Polonium 210 is highly radioactive and very toxic. By weight, it is about 250 million times as toxic as cyanide, so a particle smaller than a dust mote could be fatal. It would also, presumably, be too small to taste.
There is no antidote, and handling it in a laboratory requires special equipment. But to be fatal it must be swallowed, breathed in or injected; the alpha particles it produces cannot penetrate the skin. So it could theoretically be carried safely in a glass vial or paper envelope and sprinkled into food or drink by a killer willing to take the chance that he did not accidentally breathe it in or swallow it.
“This is wild,” said Dr. F. Lee Cantrell, a toxicologist and director of the San Diego division of the California Poison Control System. “To my knowledge, it’s never been employed as a poison before. And it’s such an obscure thing. It’s not easy to get. That’s going to be something like the K.G.B. would have in some secret facility or something.”
In a quick search of medical journals, he could find only one article describing the deliberate use of a radioactive poison to kill. It was from 1994, he said, published in Russian...
Polonium will be undetectable by conventional chemistry. You'd need mass spectrometry of a highly purified sample. Or implication by scintillation counter spectra.
Yes indeed, that's another thing we can thank Darth Rumsfeld for.
Welcome to the new Cold War. It's so chill I bet you never felt it coming. And many more players are in than v.1. Any country with a nuclear breeder can get in.
Just think what a suicide operative and a crop duster could do...
Of course, the CIA or DIA would have easy access to this poison, too. Or the Saudis, the Chinese, the Paks, the Brits, the French, even the Aussies. But they'd never do anything like this. Right?
And the recriminations are starting to look like a house of mirrors:
...It promises to be one of the most bewildering and diplomatically challenging investigations in the force's history. Little more than two days since Litvinenko died after becoming the first human to have been killed with the rare, powerfully toxic radioactive material polonium 210, inquiries have shifted thousands of miles east to the vast interior of the Russian steppes, in particular the rusting relics of the Soviet nuclear trade and its burgeoning black market in radioactive materials.
The sheer difficulty of acquiring polonium 210 has though, for now, shifted the spotlight on to state-sponsored scientists working in Russian research laboratories and the country's massive nuclear reprocessing plants. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), obtaining the material would require a level of access unthinkable only the most well-connected of individuals - just possibly with state backing.
A United Nations expert in the trade of nuclear materials said the sophistication required to harness polonium's poison as a murder weapon meant it could not have been executed by a 'lone assassin', a madman with a grudge to take out. Such is the difficulty of obtaining radioactive material, it would have to be someone with skill and powerful connections.
And, whoever they are, they collected enough extremely rare radioactive material to ensure doctors discovered a 'major dose' in the frail, sallow body of Litvinenko...
The UN is expected to begin investigating which of the nuclear reprocessing plants the polonium 210 that destroyed the internal organs of the Russian exile may have come from.
First up, will be the principal plant in Krasnoyarsk, 600km east of Tomsk, a massive, remote structure notorious for the radioactive contamination of Siberia's major rivers. Although UN officials remain sceptical the material may have been procured on the black market, British police are though to be liaising with the IAEA on whether the rare isotope may have originated on Russia's flourishing underground trade in nuclear and radioactive sources.
After all, on several occasions in the past 15 years, Russian police have intercepted smugglers trying to carry the alpha-radiation emitting substance out of the former Soviet Union. In 1999 an army officer was caught trying to cross from Kazakhstan into Uzbekistan clutching a glass capsule marked 'RA 23-54' and a metal canister covered with lead foil. Under interrogation, he admitted it contained a radioactive mixture of polonium and beryllium, used in Russia to trigger nuclear chain reactions. He had stolen the material from the Baikonur cosmodrome, where he worked, and intended to sell it in Uzbekistan. Other cases involve the theft of several canisters of polonium 210 from a secretive research centre in the city of Sarov called the All Russian Research Institute of Experimental Physics, a sprawling complex known as Russia's Los Alamos.
