http://syriapropagandamedia.org/working-papers/update-to-briefing-note-doubts-about-novichoks

“Official statements from the UK government claim that the “military grade nerve agent” detected in Salisbury was “part of a group of nerve agents known as Novichoks” that the Russian chemist Vil Mirzayanov alleged had been developed in the Soviet Union in a secret programme. The structures of these compounds, labelled A-230, A-232, A-234, A-242 and A-262, were published by Mirzayanov in a book in 2008, twelve years after he emigrated to the US.

Other than Mirzayanov’s story, there is no evidence that these compounds were ever synthesized in either the Soviet Union or Russia, or that the “Novichok” programme ever existed. The use of the term “Novichoks” to describe this A-230 series of compounds, which are real chemical structures, is therefore tendentious. An account by another Russian chemist Vladimir Uglev, often cited as corroboration of Mirzayanov’s story, appears on close examination to be about the development of a class of nerve agents denoted GV and which has been studied in several countries including Czechoslovakia and the US.

The UK government has not revealed the identity of the compound detected in Salisbury, but the Russian ambassador has stated that the Foreign Secretary told him that the compound detected was A-234. They have revealed that the mass spectrometry profile of this compound was submitted to a public database by a researcher in the US Army’s Edgewood Chemical and Biological Center around 1998, indicating that Edgewood has synthesized and studied this compound.

There is also evidence that the US government has concealed what it knows about the A-230 series of compounds. Edgewood’s entry for compound A-234 in the public database has been deleted. Furthermore, US diplomatic cables from 2009 show that the US and UK governments sought to discourage discussion of Mirzayanov’s story at the OPCW and the Australia Group (an informal grouping of US-allied countries set up in 1985 to control the export of precursors for chemical weapons).

It has been suggested that the A-230 series of compounds have a different mode of action to that of classic organophosphates. To ensure that all relevant information is available to the doctors caring for the victims of the Salisbury poisoning, the UK government should without further delay reveal the identity of the compound detected, and should request urgently that all labs that have undertaken toxicity studies on such compounds make their results publicly available.”