Vladimir Petrenko is a victim of the Russian CBW program. As a young lieutenant in 1982, he volunteered to test a new chemical warfare suit and was exposed to a poison that the Soviets had been secretly developing since the late 1970s.

Michael Waller, a senior fellow with the American Foreign Policy Council, visited with Petrenko and says his health is deteriorating. At age 34, Petrenko looks 20 years older. He is haggard and gaunt, has a grey beard and is developing serious illnesses that require almost constant treatment.

Novichok has similar effects. It can be toxic like a chemical agent or cause diseases like a biological agent. It can be lethal or debilitating.

Equally frightening, Waller says he was told by Russian scientists who have worked on the Novichok program that the poison affects human genes, causing birth defects and infant illnesses among offsprings.

These weren't the only surprises that greeted Waller as he traveled Russia in 1993 gathering information about Russian military activities that still continue under President Boris Yeltsin. He was also caught off guard when a Russian physician who treated people like Petrenko said their symptoms resembled those of the Americans he had been reading about in the papers--the sick veterans of the Persian Gulf War.

In short, the Russians may have pulled off one of the most spectacular and deadly deceptions in the history of warfare. Waller believes that NOVICHOK may be what Russian extremist Vladimir Zhirinovsky had in mind when he warned that his country has a "secret weapon" capable of destroying the West. Zhirinovsky's party dominates the Russian parliament, and Zhirinovsky has ties to the old Soviet KGB.

Indications that Zhirinovsky's threat was a boast, not a bluff, came when Vil Mirzayanov, a Russian scientist who publicly disclosed the existence of Novichok, was charged with revealing the "state secret." On two occasions, in 1992 and again in 1993, he was arrested by Russian authorities for talking about Novichok.

Mirzayanov's arrests caught the worldwide attention of scientists, including Nobel Laureate Joshua Ledberg of the Rockefeller University in New York, who headed a special Pentagon panel on Gulf War illnesses. He said if the Russians proceeded to prosecute Mirzayanov, "we must conclude that Mirzayanov was telling the truth and a whole new class of deadly binary chemical weapons was created."

However, Mirzayanov was not prosecuted, apparently because of the international attention. But that did nothing to diminish concern that he was telling the truth, the implications OF which are ominous for US national security.  

In past articles, Novichok was dispersed in experiments from a lab in Uzbekistan during the Soviet era, allegedly used in First Gulf War by Saddam Hussain en Cuban leader Fidel Castro was accused of stockpiling Novichok. The Soviet developer Vil Mirzayanov has lived in the United States since the mid 90s. I can blindly state the nerve agent has been duplicated world wide in the so-called research labs of friendly nations. From Fort Detrick, Porton Down, Dutch TNO Lab, and so on ... for "defensive" purpose in limited quantity. Spreading a nerve agent across so many locations in Salisbury doesn't sound to me as a professional hit. It would be difficult to trace the source after all ... WhoDunIt?

Description of Novichok agents

The first description of these agents was provided by Mirzayanov. [8] Dispersed in an ultra-fine powder instead of a gas or a vapor, they have unique qualities. A binary agent was then created that would mimic the same properties but would either be manufactured using materials legal under the CWT [10] or be undetectable by treaty regime inspections. The most potent compounds from this family, novichok-5 and novichok-7, are supposedly around five to eight times more potent than VX.

One of the key manufacturing sites was a chemical research institute in what is now Uzbekistan, and small, experimental batches of the weapons may have been tested on the nearby Ustyurt plateau. [11]

Two broad families of organophosphorus agents have been claimed to be Novichok agents. First are a group of organophosphorus compounds with an attached dihaloformaldoxime group, with the general formula shown below, where R = alkyl, alkoxy, alkylamino or fluorine and X = halogen (F, Cl, Br) or pseudohalogen such as C≡N. These compounds are extensively documented in Soviet literature of the time, but it is unclear whether they are all members of the potent "Novichok" compounds.[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]

 « click for more info »

Central-Asia: US dismantles chemical weapons | BBC News - Aug. 9, 1999 |

A group of American defence experts have arrived in Uzbekistan to start helping the Uzbeks dismantle and decontaminate one of the former Soviet Union's largest chemical weapons testing facilities.