Beyond rows of barbed wire and troop patrols, experts have admitted polonium isotopes are still produced there. Disturbing reports of thefts from the site continue to surface. In 1993 the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists reported that 10kg of polonium had gone missing from the plant. Two years ago the IAEA established that Iran has been conducting experiments with polonium 210 as part of its nuclear programme, possibly using material obtained from Russia.
Meanwhile, the National Threat Initiative in Washington warns that Russia's porous borders present little obstacle to smugglers carrying radioactive substances out of the country and that concern over Russia's huge stockpile of nuclear and radioactive materials slipping on to the international black market remained undimmed. Yesterday Vladimir Slivyak of the Eco-Defence organisation in Moscow, warned that radioactive substances are often poorly guarded and vulnerable to theft. Even so, IAEA sources say they have never confirmed a single case of polonium 210 being smuggled on the black market, indirectly giving weight to allegations that Litvinenko's death was a state- sponsored assassination.
But Litvinenko's death holds even greater resonance; claims that a terrorist organisation managed to acquired a rare, powerful radioactive material which was smuggled into Britain where it was targeted with deadly effect have caused much concern among UK security services. Officials are concerned that next time the target might be greater than the internal organs of a single human.
Intelligence sources said they had recently confirmed al-Qaeda is intensifying efforts to obtain a radioactive device amid new figures revealing that the black market of radioactive material is prospering. Smugglers have been caught trying to traffic nuclear material more than 300 times in the past four years, a doubling of such seizures.
It is little surprise that the man charged with investigating Litvinenko's death is Peter Clarke, Scotland Yard's deputy assistant commissioner who has taken the lead in protecting Britain from Islamic terrorists. He is understood to believe that tracking down the polonium 210 found in Litvinenko could unlock the key to his death, the toxic material's very rarity the factor that guides British police to those responsible.
Officials from the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston and Porton Down, the government Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, will today continue studying samples of the radioactive material extracted from the tablecloth of the sushi restaurant where Litvinenko ate the day he died.
Experts maintain that the sample will yield its own 'fingerprint' which can be used to track down where the polonium came from. So far, all they can say with reasonable surety is that the polonium 210 looks likely to have come from Russia and must have been smuggled into Britain relatively recently; it has a half-life (the length of time during which is radioactivity declines by 50 per cent) of just 138 days. Whoever is responsible knew what they were doing, appreciating the ease and safety with which the material could be transported in, say, a glass jar without detection or risk to its carrier.
'For anybody looking to kill an individual using nuclear material, polonium- 210 would be the radioactive isotope of choice,' said a IAEA source. A perpetrator may have entered Britain shortly before 1 November, the date Litvinenko is thought to have been poisoned, and one line of inquiry is that they a may have fled London after administering the deadly dose, safe in the knowledge that as the first alpha rays entered Litvineko's body, he was good as finished.
No on disputes that Litvinenko had mustered his fair share of enemies. Some were dangerous, others less so, yet whether light can ever pierce the fog of claim, counter-claim and smoke and mirrors that characterise this case is hard to predict. Litvineko's dissident friends blame the Kremlin. The Kremlin blames Litvineko's dissident friends. Rogue Russian agents have been named, but still no central suspect has emerged.
Scotland Yard is thought to have sought the first tentative help from the Kremlin via Foreign Office officials. Officers too are examining four sheets of A4 thrust before Litvinenko by Italian lawyer Mario Scarmella on the day it is presumed he was poisoned. They reveal how Russia's security services 'had decided to use force' against Litvinenko for 'incessant anti-Russian activities'. But, in keeping with such a case, it is impossible to determine whether the documents are a hoax or genuine. The more outlandish theories speculate that Litvinenko's own allies could have been the culprits. Even by the Machiavellian standards of Russian politics, such a plot would mark something of a new nadir.
Moscow's elite has been stunned at the British response to the scandal amid suspicion that the whole affair was some elaborate lie designed to discredit a post-soviet Russia. Vladimir Kuznetsov, former chief of Russia's state atomic control agency, even came out to describe Litvinenko's death by polonium 210 as mere 'journalistic invention'.
