VX Nerve Agent: The Deadly Weapon Engineered in Secret

In January 1958, two medical officers at Porton Down, Britain's military science facility, exposed their forearms to 50-microgram droplets of a substance called VX, which was a new, fast-acting nerve agent that could kill by seeping through the skin. VX, short for "venomous agent X," is tasteless, odorless and causes uncontrollable muscle contractions that eventually stop a person's breathing within minutes. That experiment in 1958, according to University of Kent historian Ulf Schmidt, w