Nerve agents inhibit acetylcholinesterase, which is an enzyme that catalyzes the breakdown of acetylcholine. Some nerve agents covalently bind to the enzyme, and can damage the active site of the enzyme, so the acetylcholine builds up, the signal keeps sending, and the motor neurons keep firing. The G series and V series of nerve agents were mass produced, weaponized agents, while the EA series, A series, and others are not known to be mass produced or weaponized. Exposure to nerve agents is usually treated with atropine and pralidoxime chloride (2-PAM chloride).

It is an honor to be on a watch list with you all!

I knew I’d be traumatized when I saw that Sarin was only in D tier

Not nearly as extreme as the nerve agent testing, but in the late 90s, I was in the Marine Corps and "volunteered" for a sleep deprivation experiment. A substantial number of minor injuries occurred, and those who made it to the end were largely experiencing delusions, mood disorders, and outright hallucinations. Some (like me) recovered relatively quickly after returning to normal sleep patterns, but some needed months of therapy to resolve sleep and mood disorders they'd developed (and probably still have lingering symptoms). It was a nightmare. But you got paid a lot more AND you got as long as you needed to recover afterward.

Hearing that one of these compounds is lethal at the femto molar level left me mouth agape and sent shivers down my spine, absolutely insane

I am impressed that you had the nerve to do this

You're not a real chemist if your home products aren't even on this leaderboard

The really scary part about this is that these are ALL incredibly simple molecules. Im an organic chemistry student on my third year of Ochem and I'm trained to look at molecular structures and imagine the potential synthesis pathways. The first thing that came to mind when I saw these was that I could synthesize these compounds with relative ease and using common precursors, which is really really really scary. 😭 As we push for a more educated societal standard, i wonder how many horrible people in the future will come up with the bright idea to utilize chemical weaponry

I still remember our NAAK (nerve agent antidote kit)training in Army BCT. It honestly was the most terrfying part, not because it was dangerous at all but just learning about Nerve agents and how quickly they could get ya with very little warning. We had to memorize all the symptoms. Sudden headache Unexplained runny nose Burning eyes Etc.

There really is a tierlist for everything on KZfaq.

Thanks for the tierlist, was struggling to pick one until now 👍

leaving the horror of all of these aside, i am super impressed that you can tell that something is necessarly toxic just buy looking at the (stylized) molecule. That is not only insanely impressive, but also really shows how much it pays off to actually understand one's own craft, not just get familiar with steps.

I’ve never heard about the Edgewood Arsenal human experiments before either, would be interested to see a video on it. We shouldn’t forget the atrocities in our past.

This tierlist could have used extra tiers above S, like "wtf?!", "oh god no" and "why would you even?!"

I was a nuclear, biological and chemical specialist in the army. Learning about his when I was 18 scared the hell out of me

For anyone who doesn't wanna see the video of what happens when someone is exposed to a nerve agent, but are still curious, look at a wasp getting sprayed by raid. The spray holds the sodium channels open and essentially makes them have a seizure until they die.

Fun fact about Aberdeen/ Edgewood area. If you get stationed there for more than 3 yrs, you MUST sign a waiver stating you have been made aware that there are VERY high levels of cancer in the area. Oh, and in the mornings we would go on company runs up to the gate to edgewood. On the gate, they had a sign that they are authorized to use deadly force without warning if you cross said gate

I remember in high school our chemistry teacher told us that our final assignment in class is to research any paper that is chemistry-related and present it to the class. Me, being the meme/edge-lord all high schoolers tend to be, did an entire presentation on the effects and countermeasures to agent VX with model testing on mice, as described in some Czech research paper. To maximize meme potential, my entire Powerpoint was in Comic Sans.

The moment you sent Sarin to D tier I knew this was gonna be a spicy video. The classified, human tested, chemical warfare agents of the United States? Well of course we want to know more about that

As a Former decontamination sergeant, i can confirm that VX is hellish. One of the big Problems is His very gooey consistance, which make it difficult to decontaminate. In the cbrn Branche, there is the Term "VX problematic"

I have no idea what any of this means, but you make this field (chemistry) sound very impressive

ah this is horrifying but one thing I find interesting is that you can, through their structure, almost sort them into a family tree. it's almost like you can see how the ideas developed over time

When Thatchemist uploads a video, I always watch, laugh, learn, and get contacted by the authorities.

so, (for context I’m CBRN in the US Army) and it’s cool to see someone review what they beat into our heads. Soman is terrifying because it ages (permanently binds to your AChE within 2 mins of exposure.) We usually are able to counter nerve agent poisoning with a combination of Diazepam and Atropine (mostly the atropine) alongside copious amounts of RSDL to the affected area. SMs (servicemembers) are given CANA (the anti convulsant) and an ATNAA (the immediate atropine) injectors. Mostly these can counter 2nd and 3rd Gen agents, however the novichoks (4th Gen, A-Series, etc.) are also terrifying bc they are resistant to these interventions. It’s why the Russians prefer them.

