Polonium, Fresh from the Reactor

Charlie Stross is frightened by the Litvinenko assassination:

Astute readers of the daily fishwraps will have no doubt been aware of the Litvinenko poisoning. (Synopsis for aliens: a former FSB colonel, resident in London and noted for making serious accusations of terrorism at the Russian government, fell ill a month ago and died last week. The cause of death is now believed to be poisoning with radioactive Polonium 210, and police are treating the death as "suspicious" — legalese for "we think he was probably murdered but we don't have any evidence pointing to a specific third party so it's not technically a murder investigation, yet.")

Polonium 210 is interesting stuff. As noted in a variety of places on the web, it is entirely artificial — it doesn't occur naturally, but has to be created by irradiating bismuth in a nuclear reactor or particle accelerator — and it has a half life of 138 days, decaying via alpha emission. To do any damage, it needs to be up close and personal, inside the victim, because alpha particles are absorbed very rapidly: but the biological damage they cause is much more severe than gamma radiation, neutrons, or beta radiation, precisely because all their energy gets dumped into bodily tissues promptly, rather than most of it zipping right through the victim and dissipating harmlessly in mid-air.

And the Wikipedia section on Polonium toxicity makes for sobering reading. ("250 billion times as toxic as hydrogen cyanide" is not a typo!)

Anyway, I digress.

The point is, someone with access to fresh Polonium 210 (read: less than a year old, hot from the reactor) decided to use it to bump off an enemy.

And the terrorism alert status hasn't risen a notch? Pull the other one.

Anyway, to the point: this wasn't simply an assassination. There are any number of poisons out there that would do the job painfully well but much more rapidly, and without the same scope for a diplomatic incident. Likewise, a bullet to the back of the head would have worked just as well (as witness the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya).

What this is, is a warning: "we have the capability to detonate a dirty bomb in central London any time we feel like it, so don't fuck with us". (Just take Polonium and add a little TNT.)

Who the warning is from, and who the intended recipient is, are another question entirely. I don't think it's any accident that the COBRA committee was convened the day after Litvinenko's death (on a Saturday, no less). And I don't think it's any accident that the British press have been very carefully pretending the phrase "dirty bomb" is not part of their vocabulary for the past week.

We're actually facing a national security nightmare: someone has demonstrated the capability to use radiological weapons on the streets of London and we don't know who they are. (Although we can make a couple of guesses.)

Given that Litvinenko was promoting a book that asserted FSB agents blew up two apartment buildings in Moscow and pointed the finger at Chechen rebels in order to justify Putin's subsequent war on Chechnya, one possibility that must be considered is that elements of the FSB may be responsible — and willing to use radiological terrorism as a tool of foreign affairs. It may well not have been ordered by the Kremlin: all it takes is for Vladimir Putin to mutter "will nobody rid me of this turbulent priest?" over his breakfast one morning, and Shit Happens in a foreign capital thousands of kilometres away. (Or it may be entirely deliberate, merely "plausibly deniable", to use the charming CIA-surplus weasel words for "we did it but you can't prove it".)

But we don't know that. It's just a guess. It might be wrong.

And what disturbs me most is that all the other possibilities I've been able to think of are worse ...

Comments

[Laertes]

"It is unclear that a bomb made of TNT and polonium would be significantly more destructive than a bomb made of TNT packed with nails."

Depends on the nail. I don't know where you'll find microscopic nails that are small enough to remain airborne for a significant time and sufficiently toxic to kill you if you inhale one, but I don't shop at the fancier hardware stores.

[arbogast]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, etc.

You're wrong, gentlemen (Dave Parker and thetruth).

Use your noggins. Access to Polonium 210, because it must be "fresh from the reactor", means access to just about any other radioactive substance known to man. A dirty bomb would be child's play. It would just be harder to transport the gamma emitter.

No, this is extremely serious, and let us hope that Putin does not have an agreement with Iran to set off something crazy in NYC if we bomb Tehran.

[Dave Parker]

Indeed polonium means access to lots of other radioactive substance. So why use that particular one? Because it's unlikely to cause collateral damage, and above all because it's hard to detect. This wasn't the action of people interested in dirty bombs.

