Aviation meets suffocationTHE murder of Kim Jong Nam, half-brother of Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator, had already seemed outlandish enough. According to the Malaysian authorities, two women in their 20s had stolen up behind him at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on February 13th, smeared some kind of poison on his face and then slipped away into the throng of travellers. Within 20 minutes Mr Kim was dead.
The results of an autopsy, announced ten days later, were more extraordinary still: they showed the poison to be VX, the deadliest nerve agent ever synthesised. That firmly pointed the finger at North Korea’s repressive regime, which is thought to have a vast stockpile of chemical weapons, VX among them. The nerve agent is classified as a weapon of mass destruction and banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention—which North Korea, along with only three other countries, has not signed. Just one litre of the stuff could kill 1m people, such is its potency. Inhaling VX vapour disrupts the nervous system within seconds, causing convulsions and suffocation.
North Korea is not known for its...Continue reading
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