All those who passed through Kuala Lumpur’s International Airport on February 13 must now be aghast over their possibly narrow brush with one of the world’s most toxic chemicals, seemingly a mere drop of which killed a man in the terminal building that day. And, the likely assassins were seen on airport security cameras running to the washroom, with their hands held away from them, possibly to clean any traces of the toxin after their attack on infamous North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un’s half brother.
Half brother Kim Jong-Nam collapsed and died within minutes of the attack in the middle of the airport’s terminal hall. If the mystery and dramatic style of the assassination astounded the world, a week later, came another shocker: the killing was seemingly done with the use of a few drops of one of the world’s scariest toxic chemicals, a toxin that has been globally banned since 1993 under UN law as a weapon of mass destruction.
Last week, the Malaysian Police announced that they had tentatively identified the killer substance as the toxic chemical ‘VX’ which is the short form for ‘Venomous Agent X’, the original code word given to the toxin after its dangerous effects were discovered.
VX was discovered in 1951 by British scientists at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), one of the world’s oldest and largest chemical producers, in its laboratories in the UK. They thought they had found an improved pesticide of sorts. Within two years, however, the terrifying toxicity of the substance was realized: a drop smaller than a match-head can kill you by seeping into your body and causing nerves to malfunction in a manner that you are asphyxiated to death within minutes.
Of course, many world powers immediately began producing VX for chemical warfare purposes, with the US and the then USSR taking the lead. Thousands of tons of this chemical were produced and stored. VX became just one more toxic chemical to be used in war. Toxic chemicals, either in liquid or gas form have been used in warfare since World War 1.
In 1993, under the United Nations Chemical Weapons Convention, VX was outlawed globally and a UN supervised program to destroy stock piles is yet under way. In addition to the United States and Russia, several other countries, including Iraq, Sudan and North Korea are suspected to possess stockpiles. To its credit, the US, on realizing the dangerous nature of this toxin and the possibilities for theft and proliferation, began reducing its own stockpile as early as 1969.
While Iraq’s Saddam Hussein regime is suspected to have used VX in chemical warfare against the Kurdish insurgency in 1988, in December 1994, VX or something similar was used by the secretive cult Aum Shinrikyo in Tokyo to murder three former members. Apparently, Aum disciples had made just about 100 grammes of VX for this purpose. VX is what is known as an ‘organophosphate’ type chemical that does not require rocket science to make. The Malaysian police believe that a cloth sprayed with a few drops of VX was rubbed on Kim Jong-Nam’s face and that sufficed to kill him. Investigators say, the fact that the two suspect women assassins were seen on camera moving away with their hands stretched out before them indicated that they knew of the highly toxic nature of the chemical they were handling. They were seen heading for the washrooms probably to wash their hands and arms thoroughly. One suspect subsequently was affected by symptoms similar to that of VX poisoning.
Kim Jong-Nam had been living in exile on the gambling resort island of Macao, a one-time Portuguese colony later returned to China. He had been favoured by China as a possible alternative to his eccentric half-brother and current North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, younger grandson of Kim Il-Sung, founder of the Korean Communist Party and of the northern People’s Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK). Kim Jong-Un has been increasingly repressive in recent years moving swiftly and suddenly to depose some of his own most senior associates in his dictatorship. This is what leads analysts to believe that this assassination was his handiwork. Four other suspects arrested by the Malaysian police are all of North Korean origin.
Malaysia is one of the few countries other than China to maintain diplomatic and trade links with Pyongyang.
The use of VX in an international hub airport has frightening implications and Kuala Lumpur is furious. If the substance had been sprayed more loosely or spilt while being brought into the building, it would have caused a wave of death. The whole terminal area was later de-toxified.
But imagine if you had used the washroom after those assassins had washed up? Perhaps, the very basin used for washing?! Remnants of VX can remain toxic for hours afterward depending on the volume of the dose. Such are the weird hazards of modernity and globalisation!
Meanwhile, across the world, in Washington DC, America’s new leader is also toying with the idea of boosting the use of a similarly toxic and even more destructive substance: nuclear fission or, the atom bomb. In a interview with Reuters news agency last Thursday, President Donald Trump dropped another bombshell: he declared that America should build its already massive nuclear arsenal to make it indisputably “top of the pack” among the world’s nuclear armed states.
What happens when an atomic bomb explodes? The flash will be “brighter than a thousand suns”, as one of the pioneer designers of the United States’ nuclear weapons program during World War 2 remarked, as he watched that very first test explosion in the New Mexico state desert. Nuclear scientist, Robert Oppenheimer was actually recalling a quote from the Bhagavad Gita, describing the wrath of God. The strength of those first test blasts or, as it is technically termed, the ‘yield’ from the ‘fission’ or splitting of atoms at the core of the bomb, amounted to a few thousand tons’ equivalent of normal explosive, i.e. trinitrotoluene (TNT).
The bombs dropped by the US Army Air Force on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also similarly ‘small’ bombs of a few kilotons worth of TNT. But, each bomb destroyed the entire city it was dropped on. The immediate physical destruction from the shockwave effect, the intense heat and ‘fire storm’ were but the first impact. That immediate physical impact killed over 100,000 people in one city and nearly 90,000 in the other, virtually the entire urban population. More people continued to die in their thousands over the ensuing months from blast and burn injuries. Chillingly, poisoned with deadly radiation and toxic chemical ‘fall-out’ from each explosion, many more began to die slowly, over the years and decades, long after Japan’s surrender and the end of the war. Tens of thousands more spent the rest of their lives maimed and disfigured in various ways by the explosion and its toxic after-effects. The cities themselves remained poisoned wastelands for years, especially, at the epicentres of the blasts.
If those two ‘primitive’ atom bombs wreaked that destruction, the atomic, hydrogen and cobalt bombs subsequently developed and stockpiled by the US, USSR and China in subsequent decades brought the world to a situation in which any use of these arsenals will actually result in the destruction of those countries using them. This was what scientists began to call, ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ (MAD). The whole world, in the half century since Hiroshima, has well learnt of the dangers of nuclear war.
Nuclear arsenals, these past decades, have been seen not as actual weapons to wage war with, but as weapons to deter war. Now, Trump wants to further build his own country’s nuclear arsenal, thereby upsetting this balance of the ‘nuclear deterrent’. He wants to go back to MAD.
Of course, this could be another outburst of childish Trumpian fantasizing to be quietly refuted by his cabinet ministers later. We all hope so.