[arbogast]

"You can order polonium off the internet"

So, let's see, your hypothesis is that the poisoners ordered some Polonium 210 off the Internet and fed it to their target.

Hold on, I just saw a flight of pigs coming through the window. Gotta go.

[arbogast]

"This wasn't the action of people interested in dirty bombs"

Aside from the omniscience to be inferred from this statement, it is just plain cuckoo. It is entirely reasonable to assume that it is possible that the authors of this murder have access to the materials necessary to make a dirty bomb. With that assumption in hand, we are left to the very difficult work (once again, putting omniscience aside) of deciding what their next move will be.

The Iranians call up Putin and say, "We really don't want the US to bomb us. Can you help out, if we promise you a lot of oil and gas?"

"Sure, I'll send them a message demonstrating beyond doubt that I can set off a dirty bomb in London without fingerprints any time I want."

All the pantyhose in the world doesn't make that hypothesis implausible.

[jerry]

You can get Poloniumz at Amazon! Just order the 98 Monkeys version of Hamlet.

[d'Nile]

Critics of Putin have a habit of winding up dead. Putin is pretty much the only person who benefits from killing his opposition. Combine this with Russian nuclear technology and the fact that the FSB is far from incompetent at field craft and the result is motive, means, and opportunity.

It is not credible to suggest that the method of assassination was chosen as a warning to anyone other than Putin's critics. It's not in Russia's interests to conduct dirty bomb terrorism on any scale in the US/NATO sphere of influence. The risks of getting an ICBM sandwich as a result of being firmly implicated in a dirty bomb attack are far too high to be worth whatever benefits might come from using a dirty bomb in the first place. Russians are often vicious, but they're generally not crazy.

There is also the small matter that a dirty bomb would be a substantial step down in lethality from any of the ten to twenty thousand nuclear warheads in the Russian arsenal.

[Dave Parker]

We already know the Russians could set off a dirty bomb in London any time they want - but I'm not so sure about the "without fingerprints" bit, and I doubt they're about to do it for some oil & gas! What on earth has this assassination to do with that?

I don't know about omniscience, but the targeting and the choice of material point pretty diametrically away from dirty bombs so far as I can see.

[d'Nile]

Arbogast, lay off the paranoia pills.

If one fingerprint connected Russia to a dirty bomb in NYC, Russia would be nuked flat. Neither Putin or his backers are suicidal.

If Putin was crazy enough to want to set something off in NYC in response to an attack on Iran, he has at his disposal 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads which would make a dirty bomb look like a wet match. Since a dirty bomb would get Russia nuked anyway, there's every incentive for the first strike to be a WWIII grade total salvo.

I realize it's hard to accept, but the entire world is not full of irrational maniacs who are intent on damaging the United States at all costs. Deal with it.

[Movie Guy]

Does Polonium have a signature that can be source traced?

[Dave Parker]

"Does Polonium have a signature that can be source traced?"

Apparently not, or at least no-one seems confident that its origin can be established conclusively - doubtless another reason for its choice.

[Fifi]

Stross may be overreacting but it's true that this poisoning is meant to do more than kill someone. Whoever did it is sending a message.

Polonium-210 is a fabulous internal poison. It's a very strong alpha emitter so, it’s very safe to manipulate, even with your bare hands as the dead layer of your skin is enough to stop the alpha particles. Yet, don't forget to wash your hands once the deed is done. Once it’s inside the body, in direct contact with living cells, it’s absolutely devastating. Alpha particles wreck DNA.

But, if those killers insisted on using radioactive poisoning rather than than a good old gun, they could have used something else like americium-241, a very common alpha emitter that used to be found in smoke detectors.

But, no. They decided to use polonium-210.

Message #1 : we have big time access to big time resources. Polonium-210 is hard to obtain in significant quantities as it must be produced in a nuclear reactor and then used quickly, due to its short half-life. What you can buy commercially comes in very small quantities for industrial applications, way below toxic quantities. Buying a lethal dose from a commercial source would make people extremely suspicious.

Message #2 : we know what we’re doing and you can’t do squat to stop us. Among alpha emitters, polonium-210 has a very, very unusual property. It emits nearly no gamma rays during its decay. So, even if just wrapped in a paper bag, it is essentially undetectable by common radiation detectors.

