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Review
. 2019 Mar 11;20(5):1222.
doi: 10.3390/ijms20051222.

Novichoks: The Dangerous Fourth Generation of Chemical Weapons

Tanos C C Franca  1   2 , Daniel A S Kitagawa  3 , Samir F de A Cavalcante  4 , Jorge A V da Silva  5 , Eugenie Nepovimova  6 , Kamil Kuca  7
Affiliations
Review

Novichoks: The Dangerous Fourth Generation of Chemical Weapons

Tanos C C Franca et al. Int J Mol Sci. .

Abstract

"Novichoks" is the name given to the controversial chemical weapons supposedly developed in the former Soviet Union between the 1970s and the 1990s. Designed to be undetectable and untreatable, these chemicals became the most toxic of the nerve agents, being very attractive for both terrorist and chemical warfare purposes. However, very little information is available in the literature, and the Russian government did not acknowledge their development. The intent of this review is to provide the IJMS readers with a general overview on what is known about novichoks today. We briefly tell the story of the secret development of these agents, and discuss their synthesis, toxicity, physical-chemical properties, and possible ways of treatment and neutralization. In addition, we also wish to call the attention of the scientific community to the great risks still represented by nerve agents worldwide, and the need to keep constant investments in the development of antidotes and ways to protect against such deadly compounds.

Keywords: Novichoks; binary weapon; chemical warfare; nerve agents.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Structures reported by Mirzayanov for the A-series agents developed in the State Scientific Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology (GOSNIIOKhT) by Petr Kirpichev [3].
Scheme 1
Scheme 1
Production reactions of sarin (GB), soman (GD), and XV in binary weapons [5,6,7].
Scheme 2
Scheme 2
Production reactions of A-232 and substance 33 in novichoks # and 5 [3].
Figure 2
Figure 2
Possible scaffolds for the A-series nerve agents already reported in the literature [11].
Figure 3
Figure 3
Possible A-series nerve agents, as reported by Hoenig [12].
Figure 4
Figure 4
Possible structures of A-series nerve agents, as reported by Ellison [14] and Patocka [13].
Scheme 3
Scheme 3
Possible synthesis routes for the A-series based on Mirzayanov’s report [2]. The leaving group X is either fluorine (F) or cyanide (CN).
Scheme 4
Scheme 4
Microsynthesis of O-Alkyl N-[bis(dimethylamino)methylidene]-P-methylphosphonamidates, as reported by Hosseini et al. [16].
Scheme 5
Scheme 5
Synthetic route proposed by Hoenig [12] for the synthesis of the A-series nerve agents.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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MeSH terms