VX

For the talk, the scientists flipped a single instruction, reward toxicity.

They hit run on an ordinary office server, and in less than six hours, it designed 40,000 molecules it predicted would be lethal, including VX, which is one of the deadliest nerve agents on Earth, alongside thousands of brand-new chemical weapons that had never existed in nature.

According to the AI's own math, some were far deadlier than VX.

When the researchers published the paper, they admitted two things.

The software they used is built on an open source code that anyone could download.

However, World War I is when chemical weapons really took off, and nations across the globe entered a race to develop, produce, and weaponize the most deadly compounds possible.

Since then, more than 700,000 tons of chemical weapons have been produced, including the horrific nerve agent VX.

VX, short for Venomous Agent X, is a chemical compound capable of killing a person just by it touching their skin.

As humans seem intent on becoming the masters of our own demise, it probably won't surprise you that VX is not found in nature.

It's entirely man-made.

It belongs to a group of synthesized chemical compounds known as nerve agents.

Unfortunately, as they're such simple compounds, they're easy to make and can be manufactured in fairly ordinary factories.

The only known uses for them are as insecticides, if weak enough, or nerve agents, if more potent.

In terms of destructive weapons, chlorine gas is fairly low grade, which is why it's barely been used since the trenches of World War I, but it lit the fuse on a series of steps that has gradually developed deadlier and harder to trace chemical weapons.

Today we worry about Novichok, Sarin, VX, and Cyclosarin, weapons infinitely worse than what was seen on the battlefield on the 22nd of April 1915, but nonetheless certainly the continuation of humanity's horrifying desire to kill as many people as quickly and as silently as possible.

Today, there are chemical weapons that could effectively destroy vast swathes of populations in an instant.

But it all began in the muddy nightmare that was the Second Battle of Ypres during the First World War, with all of green smoke floating silently towards unsuspecting soldiers.

There's chlorine and phosphine.

Then there are things that the agent refused to synthesize after doing a web search, things like meth, sarin, VX, A230, and codeine.

So this one, for example, is a, is a nerve agent produced in the Soviet Union.

So if you've heard of the Novichok agent, it was used to assassinate a person, and it was pi- almost untraceable, and this is one of the group of compounds that were used for that.

B.

The substance identified on Kim Jong Nam's face and in his bloodstream was VX, a nerve agent so toxic that a single drop on bare skin is considered a potential lethal dose.

VX was developed as a weapon of mass destruction.

Its presence on a civilian in a commercial airport was not an accident.

It was not a spontaneous act.

The question of who gave the order is the one that the official record refuses to fully close.

The forensic evidence is not ambiguous.

VX does not exist in private hands.

The sheep had been grazing near land known as the Dugway Proving Ground, which was, at the time, the Army's main site for field testing chemical and biological weapons.

Only the day before, the Army had tested a highly toxic nerve agent called VX.

According to the December 1968 issue of Science magazine, quote, how the agent escaped from Dugway may never be known beyond doubt, but investigators suggest that a combination of circumstances conspired to bring about this sheep slaughter, end quote.

The army's initial response was to deny that any testing at Dugway could have caused the deaths, but this position became increasingly difficult to maintain after a senator revealed that three separate nerve agent operations had taken place the day before the sheep fell ill.

The two of them headed to the airport separately, and that day, acting together for the first time, they murdered a man without even knowing it.

The two substances the women had on their hands combined to make VX, considered to be one of the deadliest chemical substances ever created by man.

It was originally discovered by accident during research into pesticides, but its toxicity was so overwhelming that it was soon developed into a military chemical weapon.

It's colorless and odorless, which makes it extremely hard to detect even after you've been exposed to it.

So how does VX actually kill a person? It's classified as a nerve agent, meaning it completely disrupts the signals passing between your nerves and muscles.

Once this poison enters the body, the muscles lose control and start contracting on their own, and eventually it shuts down the muscles you need to breathe, and even the heart.

Just a drop or two can kill a person within minutes.

If the two women rubbed Jong Nam's face with their bare hands, why did only Jong Nam die while they remained unharmed? This is where the most calculated part of the assassination was hidden.