They also point at the police's response to the death, which veered from an investigation into a 'suspicious poisoning' to 'how this man became ill'. Officially Scotland Yard has yet to launch a murder inquiry, claiming they still do not have enough evidence to rule out Litvinenko's death as an accident or suicide...
Certainly, Litvinenko's profile has never been greater. Even his most incendiary allegations against the Kremlin had played to little effect in Russia. Yet his deathbed description of Putin as a 'barbaric and ruthless' president played to millions worldwide. And, regardless of which direction the case twists next, the inquest and accompanying attacks on Putin from dissidents promise fresh embarrassment for the president.
The involvement of Russia's intelligence service also remains a matter of scorn in the Kremlin. Sergei Ivanov, spokesman for the SVR, one of the organisations that replaced the KGB, said accusations of an assassination plot organised by his service, were 'some kind of science fiction'. Sergei Markov, an analyst and Kremlin consultant, pointed the finger at renegade elements within the security services, still vengeful over his claims of corruption and murder among Russia's intelligence agencies. He added that suggesting the Kremlin arranged the poisoning was absurd: 'That is just a symptom of Russophobia, one of the main prejudices now active in Europe.'
Police will also examine the so-called Chechen connection, in particular alliance with the Chechen separatist envoy, Akhmed Zakayerebel Akhmed Zakayev, who lives on the same Muswell Hill street as Litvinenko and is rumoured to be on a hit list after the Russian parliament passed a law approving use of hit squads to eliminate terrorists abroad. Yet one nagging issue torments those looking into the case; Litvinenko was small-fry, an exile whose anti-Kremlin criticisms were largely ignored in his homeland. In London, only his closest friends would recognise him. 'Litvinenko just wasn't worth it. He didn't pose a threat,' one FSB veteran told The Observer
We may never know how damaged Litvinenko's insides were by the polonium, his body remaining so contaminated it may be deemed simply too toxic to touch. As his friend Alex Goldfarb said: 'It is like being exposed to Chernobyl but not from outside but within.'
This week police will begin questioning witnesses. Kovtun is likely to be among those to be notified to ascertain precisely what, if anything of interest, may have arisen in the Millennium Hotel. So too his business partner, Andrei Lugovoi who also met Litvinenko on 1 November. Yesterday Kovtun said the fact traces of polonium 210 were found at several different locations across London supported his claim that he was not involved with Litvinenko's illness.
The former KGB officer, told The Observer that he met Litvinenko that day principally to discuss a simple business deal. 'It's quite clear that we had nothing to do with it,' he said...
Quite.
Meanwhile, leave it to a master conspiracy theorist like Jeff Wells to dig this up:
...And then there's the likely radiological poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, former KGB/FSB counter-terrorist officer and author of Blowing Up Russia, an important account of 1999's false flag apartment bombing campaign that anchored authority for the as-yet unelected Vladimir Putin. A statement from the FSB implies that Litvinenko is not important enough to bother killing, adding "The man got sick. I would like to wish him early recovery."
Though I wonder whether something Litvinenko wrote a few months ago, after Putin impulsively kissed a boy on his belly, might have raised his Kremlin profile as a "person of interest."
From last July 5 (and thanks to a reader for the link, which is found now only in cache):
The Kremlin Pedophile
By Alexander Litvinenko
A few days ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin walked from the Big Kremlin Palace to his Residence. At one of the Kremlin squares, the president stopped to chat with the tourists. Among them was a boy aged 4 or 5.
'What is your name?' Putin asked.
'Nikita,' the boy replied.
Putin kneed, lifted the boy's T-shirt and kissed his stomach.
The world public is shocked. Nobody can understand why the Russian president did such a strange thing as kissing the stomach of an unfamiliar small boy.
The explanation may be found if we look carefully at the so-called "blank spots" in Putin's biography..."
Read it all. I won't go into the details here. But consider: Russian Intelligence may be telling the absolute truth about this and other Russian dissident deaths occurring recently. Anyone remember Anna Politkovskaya?
For Russian leaders, as well as Dear Leaders of other superpowers, it may be neater and easier to avoid entanglements to have private contractors doing pest control.
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