As a layman in anything related to chemistry, I wish there were additional descriptions as to what these agents do to you physically. Still love this content, the fact that many of these don’t degrade and are so lethal at small doses and with little to no warning is wild.

A historical overview of making people lose their nerves, literally. 1:45 G-series. 8:50 V-series. 11:45 Novichok. 14:40 Neostigmine, a medication.

As someone with no background in chemistry or nerve agents: this all sounded scary to me. Thanks for the new fear! 10/10 would watch again!

I'm a retired nuclear biological and chemical warfare specialist. I love little videos like this. Good for civi awareness.

Sarin should be higher up, not because it's deadly (even though it is), but because it's so damn easy to make.

Oh man. Sarin/GB in D tier. How much worse do these things get? This list is going to be interesting

In grad school, I worked on a multi-step synthesis to make some goofy organophosphorous compound. I came up with a whole synthetic plan, which I'm certain would have worked, and started validating it with SciFinder searches of my intermediates. Long story short, it's worryingly easy to accidentally plan a process that involves distillation of sarin. Had to go back to the drawing board on that one...

I remember going through the nerve agent chamber, even though they make sure your all sealed up and fine its still pretty scary

as someone who is currently a chemical corps soldier, this stuff will mess up the world if used incorrectly

Weellllllcome back, I'm That chemist and today we'll be doing a speedrun to the top of the No-Fly list!

I used to work in a laboratory that did testing on nearly all of these compounds. While we were working with them we had these autoinjectors similar to an Epi-pen that were called Duodotes. They contained Atropine and another compound called 2-PAM that both worked together to counteract the effects of the nerve agents. One of the scariest ones is by far GD. It may not be nearly as toxic as the other ones, but because aging happens in a few minutes, by the time you would start getting symptoms of exposure it would be too late to get an antidote. I was responsible for making up some of the dosing solutions of these agents and would hand them off to someone that would give them to an animal. Even when an antidote was given to the animal, they would still have pretty severe symptoms. Its pretty brutal to see those kinds of things and its part of the reason I no longer work there. These compounds are no joke and I still have a pretty healthy fear of them. There's a reason they are banned.

Finished watching NileRed make cherry and grape sodas and now the algorithm decided it’s time to teach me the human atrocities tier list 💀

As a medical professional, i was really surprised to see neostigmine on there! Glad it got F tier

TMTFA sounds like it would be one of the few chemicals that's lethal even at homeopathic concentrations

I like how even though the tiers only rank them in badness relative to each other, and even the F one is really scary, half of them still ended up in S and A.

I can attest to the terrifying aspect. I went thru the CDTF at FLW MO. The first day is fun, splashing around cleaning up simulated chemical weapons in a variety of settings. The second day when they open the container and the alarms in the area start going off is a totally different vibe.

Growing up on a farm, some of the chemicals we used were scary, as was the way some farmers out there handled them without any protective clothing or respirators. Common insecticide use against soil borne pests were Terufos and Phorate, they were sold under different brand names, the LD50 on some of them was around 1mg/Kg. This scares the hell out of me, a tenth of a gram inhaled or swallowed and you're dead (dermal numbers were only slightly higher), I don't go near anything that toxic.

not into chemistry whatsoever nor do i know anything but this was thoroughly enjoyable, the way you describe how horrifying the agents are made me laugh🤣

I feel personally attacked by this awesome video.

Many pharmacies in the UK countryside keep stocks of Atropine and 2-PAM, just in case farmers were poisoned. Happened a few times each year.

15:28 The fact that I can't find any detailed information about this gas, really makes it seem extremely dangerous to even know about its existence.

The added fun with Soman is that it quickly irreversibly binds to the nerve receptors so normal nerve agent antidotes don't function that well. One of the reasons p-tabs exist

Morally questionable chemistry is a scary subject! Great vid!

Hopefully in 20 years we WON'T have a new tier list involving nerve agents and how evil they are. Maybe I'm just living in a dream though.

My science teacher used to be a weapons expert and chemist in the army. He told us stories about testing VX. Scary af.

Damn. Who'd have thought that Electronic Arts is only the second most evil "EA"?

Idk why i have been recommended this video consistently since you uploaded it but I finally gave it a watch, understood nothing you said, and am still horrified. Well done! Also I guess I’m part of the watchlist too now

My grandfather had nerve agents tested on him . He lost his mind and spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital. The military is great . 😐

Would definitely be interested in hearing more about the Edgewood Arsenal stuff I had no idea... Great insight as always.