By comparison, americium-241 has a very strong gamma emission around 60 keV on alpha decay which makes scintillation detectors scream like crazy, dozens of feet away. But to detect polonium-210, we need to put the snout of a detector in close contact with the polonium, close enough to pick the alpha particles or use a very sensitive scintillator.

Whoever did it is definitively not your usual hit man.

[Paul Orient]

Radiological Terror Threat Worsens, Economies at Risk

By Jonathan Tirone
Oct. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Terrorist groups have stepped up efforts to get radioactive materials used in the medical, mining and food industries to target civilians and disrupt national economies, U.S. and Russian experts said.
``We have seen more interest among groups seeking to engage in radiological terrorism,'' Charles Ferguson, a nuclear proliferation analyst at the Council of Foreign Relations, told a NATO research workshop this week in Bratislava, Slovakia.
Nuclear material in millions of sources worldwide, from cancer-killing implants to food irradiation machines, can be used for terrorism. Among them is cesium-137, which emits deadly gamma rays in a 1-mile (1.6-kilometer) radius when removed from lead casing, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
There were 103 confirmed incidents of illicit trafficking of nuclear materials in 2005, a 72 percent increase since 2000, the International Atomic Energy Agency said. The agency maintains a database linked to customs-agency reports on nuclear trafficking. There have been 827 incidents since the database began in 1993.
Dhiren Barot, a British Muslim, pleaded guilty on Oct. 12 to plotting to carry out radiological-bomb attacks in the U.S. and the U.K. The 34-year-old wanted to use so-called dirty bombs to irradiate sites including the New York Stock Exchange, the World Bank and Citigroup Inc.
``The direct economic costs include contamination to people and infrastructure,'' Ferguson said on Oct. 23. ``A lot of people could also think they're contaminated when they really are not and that could slow services. We could also see people refusing to return to affected areas.''
Ferguson, a former U.S. State Department official and co-author of ``The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism'' (Routledge, 2005), said terrorist groups including al-Qaeda and Chechen separatists have followed through on plans to acquire industrial sources of radioactive materials.
A June 2006 poll of 116 diplomats by the Center for American Progress, a research organization in Washington, identified such materials as the biggest terrorist threat to the U.S.
``It's a threat that is in the near-term and needs to be talked about,'' Igor Khripunov, a former Soviet diplomat who now runs the Center for International Trade and Security in Athens, Georgia, said yesterday at the workshop. The center organized the two-day event sponsored by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Russia's Nuclear Security Administration.
A ``medium-sized'' radiological attack on Washington could inflict economic damage of as much as $106.6 billion, Khripunov wrote, citing insurance actuaries, in a July article for the Nonproliferation Review.
Companies that make radioactive sources, including Canada's MDS Nordion Inc., General Electric Co., and the U.K.'s Reviss Services Ltd. formed an industry group in 2005 to boost security against terrorist threats. The International Source Suppliers and Producers Association is developing standards ``enhancing safety and security of sources throughout their lifecycle,'' according to the organization's Web site.
ISSPA spokesman Grant Malkoske couldn't immediately be reached by telephone.
``There are very few companies and countries that make these devices,'' Ferguson said. ``We need to have conversations with companies about how radiological terrorism would be bad for business and that we all need to secure these materials.''

[dsquared]

you can get tiny bits of polonium off the internet. You cannot get large amounts of Polonium-210 off the internet. The isotope matters.

Similarly, you can get H2O out of taps, but heavy water for your nuclear reactor requires a trip to the shops.

[Tom]

All you need to know about polonium-210 in one easy article courtesy of the BBC.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6190144.stm

After all, as several have noted, this did happen in the UK and has nothing to do with the USA. It may however, have something to the 40 or so journalists who have been recently killed within territories under the Russian sphere of influence.

[bad Jim]

The bit that got up my nose was "alpha particles are absorbed very rapidly: but the biological damage they cause is much more severe than gamma radiation, neutrons, or beta radiation"

Your mileage may vary, but gamma radiation is high energy stuff, nothing to be lightly dismissed. Alpha radiation, helium nuclei, consists of comparatively massive and slow-moving particles, the sort of thing a balloon can contain. Inside a body, or a chip, they can wreak havoc. Outside, not so much.