US officials say the chemical research institute in western Uzbekistan was a major research site for a new generation of secret, highly lethal chemical weapons, known as Novichok.

Congress has allocated up to $6m for the project, after the US signed an agreement on assistance to help dismantle the institute earlier in the year.

...
According to a senior defector from the Soviet chemical weapons programme, the Soviets used the plant to produce small batches of a lethal new generation of nerve agents called Novichok, or New Boy in Russian. They were designed to escape detection by international inspectors.

Some of these were then tested on the nearby Ustyurt plateau, a forbidding desert west of the Aral Sea, in contravention of treaties Moscow had signed.

Now independent Uzbekistan is only just beginning to learn the legacy it has been left.

The Uzbeks have since worked closely with the Americans, giving them access to sites that in other parts of the Soviet Union are still off limits.

US military scientists and intelligence experts have already visited the nearby island of Vozrozhdeniye in the Aral Sea, which was the Soviet Union's main open air biological testing site and where hundreds of tons of the deadly anthrax bacteria are believed to have been buried.

A mighty wind: Nerve gas, six thousand dead sheep, and Soviet trickery (2014)

VR was developed in the 1950s roughly parallel to the U.S. development of VX.

Given that it is an isomer of VX - that is, it has the same chemical formula but a different molecular structure - VR may have been reverse-engineered from VX.  Vil Mirzayanov, a physical chemist and senior researcher in the Soviet nerve gas program who became a whistleblower shortly after the Cold War - exposing the Novichok program - told David Wise that the Soviet version of VX, called Agent 33, and binary chemical weapons were "developed in response to American programs and Soviet intelligence."  He said that, in the early 1960s, the Soviets obtained VX from the U.S. and had synthesized it in Volgograd by 1963.  "The people who did it got the Lenin Prize," he said.  According to Wise, Soviet intelligence learned the formula for VX itself in 1972, and began full-scale production at Novocheboksarsk that year. [105]

The idea that a Dugway CBW test might go wrong and hurt civilians had certainly occurred to CBW critics.  Robin Clarke, in his exposé We All Fall Down: The Prospect of Biological and Chemical Warfare, noted:

"The idea is that to test a biological weapon satisfactorily will involve detonating the weapon, releasing the biological material over a wide area on a proving-ground - such as the American one in Dugway, Utah - and recording the results on experimental animals set up in the area." [106]

The scientist who leaked Russia's Novichok 'conspiracy' | France24 |

Dissident Soviet scientist Vil Mirzayanov gained notoriety in the 1990s when he blew the cover on Moscow's secret experimentation with Novichok, a binary nerve agent. He had worked for almost three decades in the Soviet Union at the State Scientific Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology.

...
Mirzayanov became involved in Russia's nascent democratic movement and wanted to make his concerns about the chemical weapons programme public.

As a result of his dissident activities, he was fired from the institute. He then decided to write the whistle-blowing article in a Moscow newspaper along with another chemist, Lev Fyodorov. They warned of poor safety standards at the Moscow facility and vast quantities of harmful chemicals stored elsewhere in Russia.

The article led the authorities to prosecute Mirzayanov for divulging state secrets. He was arrested in October 1992 and held for several days in Moscow's notorious Lefortovo prison, used by the security services.

His case was eventually closed in 1994 after considerable international pressure on the Russian authorities. Mirzayanov has lived in the United States since 1996.

Russia declared in 2017 that it had destroyed all of its chemical weapon stockpile.

Moscow has rejected accusations of involvement in poisoning Skripal.

