quite that potent—but they're close.
The original nerve agent tabun, discovered in 1936, might yield roughly 200 lethal doses per gram. VX, the benchmark for nerve agent toxicity before Novichok, offers perhaps 1,000 to 2,000 lethal doses per gram depending on the route of exposure.
The Novichok agents reportedly double or triple even that figure.
Yet the Skripals survived. So did Navalny. This seems paradoxical until you consider how chemical weapons actually work in practice. The theoretical lethality assumes perfect exposure conditions—proper concentration, appropriate duration, vulnerable target. Real-world poisonings are messier. Victims may receive only partial doses. They may be found quickly and treated aggressively. The human body has some capacity to resist and recover even from severe nerve agent exposure.
The nerve agents are not magic death sentences. They are weapons, and like all weapons, they can fail.
This may be cold comfort. Dawn Sturgess didn't survive. Ivan Kivelidi and his secretary didn't survive. The agents work often enough, reliably enough, that states continue to produce them and assassins continue to use them.
The newcomer is patient. It will wait.