I've always wondered how they knew some of these are tasteless and odorless

love how a research for a roleplay I'm planning for my friend led me to this and probably me ending up on a watchlist :D

I didn’t watch the full video. I just needed to the know the S tiers. But thank you for making this 😊

I like how you're like "ok, this one takes a whole drop to be lethal, can eventually evaporate, and can only be absorbed through the skin a little bit. F tier useless trash."

Two popular theories as to why Hitler refused to allow the use of chemical weapons during WWII: He'd himself been a victim of gas attacks in the first world war and thus thought they were too horrible to use, and the second reason is that German high command knew the allies themselves also had chemical weapons and feared retaliation if they were used.

Excellent video... so much detail! 👏👏👏👏

I find your videos fascinating. Even tho I don't understand the chemistry it's so interesting to learn about.

What's most scary to me is that you only have to get in the ballpark of any of those molecules. You've got two functional groups that you can mix and match and basically any combination of them makes an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor.

If you want to see the effects of a nerve agent in action, just use insect spray on a mosquito.The mode of action is pretty much the same, with the difference that the compounds of the insecticides are optimized to inhibit/block insect acetylcholinesterase (an enzyme which breaks down the neurotransmitter acetylcholin), while nerve agents are good at blocking human acetylcholinesterase.

2am on a weekday and I’m so glad I now know the best/worst nerve agents!

I’m so glad the algorithm brought me to this. What a great scientific breakdown. 10/10

VX was apparently so important that it was rumoured to have been given by Britain to the United States as part of quid pro quo for information/designs for Thermonuclear weapons. Also Porton Down laboratory in Britain also conducted human experimentation with nerve agents (including at least one death found by a coroner's inquest in 2004 to have been unlawful) so you could include that with any Edgeworth Arsenal material.

ICU/OR RN back again, Neostigmine is used A LOT in critical care/anesthesia medicine. It's one of the most cost-effective and efficient reversal agents for paralytics. Rocuronium, Vecuronium, succs, all reversed by Neostigmine within 60 seconds, usually less than that. Another one is Suggamadex. Also, definitely make a deep dive on Eastwood Armory please

Wicked! Thanks for everything you do.

Thank you so much for making this video. You have no idea who the audience may be, and how we can use this to better the human condition as well as the earth's condition and all living animals / plants. Thank you again, from the bottom of my heart.

I did some training with an agency where we underwent live-agent hazmat operations. It was 4 days of classroom learning, and 1 day of in the field. We had to have all of our masks and filters inspected, and then double and triple verified by computer measurements. We went into areas with VX, Sarin and GB gasses/exposure. And when they said “Oh yeah, by the way, this stuff isn’t even anywhere near the worst out there.” That just kind of hit different. Edited to add: Yes, VX is a 10/10 on this list. But theres also other nerve agents that make your death even more unpleasant. Just for some reference, in the proper environment, with the proper conditions and carrier, a single drop of VX gas the size of the tip of a needle, could kill over 3000 people.

The G stands for "German (agent)", you learn this in Army CBRN training at Nord Hall in AIT. This was done because those agents were discovered during WW2 in the possession of the Germans as the Allies invaded.

I was under the impression that the "G" is derived from the German word "Gifte," which means "poisons" in English. The G-series nerve agents were developed by the German military during World War II, and they are named using a combination of generally two letters except in specific cases like GBS where the S stands for sulfur)

Hey thanks for adding me to the watchlist, hope they show good movies 🙂👍

Sad anyone would ever purposefully make a cocktail of death. Not just death but absolute suffering. I can only imagine those poor people they experimented on. It’s what nightmares are made of. What you mentioned reminded me of unit 731 from Japan. After reading about it I couldn’t sleep for 2 weeks.

When you see a three fluorides on the same carbon connected to a ring with a charged group that’s when you know shit is getting real.

Thanks for the guide!

put this on your watch list to be put on a watch list. Thank you very cool

*Flicks through mentioned book* Well, that terrifying...now the question, where to rank it alongside the other terrifying things: -How deadly mixing household cleaning products is -How easy it is to produce materials that undergo "high energy decomposition at speed" -How easy it is to buy reasonably radioactive substances, sometimes without even knowing it -Taxes

1, Cyclosarin is less potent compare to sarin 2, Soman belongs in S tier - even tho it is not as toxic as some of the other agents, but the main kicker for it is that it is extremely hard to treat due to the rate at which aging (the loss of the alkoxy group ) which renders it resistant to oxime antidotes. Normal effective window for treatment for other agents are around few hours. Soman? 5 minutes 😬 3, In V series, the thiol is the leaving group, not the alkoxy group (I.e. in VX, the leaving group is diisopropylaminoethanthiol) Hope this helps

Love channels like these that teach you on obscure things in fun ways, kind of reminds me of nilered.

