The North Korea Weapon Everyone Is Ignoring: VX

North Korea is becoming a tired subject for news these days. Most people’s fascination is slowly eroding with the small country that struggles to feed its people, but is brash enough to challenge world superpowers. Throughout the bombardment we see daily of North Korean posturing and chest pounding one story stands incomplete. Kim Jong Un’s half brother, Kim Jong Nam’s assassination by VX nerve agent on February 17, 2017.

VX (O-ethyl methylphosphonothioate) is one of the deadliest nerve agents known to man. You may remember it as the looming threat to San Francisco in The Rock, but the movie doesn’t quite depict how it actually works. In the movie, one of the ‘bad guys’ screams as his face is melted off by a green VX gas cloud. In reality, it is not corrosive at all. It’s not even a green cloud. Even more disturbing than the green clouds of the movie is that it is colorless, odorless, and extremely difficult to detect unless symptoms start showing up. It is a rapidly evaporating liquid where a drop only a few microns in diameter can be lethal if ingested or inhaled. VX is a chemical inhibitor that causes involuntary muscle contractions. This causes seizure-like convulsions until all of your muscles ‘lock up’. The diaphragm contracting and never relaxing causes death by suffocation. With the right delivery system, a small amount of VX can eliminate all human and animal life in an entire city.

VX is not easy to synthesize, but it is possible with modern laboratory equipment. Saddam Hussein attempted to synthesize it in the 80s unsuccessfully, but the North Koreans appear to have more resources given the advances in their nuclear program. Scientists agree that even if the assassins that killed Kim Jong Nam were gloved, that they would have experienced exposure and symptoms from the cloth held over the half-brother’s mouth. This points to the assassins having been provided chemical compounds that synthesized into VX when combined. This would make them less detectable and safer for them to use without guaranteeing their own death. This sophisticated level of administering the WMD should raise a red flag as to North Korea’s chemical capabilities.

Armed with chemical dispersal airbust missiles, the North Koreans could easily wipe out the Korean peninsula using VX. Luckily, US soldiers are issued a protective mask and full body coverage NBC suit, but unprepared soldiers would not be so lucky. If North Korea is looking to unite Korea by eliminating their opponent’s military but not destroy any infrastructure, we may see them turn to chemical weapons instead of nuclear. While nuclear weapons still hold the highest destructive potential, seeing the sophistication North Korea has demonstrated by field synthesizing VX should not go unnoticed.