For anyone nostalgic for the world of John Le Carré, the last week would have been a boon.
A former double agent and his daughter found unconscious on a park bench, allegations that Mother Russia poisoned her wayward son using a secret nerve agent ('Novichok') and diplomatic repercussions — all very much the sort of thing with which George Smiley, Le Carré's fictional MI6 spook would have been very much at home. However, before assuming that life imitates art, it would be well to check our facts — not least because stumbling into war with a nuclear power seems a silly thing to do.
While the Skripals are still in hospital and, as far as we know, haven't said much about the incident, a great deal has been alleged. Even to a non-chemist such as myself, much of this does not add up when stacked against information in the public domain.
First, while Skripal undoubtedly was a double agent (apparently turning on his Russian employers for financial gain, rather than out of conviction), he served four years of a 13 year sentence before being pardoned and swapped for Russian spies (Anna Chapman and her colleagues) back in 2010. His daughter, Yulia, visited Russia frequently.
No-one has explained why Russia would wish harm to a superannuated double agent some 20 years after his glory days and eight years after freeing him from custody. If they really had wanted the man dead, a convenient accident could surely have been arranged while he was still in prison.
Given that relations between Russia and the West are already at rock bottom and given Russia's current situation (elections and the hosting of the World Cup soccer tournament coming up in a matter of months) the timing seems even more surprising.
Second, it is far from clear that the nerve agent at the centre of the drama was ever successfully made by the Russians, let alone that they are the only possible culprits. Novichok ('newbie' in Russian) was alleged to be the name given to a group of nerve agents developed by the Soviets in the late 1970s, so secret that it was not declared when Russia signed onto the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1992.
"While it would be reassuring to be able to take government declarations on intelligence agencies' conclusions at face value, we have a lot of experience of late of politicised or even wholly invented intelligence."
Until 2016, the only proof we had of its existence was the allegation of a lone Soviet military chemist, Vil Mirzayanov, who helpfully gave the formulae for the family of chemicals and for each of its individual members in a book he wrote ten years ago about his experiences. No-one had been able to confirm the alleged formulae and the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had accordingly declined to add 'Novichok' agents to its list of banned chemicals. In 2016, however, Iran successfully synthesised 'Novichoks' in cooperation with OPCW and details were added to the OPCW database.
Certainly the US would arguably be in a better position to make them these days than the Russians. The Nukus plant (in Uzbekistan) which Mirzayanov claimed to have manufactured Novichok was dismantled with US help in the early 1990s and the alleged inventor himself has been living in the United States since being acquitted in Russia of revealing state secrets.
Mirzayanov claimed that one of the compounds' benefits was that they were easy to make with commercial ingredients (a claim at odds with both the UK claim that only the Russians could have done so and the fact that it has taken a quarter of a century for anyone to make one). Russia, by contrast, was certified by the OPCW as having destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical weapons in accordance with the Chemical Weapons Convention in September of last year. (The US has yet to complete this process in respect of its own chemical stockpiles.)
Equally, if the 'newbies' were used in Salisbury, one would have expected rather more lethal results. Mirzayanov claimed that some, at least, were five to eight times more deadly than VX. This is a persistent nerve agent developed in the 1950s, 30mg of the vapour from which can kill in under a minute. In Salisbury, by contrast, we have two people in hospital and a public health warning (issued a week after the attack) suggesting that people exposed might wish to wipe down any hard objects with a tissue and put their clothes in the wash.
Finally, even assuming that all the above reasons for scepticism are ill-founded, there are established mechanisms for refereeing alleged uses of chemical weapons under the Chemical Weapons Convention (to which both Britain and Russia are signatories). The fact that the UK has refused to make use of these, or to hand over any samples of the alleged agent used on the Skripals, is also rather surprising in light of the extreme actions it has taken in alleged retaliation.
While it would be reassuring to be able to take government declarations on intelligence agencies' conclusions at face value, we have a lot of experience of late of politicised or even wholly invented intelligence. One has only to remember the tearful (and bogus) stories of babies thrown out of incubators before the first Iraq War or Colin Powell and his vial of alleged Iraqi 'weapons of mass destruction' before the second. This need for caution would seem only to be enhanced where the protagonists of any new conflagration could wipe the whole of humanity out within half an hour.
Fr Justin Glyn SJ is studying canon law in Canada. Previously he practised law in South Africa and New Zealand and has a PhD in administrative and international law.