The CBW Convention Bulletin - July 2009

In  the  USA,  Outskirts  Press  of  Denver, Colorado,  publishes State  Secrets:  An  Insider's  Chronicle  of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program, which is a memoir by  Vil  Mirzayanov  [see  7  Nov  02]  who  had  emigrated  to  the USA from Russia in 1995. As a physical chemist he had joined the  principal  Soviet  chemical-weapons  research  institution, GosNIIOKhT, in 1965 but was dismissed in 1992 for publishing  a  whistleblowing  article.  After  press  interviews  and  another such article a year later that now revealed the existence of novel Soviet nerve agents referred to as 'Novichoks' under development in a programme codenamed Foliant [see 16 Sep 92 and 18 Oct 92], he was charged with unauthorized disclosure of state secrets [see 22 Oct 92]. During the next two and a half years he was either under house arrest or in prison until the charges were finally dropped during a closed trial, an outcome  he  attributes  to  "the  constant  intense  pressure  of  the media,  scientists  all  over  the  world,  statesmen  and  human right[s]  activists".  How  all  this  happened  he  describes  in  his book,  and,  in  the  process,  he  discloses  for  the  first  time  actual  chemical  structures  of  the  novel  agents.  These  include the  phosphonylated  or  phosphorylated  acetamidines  hitherto known in public only as 'A-230' and 'A-232' (or, in binary form, as  'Novichok-5'),  as  well  as  other  novelties.  The  book  has 105  pages  of  annexes  reproducing  numerous  documents, among them translations of evidence used by his prosecutors made  available  to  the  defence  (and  thence  to  supporters  in the  outside  world),  despite  high  security-classification.

Both  in  this  book  and  subsequently,  Dr  Mirzayanov  has continued to portray Novichoks as a deliberate attempt by the Russian  "military  chemical  complex"  to  circumvent  the  1993 Chemical  Weapons  Convention.  As  before,  he  cites  in  evidence the absence of A-232 precursors from the CWC schedules, continuing [see 25 May 94] to disregard the comprehensive  scope  of  the  CWC's  prohibitions  due  to  use  of  the  general purpose criterion, not the control schedules, to define the banned weapons.

○ Cold War at Porton Down: Informed Consent in Britain's Biological and Chemical Warfare Experiments

What we know about Russia's Novichok nerve agents linked to attack on ex-spy | Chemistry World |

Scientists at Porton Down would have been able to identify the agent, he adds, because the laboratory has been assembling information on potential threats for decades. 'What they will have done is made these chemicals, suspecting they were part of the Soviet or Russian arsenal,' Hay says. Then chemists at Porton Down would have 'assessed their structure and put them into a library of reference material', he adds.

Chemical structure of VX nerve agent

The generic Novichok chemical structure has some similarity to the structure of other nerve agents such as VX, seen here.
Information on Novichoks indicates that the agent used in the Salisbury attack could have been administered as a powder, spray or gas, although no information has been provided so far.

Public Health England has said that there is little risk to the public at large. Nerve agents degrade on contact with water, and the area of Salisbury where the attack took place has been hosed down. People who visited the same restaurant and pub as the Skripals on the day of the attack have been advised to wash their clothing to eliminate any risk of long term exposure.

○ Porton Down is approximately 8 miles from Salisbury

Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan states Porton Down could not have verified the Novichok fingerprint within days. May's "evidence" likened to the WMDs held by Saddam Hussein.

○ The Novichok Story Is Indeed Another Iraqi WMD Scam

I personally do not agree with Craig Murray. I believe the Novichok precursors can be replicated and indeed must have been researched across many nations. It would have been irresponsible if this new 4th generation nerve agent from the Soviet era would not have been studied.

I will look for signs this was a false flag attack which I have lived through a number of times before the onset of another major military conflict. As I have predicted, the Western world was edging towards a conflict with Russia and Israel's nemesis Iran. The Syrian failure by the West has brought both conflicts together. The Tillerson move is part of a more aggressive NSC in Trump's White House. Getting the IC and the Pentagon further infiltrated into decision making of the Oval Office. I'm changing my optimistic outlook to very negative. Especially because so many are fed  US and UK war propaganda for nearly two decades now. North Korea is a distraction, no war on the Korean peninsula.

[Update-1] Dutch representative chairs the United Nations Security Council … new FM Stef Blok made a statement this evening it’s too early to blame Russia as the evidence is lacking. The Netherlands is one of the more trusted allies of Theresa May and the UK Conservatives. I was indeed surprised. :-)