A Cold War poison resurfaces in a quiet English town
MOSCOW — During the Cold War, Soviet scientists at a secret, high-security lab worked frantically to counter the latest U.S. chemical weapons. More than four decades later, the nerve agent they developed apparently turned up in a quiet English town, where it nearly killed a former Russian spy and his daughter.
Vladimir Uglev said he was the scientist who in 1975 first synthesized A-234 — an odourless liquid deadlier than any other chemical weapons that existed at the time.
“Hundreds of thousands could have been killed with what I produced,” the 71-year-old former researcher told The Associated Press.
Uglev detailed his deadly and secretive work, recalling how Kremlin leaders and the military were ambivalent about the chemical weapons program and eventually came to see it as burdensome and costly. And he described how the economic chaos that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse could have led to the lethal poisons falling into unscrupulous hands.