This book provides an extraordinary look inside the Russian chemical-weapons development system, written by a scientist who was deeply involved in that work for decades until he exposed it to the world in 1993. As he explains in this book, he put this information into the public domain because he was deeply disturbed by the devastating power of nerve agents, the extreme environmental problems and risks associated with their production and storage, their uselessness as military weapons, the waste inherent in their development, the official lying of the Soviet and later RF governments about their non-existence, and the illegality of the development programs in his country, run by sometimes-rogue generals inside the Russian military-industrial complex. In this book he details how he was jailed, prosecuted, released, jailed again, and finally forced to emigrate to the United States after publicly exposing clandestine Russian chemical weapons programs for development of a new class of nerve agents.
Vil Mirzayanov, now 83, describes in this memoir the enormous Soviet, and later Russian Federation (RF), complex of technical staff, laboratories, production facilities, and test ranges that continued to develop and test new types of nerve gases even as his country was negotiating its participation in the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) with the international community. Dr. Mirzayanov explains at length the Russian goal of evading CWC restrictions by creating a new class of nerve gases (called Novichok, Newcomers) for the express purpose of continuing to hold on to some chemical weapons after stocks of the older types that were known to the international community (e.g., VX and VX analogs, sarin, tabun, etc.) and their precursors were to be destroyed.
Ironically, part of the motivation that he describes for developing the Novichok class of weapons was a disinformation campaign by US Intelligence, based on bogus, "secret" nerve weapon data that were carefully fed to the Russians via a double-agent US Army spy. The phony data were supposed to mislead their scientists and engineers and cause them to waste time and money on hopeless development work. But the fake American data actually caused them to start thinking about the new agents that they eventually created, Mirzayanov says.
If you want to understand the nerve gases that the RF has developed, and now holds illegally in its possession, you need to read this book. One of these agents was used in March 2018 in an assassination attempt at Salisbury in the UK. (Mirzayanov's account indicates that Novichok agents are only held by, and available for use by, the RF leadership.) To this day, this book is the only open-literature source of detailed information on the chemical composition, structure, and effects of the Novichok nerve poisons such as were used at Salisbury.
One sad story that Dr. Mirzayanv tells is that of a researcher at a development laboratory who was accidentally exposed to a small amount of nerve agent when a seal failed on a tube. The man didn't die as an immediate consequence of his exposure. But his subsequent difficulties make it clear that any exposure to such an agent, even at a very low level, can have devastating consequences for the rest of one's life, due to long-term side impairments in mental processing capabilities and emotions. In the story that he tells, the man eventually died, after many travails, as a result of long-term side effects of his initial exposure.
Dr. Mirzayanov provides interesting side descriptions and commentary on Russian proliferation of nerve gas precursors (the chemicals from which nerve gases are made) and finished products to places such as Iraq and Syria. He includes some pithy observations on what he sees as the recklessness and irresponsibility of the US Army's disposal of old chemical weapons in Iraq after Saddam Hussein's army was defeated. (Spoiler: Mirzayanov calls the Army's expedient of blowing up Iraqi chemical weapon depots with explosives "barbaric," a sure-fire way, he says, to contaminate the environment and expose soldiers and civilians to robust nerve gas molecules that tend to be dispersed as airborne fallout rather than incinerated by explosions.)
In the biggest picture, you should read this book if you want to gain Dr. Mirzayanov's unique perspective on the extent to which Soviet, and later the RF, leadership were and are politically and operationally dedicated to fighting against democracies and the very notion of democratic processes and institutions through any and all available means. This book deserves a wide readership.
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