Thanks for this video!

Your hard work does not go unnoticed! Thanks for the great content as always!

Also this is probably one of the first times I have heard new chemistry terms like "quatranary anilibrium" 15:21 and im glad he does not use layman's terms because I get to expand my chemistry vocabulary.

What a awesome video! Thank you sir, I subscribed.

Being a CBRN specialist in the USMC and a technician now, this was a pretty great video/tier list. 👏

I was honestly a bit surprised you mentioned some of the history of how a couple chemicals were used but not Sarin cuz it was infamously used by that one Japanese doomsday cult in an attack on a subway. To be fair though, this was my first video of yours I've seen and I wasn't expecting it to be more about the chemical properties than the history of their use! It was very informative regardless even if I didn't understand some of the terminology

As a person that collects and studies CBRN-E personal protection equipment, if a nerve agent was ever used, I would just give up. It is nearly impossible to protect from them As a civilian. .

This is a great intellectual work and summery. More ppl should learn about these things

You got my subscription based off of the name of the video alone. This promises to be elucidating and ridiculous. I'm making popcorn before I start the video.

I'm a public safety and environmental science major, and I appreciate how you avoid the sensationalism I've seen from far too many science channels. Everybody is correct that the hazard severity is extreme, but the vulnerability is nearly non-existent for 99% of ppl, meaning the overall risk is marginal at most. Some KZfaqrs are willing to make soccer moms think their local suburban mall is imminent to be fumigated if it gets them clicks. I just wanna make sure it's clear that the chances of this being relevant to the average person is incalculably small.

u know these scary things about Quaternary amines makes me more cautious now when preparing anion exchange membranes because one of the steps involve treating the surface full of amines with methylating agents like methyl iodide to form quaternary amines which make me wonder if some of these may break apart and form terrifying compounds.

I love how you showed the parts that are easy to bond

Appreciate the information. I was a CBRN Defence Specialist in the USMC and chemical warfare agents has always been my weakest understanding. The more I can study on these and how to combat them, the better.

The algo has blessed you, please do more. This topic is extremely interesting!

I've never been so confused, terrified and entertained in my life.

another recommendation?! wow thank u again

You'll have about 10 personal FBI agents by now with your internet search history.

excellent work. as someone who went through live agent training: VX is by far the most terrifying

3:00 my first thought is that given he was discharged from the military after being exposed to mustard gas maybe Sarin gave even _him_ pause when presented with the nerve agent

You are definitely on a list after the research for this

CBRN/ACM Marine here. I miss this shit. Ironically, I miss having a job that NOBODY took seriously. Gas chambers are the butt of the joke, "what do you guys even do?" all that jazz. I look back at how I felt about that during my time in, how other Marines looked at our jobs, how we were treated at the command and in the S-3, and I feel so good about the work we accomplished then. We had a ragtag group of CBRN, Arty, Infantry, EOD, SEAL, and corpsman on our ACM team, doing incredibly important shit that nobody else knew or cared about. It felt very "secret squirrel" if you will. Or as secret squirrel as a bunch of dudes running around in level A suits with detection equipment can get. Every sector of Marine professionalism jam packed into a squad of people that could take on the worst shit man kind has ever invented. A truly thankless job, and I was proud to do it. We all were. Wish I still could be in that field doing what I loved. I miss my guys, I miss suiting up, I miss the thrill, the professionalism, the places we got to go, things we got to do. We traveled the world, visited 15+ countries teaching people our job, did real world detection and decon on some real nasty shit. The knowledge you HAD to have to do that job efficiently and keep people alive is something i am really proud of, and I'm glad to have spread that knowledge as much as we did. Everybody thought the gas chamber was just going through the motions, which in the world then and today, it was in a way during peacetime. But the basic fundamentals of CBRN gas chamber training to the normal Marine lays the groundwork for having that skillset. I just wish more people took it seriously. It is an incredibly fulfilling knowledge base to have even in everyday life dealing with household chemicals, knowing what chemicals are in the random trucks driving the roads, such a niche sector of knowledge to possess. I just wish in hindsight, that I continued pursing that after I got out. I'm being overdramatic, but God damn, being 10 years removed from that job, do I fucking miss it. It was so much fun being so good at what we did. Now we all have kids, live normal lives, work normal jobs. Life is fucking strange sometimes. At one point I had a ridiculously important job. Now I'm a nurse, and it just doesn't compare. I've let that time in my life go. Uniforms in a tote in the attic, some small things around the house from those days, pictures, challenge coins, what have you. I hadn't honestly thought about it in quite some time. Thanks for the video. I know that wasn't its intention, but thanks anyway.