[anon]

[quote]But, if those killers insisted on using radioactive poisoning rather than than a good old gun, they could have used something else like americium-241, a very common alpha emitter that used to be found in smoke detectors.[/quote] Americium 241 is still found in NEW smoke detectors in the UK. When you ask how to dispose of the old one (the instructions tell you not to dump it) the seller replies, usually with a thick cockney accent: "just chuck it in the bin"...

[Ginger Yellow]

This dirty bomb nonsense is a total red herring. thetruth has it right - it's either the Russian government sending a message to its critics or its someone who wants people to think it is. Neither one has any interest in causing widespread civilian casualties in London, which would piss off both the British government (which is broadly pro-Kremlin) or and the British public (which isn't).

And Russia is not going to bomb London as a favour to get Iran's natural resources, for Christ's sake. Russia is the world's largest natural gas exporter and one of the biggest oil exporters.

[Tim Worstall]

'Given that Litvinenko was promoting a book that asserted FSB agents blew up two apartment buildings in Moscow '

You'll find that that is a very common assertion.

[josephdietrich]

"Whoever did it is sending a message."

Regarding this, it's not entirely clear that this is the case. As Jeffery pointed out over at Arms Control Wonk (http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1306/assassination-by-polonium), it could be that since Polonium-210 is hard to detect, the assassins might have thought that no one would be able to figure out what the substance was, but screwed up and used too high a dosage. It could be that they were just being too clever by half, and messed it up.

[PaulC]

Bruce and the "ordered off the internet" guy: As far as I can tell, the naturally occurring isotope of polonium is 209, found in pitchblende ( http://education.jlab.org/itselemental/ele084.html )
This can be ordered. Polonium 210 has a half-life of about 138 days as noted, so clearly any naturally occurring deposits would not last long.

I don't agree with most of the other ideas in the article, but polonium 210 is indeed an artificial isotope that has to come from a reactor, and regardless of ultimate intentions, it is pretty disturbing that somebody is carrying into London sushi bars.

[andres]

I think I have to agree with Ginger Yellow and josephdietrich. Given that no one else had a motive to kill Litvinenko (there are more effective ways to frame Putin), this sounds like the FSB agent getting too creative by half with a simple hit order. Chances are he'll end up dead in a Lubyanka basement if he hasn't already had the good sense to disappear.

He should have gone with the warfarin gambit that may have been used to off Joseph Stalin himself--doze the guy with just enough warfarin to provoke an accidental-looking brain hemorrhage. Warfarin can be found in an autopsy, but only if the examiner is suspicious enough to test for it (I think).

The various assassinations set up by (and against?) Russian leaders over the years makes for very very grim reading. Kremlin politics in that sense has a very Jurassic, reptilian feel. Shiver.

[WatchfulBabbler]

Some notes:

1. The Po-210 would not have to be "less than a year old." A gram of Po-210 whould decay to sublethal levels of radioactivity in several years (up to 8.6 years, to go by my quick and dirty math). Of course, that's because you require such a tiny dose to generate lethal levels of emissions.(Po-210 is also encountered in small quantities in the wild, as it's part of radium decay series from U-238 to Pb-206.)

2. A Po-210 dirty bomb is not a meaningful threat scenario, for both technical and political reasons. Full stop. If Russia wanted to threaten Britain, they have far more effective ways and absolutely no reason to do so. Dirty bombs are a potential threat (though wildly overblown in the media), but I don't see that using a tiny amount of a rare alpha emitter correlates with an increase in that threat assessment. Most threat scenarios have concluded that commercially-available energetic gamma emitters like cobalt-60 and cesium-137 are more effective than alpha emitters like americium as weaponized materials, anyway.

3. My assumption has been that the assassins thought that a tiny amount of an incredibly rare isotope would go undetected as a murder weapon, and that poisoning Litvinenko was going to be a lot easier than gunning him down in firearms-averse Britain. Insofar as the radiological identification is concerned, much credit is due to NHS for finding the zebra.

