Why do spies use cyanide

This is what I suspect the Skyfall scriptwriter grabbed onto when he chose it for his destructive suicide pill. It's worth noting that KCN and NaCN are considered mildly corrosive salts and tend to cause distinctive lesions the intestinal walls. But, of course, they don't have that "acid" nomenclature. The problem is, though, that the word acid doesn't often equal to "melt your bones.

Think of citric acid in fruits like oranges and limes. Or acetic acid, the primary constituent in vinegar. Hydrocyanic acid is more potent than those but it's also classed as a weak acid.

Or at least I think of it as potent because of the following effects but, as Alex Berezow of RealClearScience reminded me, on the acid-scale it actually ranks below acetic and citric acids.

I f you look it up , you'll find that mixed with other substances, hydrocyanic is implicated in causing stress-fractures in metal and if it's stabilized with sulfuric acid - a famously strong formulation - the combination can be corrosive to steel.

In other words, "improbable" is the best word for the melt-my-face scenario in Skyfall. Or perhaps "impossible. To learn more, click here. Upcoming Webinars. NOV 15, NOV 16, NOV 17, Upcoming Virtual Events. DEC 07, DEC 08, JAN 25, FEB 23, MAR 10, His wife was also given a cyanide pill and died as a result of the poison.

Goebbels shot himself after shooting his wife Magda on the evening of 1 May and gave orders to his soldiers to shoot their bodies several more times after the suicide, to ensure he would not be captured alive.

Even though he died by a bullet in his head, one usage of cyanide by Goebbels is recorded. Other cases of cyanide usage are documented after World War II too.

The poison was hidden in a fake silver dollar which Powers carried around his neck. Luckily for him, the pilot never got to use it and was sentenced to prison by the Russian authorities. In later history, cyanide necklaces were also found on the bodies of the suicide bombers of the Tamil Tigers, the Sri Lankan separatist organization.

Read another story from us: English writer Graham Greene suffered from depression since his early childhood and attempted suicide by playing Russian roulette. The Tigers took part in the Sri Lankan Civil War in the period from to and carried the poisonous tablets which they would bite in case they were captured by the Sri Lankan army. From , almost all members of the separatist organization wore potassium cyanide enhanced necklaces, while the women members had the poison adhered to their tooth.

The Bahamas: 'If we give up now, all hope is lost' - the island in desperate need of climate justice. Unlike other Eastern bloc communist leaders, Tito refused to align his country with the Soviets. Stalin was infuriated and decided to have him eliminated. To rid themselves of Tito, the KGB looked at numerous methods of killing, one of which was administering a silent spray of pneumonic plague during a personal audience. According to a collection of Cold War archives compiled by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Soviet agent known as "Max" was to arrange a private audience with Tito during which a mechanism concealed in Max's clothes would release a dose of pulmonary plague bacteria, guaranteeing the death not only of Tito but of all those present.

Another plan involved him being presented with a booby-trapped box that would release a lethal poison gas as soon as it was opened. The operation was ditched only after the death of Stalin in The [Kremlin] has ordered your assassination. It was an electrically operated gun, fitted with a silencer and concealed in a cigarette pack, which shot bullets containing cyanide.

Later, in , Khoklov was treated for the effects of poisoning with radioactive thallium, said to have been administered by the KGB - in a case often regarded as the first person-to-person radiological attack by Soviet or Russian security services. Bulgarian playwright Markov had fallen foul of the communist authorities repeatedly, before his defection in , after which he settled in London. When he started broadcasting reports critical of the Bulgarian government on Radio Free Europe, he was earmarked as an enemy of the regime.

On 7 September , he was walking across Waterloo Bridge on his way to his job at the BBC when he felt a sudden stinging pain in the back of his thigh. That evening, he developed a fever and four days later he died in hospital. In , a Russian-British double agent Oleg Gordievski claimed the KGB had supplied ricin to the Bulgarian spy services and given them an umbrella which could deliver a pellet made of the naturally occurring poison that was fired into Markov's leg.

The prime minister of the newly independent African nation had appealed to Moscow for help in the face of a mutiny in the army. Although Lumumba had been deposed, there were fears he would return to power and "Joe" was the CIA's top scientist who arrived in the central African nation with a kit containing an exotic poison designed to transmit a fatal indigenous disease. The poison was supposed to be injected into Lumumba's toothpaste, or his food, with the intention of killing him, in a way that could not be traced back to the US.