Imagine an amount of poison the size of an ordinary pea:

Poison
Poison
Now imagine that such a crumb eliminates a person within a few minutes. To be precise, a lethal dose is about 0.1 grams, i.e., a glass of such a substance can send 2000 people to their forefathers!

If you think that I am talking about "Novichok" now, you are mistaken. In fact, we are talking about the famous "spy" poison - potassium cyanide.

This is what we will take as a reference point, so that it will be approximately clear what doses we will be talking about.

So, we all remember these detective films in which an enemy agent, in order not to be captured, bites the collar of his own raincoat with an ampoule of potassium cyanide sewn into it.

Death occurs very quickly and such scenes are not devoid of realism, because the maximum dose of cyanide for a person (0.1 grams) looks like this:

dose of cyanide
Here and further, we will consider approximate doses, since each specific case depends on many parameters - the method of ingestion, the person's weight, age, health status, assistance provided, etc. Some will need a little more, others - a little less. The most important thing for us now is to understand the approximate order of values.

Let's define a lethal dose of potassium cyanide for a circle like this:

Cyanide
Cyanide
And now imagine that there is a poison that is 100 times more deadly than cyanide - just one teaspoon of this substance contains up to 5,000 lethal doses. And a glass - up to 400,000, that is enough for a whole city.

If at this point you again thought that I was talking about "Novichok", then, alas, again no.

We are talking about one of the most famous chemical warfare agents - sarin. Its approximate lethal dose is 0.001 grams per person.

Cyanide vs Sarin
Cyanide vs Sarin
Sarin was invented in 1938 and at the moment it is considered quite outdated (although very formidable, as we can see) chemical weapons.

After the invention of sarin, chemists did a good job and came up with a new chemical warfare agent that is even 10 times more toxic.

"Yeah, so this is probably 'Novichok'?"

No, wrong again. This is a nerve agent called VX.

Cyanide vs Sarin vs VX
Cyanide vs Sarin vs VX
As you can see from the picture, a lethal dose of VX is still an order of magnitude less than that of sarin - only 0.0001 grams. This means that 10 grams of such a substance is enough to poison a city with a population of 100,000.

Of course, this is just a theory. I.e., that 10 grams of VX can theoretically be divided into 100,000 equal doses, each of which can take a person's life.

However, if you just spray 10 grams of such a substance over the city, then, of course, a global catastrophe will not occur, since most of the VX will "pass by" people.

For a long time, VX was considered the most toxic substance ever created by man...

However, in the late Soviet years, a whole line of completely new poisons was developed in the depths of secret laboratories. In the USSR, this line was called "Foliant". This beautiful word summed up about 60 related substances of varying degrees of toxicity.

The most toxic of all these substances was a substance under the code A-232. Now the whole world knows this substance under the name "Novichok".

This is a completely fictional name, launched either by western writers or journalists... In reality, we can only talk about the class of substances "Foliant" and A-232 included in its line.

The exact parameters of the "Novichok" is still classified. But experts agree that this is the next generation of chemical warfare agents after VX. Accordingly, its toxicity is 10 times higher than that of VX.

The lethal dose is about 0.00001 grams per person!

Cyanide vs Sarin vs VX vs Novichok
Cyanide vs Sarin vs VX vs Novichok
0.01 milligrams - this amount is difficult to see with your eyes. For comparison, a drop of water is about 10 milligrams. And here it is 1000 times less than a drop.

At the same time, Novichok is so toxic that it is not necessary to swallow it. It's enough that it just gets on your skin. Even more effective - on the mucous membranes (eyes, lips, tongue, etc.). A person gets poisoned almost instantly and dies within a few minutes.

This toxicity is not surprising, because A-232 was developed in the USSR as an alternative to the atomic bomb. This is the most powerful chemical weapon of mass destruction. It is designed to deprive enemy soldiers of the ability to resist in the fastest possible time. Almost lightning fast.

One of the creators of A-232 (Leonid Rink) in an interview dropped the phrase that if a 90x60km testing ground was used to test conventional toxic substances, then "Novichok" was tested at a 700×700-km testing ground.

However, where exactly this testing ground was located, Rink did not say. In any case, such dimensions of the test site are really amazing. "Novichok" was created to destroy entire regiments and divisions, not just one person. For one person, there are other, much more secretive poisons that leave no traces.

Eliminating one person with "Novichok" is about the same as using an atomic bomb against him - an outrageously excessive power reserve.

And now we are told that there are people in the world (Skripals, Kara-Murza, Navalny) who survived the impact of such an atomic bomb. I.e., if the lethal dose is only 0.00001 grams, then some "dim" FSB employee managed to use a dose of 0.000005 grams.

To put it bluntly, he couldn't add a speck of dust, but somehow only added half a speck of dust. Left-hander of modernity, indeed...

P.S. by the way, A-232 is the most powerful combat poison, but it is far from the poisons that mother nature created.

In future articles, I will also talk about such poisons - they are 1000 times stronger than "Novichok". And one of them... botox. The one that girls prick into their lips.