4. If this was a governmental or quasi-governmental Russian element at work, the worry here is not a dirty bomb going off in the City of London; it's the fact that they were willing to bump off a British citizen on foreign soil using very specialized instruments. This may not have been Putin, but if not he should be /very/ concerned as to who's been running a James Bondesque assassination shop targeted at enemies of the Kremlin and the Lubyanka.

5. How should Western governments respond to an international assassination that is the most blatant provocation since the Chamber bumped off Georgi Markov? That's the key question today.

[BoonyaExperience]

I can't wait for the Putin book:
"If I Did It Here's How It Happened"

[BoonyaExperience]

Though that would probably have to be a series... with more volumes than the encyclopedia brittanica

[Dave Parker]

"... blatant provocation..."

It's hardly blatant if nobody knows who did it! It's a bit of family business concluded undiplomatically on foreign soil. Brits will just shrug & move on - after all, what are they going to do, threaten to send Blair on a Russian speaking tour?

It's already dropped off the BBC news pages, incidentally.

[Tangurena]

Worldwide production of Po210 is about 100 grams per year. That is less than 4 ounces. There is no possible way to make that into a dirty bomb except in some wild fantasy, like that Monty Python episode where playing the piano makes your fingers fall off and blood squirt from them like a hose, and tapping someone with a tennis raquet makes their head fly off.

Po210 also has the rather unique property of being the only element to emit Cerenkov radiation in air (that is the way cool blue glow at the bottom of your reactor - you do have one in the basement - right?). Everything else needs to be in water to give off that glow. Although one of the Manhattan Project stories says that one of the guys stacking cubes of U235 dropped some and caught one before the mass went critical and died 2 weeks later from radiation poisoning.

We only care about Litvinenko and Politkovskaya dieing because we can in some way blame Putin for it. In a way that we'd never allow the press in the US to blame bush for screwing up the wargasm in Iraq. When the US military shoot journalists, the burden of proof is on the victims to prove it isn't a mistake. When a Russian journalist dies, the burden of proof automagically falls on Putin to prove he didn't do it. The Cold War isn't dead.

[arbogast]

I don't think it's wise to traffic in omniscience when it comes to nuclear threats. The amount of mind-reading in the comments in staggering.

Whoever did this is:

a) Capable of anything at all. This was a brazen murder in the heart of a major western country. Whatever was going through their minds and whatever they plan to do next (both unknowns), we have a very clear idea of what they're capable of.

b) Doesn't really care about the opinion of the civilized world.

These are truths. They are disturbing. Very disturbing.

I, personally, have always thought that a "dirty bomb" is a lot like the boogie man. But when someone steps forward and handles nuclear materials like Ronaldinho handles a soccer ball, I think it is permitted to take notice.

[PaulGBrown]

Hello. My name is Vlad Putin.

I am the President of Russia, and my interests are roughly aligned with Russia's interests. At the present moment, I am attempting two things: an expansion of Russian energy exports (natural gas) and the suppression of internal dissent. The two are linked to the extent that while Russia is profiting quite nicely from the energy, I and my friends are profiting immensely.

The check I see to my plan is international pressure. I do not wish this to be widely commented on. I would rather accomplish all of this quietly, not the least because if I have to leave Russia abruptly I would prefer a choice of international destinations without arrest warrants. How to keep the lid on this 'international pressure'?

Happily, my potential enemies have really, really screwed the щенок. They have earned the emnity of a number of tribes of people with arguably fewer scruples than myself. Sadly, my enemy's enemies are a technologically backward lot. But - by happy coincidence - they also have enormous potential to disrupt the energy supplies of my competitors.

Yet I am a subtle man. I would like it to be known that I can supply my enemy's enemies with an indetectable poison in quantities which might, or might not, be effective when added to food or water supplies. It just takes a smidgen, just a few motes of Polonium-210, to poison a few chicken-hawks in Cleveland.

But I don't want to be too obvious about it. All I want--really--is to frighten the hell out of the potential sources of 'international pressure'. If the western world and their enemies become aware of the fact that poisoning like this is technically possible, it will certainly change the delicate equations. And if I can rub out an irritant in the process, so much the better.

Hmmm .... what to do?

[Dave Parker]

"Whoever did this... (b) Doesn't really care about the opinion of the civilized world."

But they do. That's why they're not jumping up & down shouting "We did it!"

