Criminal investigation

Secret trial shows risks of nerve agent theft in post-Soviet chaos: experts

The British government says Russia is to blame for poisoning former spy Sergei Skripal with a nerve agent, and most chemical weapons specialists agree.

But they say an alternative explanation cannot be ruled out: that the nerve agent got into the hands of people not acting for the Russian state.

The Soviet Union’s chemical weapons program was in such disarray in the aftermath of the Cold War that some toxic substances and know-how could have got into the hands of criminals, say people who dealt with the program at the time.

“Could somebody have smuggled something out?” said Amy Smithson, a biological and chemical weapons expert.

“I certainly wouldn’t rule that possibility out, especially a small amount and particularly in view of how lax the security was at Russian chemical facilities in the early 1990s.”

While nerve agents degrade over time, if the pre-cursor ingredients for the nerve agent were smuggled out back then, stored in proper conditions and mixed recently, they could still be deadly in a small-scale attack, two experts on chemical weapons told Reuters.