"I would like it to be known that I can supply my enemy's enemies with an indetectable poison..."

We knew that too. And the "other side" has the same capacity. So do lots of governments. But as a rule they don't do it - generally because the other side wouldn't like it.

[RKKA]

"Hello. My name is Vlad Putin.

I am the President of Russia, and my interests are roughly aligned with Russia's interests. At the present moment, I am attempting two things: an expansion of Russian energy exports (natural gas)and the suppression of internal dissent. The two are linked to the extent that while Russia is profiting quite nicely from the energy, I and my friends are profiting immensely."

Indeed, and Russians seem to approve of his course.

"The check I see to my plan is international pressure."

Here is where you go off the rails. It is no such thing, for the simple reason that the West needs Russia far more than Russia needs the West. Right now, Russia could cut her total exports by a fifth and still pay for all her imports, and pay off her entire remaining government debt, and the only effect would be to stop her Central Bank hard currency reserve and Stabilization Fund growing this year. Next year, Russia could cut her exports by another third.

Now tell me, what would your world look like if Russia removed $120 billion a year worth of oil and gas from the global energy market in two years?

When this sink in, you will understand why Putin never gave a rip what Politikovskaya or Litvinenko wrote about him, or Russia.

Like he said, "A dog barks but the caravan passes."

So to point the finger at him over their deaths is just laughable.

[esbisworried]

The purpose of a radiological dispersion device is not to kill but frighten...so as to depopulate an area that has been "dusted."

If a van with a drum of some explosive coated with some low level "hot" material drives to Market/Montgomery in San Francisco and detonates there, the entire financial district of SF (which is very compact) will be dusted. (Perhaps California/Montgomery is the better location.)

When would YOU be willing to return to your financial district office? Ever?

The economic impact would be large.

Now imagine the economic impact from ten simultaneous detonations strategically positoned in ten separate cities...SF, Seattle, Denver, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, (you select #10).

The PM of Israel knows without any doubt that three such devices bring economic activity in his country to an immediate halt. Anyone here think that he sleeps all that well?

The threat from this stuff is quite real.

[Grush]

My first thought is that the dirty bomb worry is BS since it appears thatt one would need to ingest the one milligram of Polonium-210 to get killing. Therefore even a bomb with a kilo of Polonium-210 in it would create an area of a few city blocks of radioactive material that you could walk through with little effect (just don't ingest it). Once it rained, the threat would decrease by at least magnitude. The panic and inconvenience this would create would dwarf the actual damage from the bomb.

[bigTom]

Well Po210 does occur in nature, as it is the second from the last stage of the decay chain from U238. Madam Curie's daughter is supposed to have died (from Luekemia) from exposure to the substance. Of course because its haf life is so much shorter tha U238 (less than a year versus more than a billion), you only find 1 atom of Polonium for several billions of Uranium. The stuff is allegedly very expensive, so this poisoning was not done on the cheap.
It almost wasn't detected, until a day or two before he died, they couldn't figure out what was poisoning him.
Its clearly a message, mess with me (Putin), and you may die a horrible death.
As for dirty bombs, thats a whole different area. I thought it seemed pretty amusing, that this fellow the US caught a few weeks back -he had paper plans for terrorist attacks, and was trying to get Al Qaeda funding, was going to make a dirty bomb, using the radiatove sources from 10,000 smoke detectors. Hardly sounds terrifying (or practical) to me.
No Po210 isn't the only emitter that can make Cherenkov radiation, although it may be the only pure Alpha emmitter -which means it is completely harmless unless ingested.

[wkwillis]

Let's see. The lethal dose is one ten thousandth's of a gram, and there are roughly 25 grams in an ounce...
Bismuth is available anywhere you have Pepto-Bismal. High flux reactors are much less available.

[Steinn Sigurdsson]

United Nuclear will sell you Po-210 on the web, $69 for 0.1 microcuries. About half million retail for a lethal dose of a millicurie (if the wiki estimate of the lethal (LD-50?) dose is accurate).

Po-210 is last unstable isotope of U-238 decay chain and is found in nature. It is more easily made from reactors or low energy accelerators if you want a pure isotope. It is chemically extractable and valuable. Lots of industrial uses.

Global production is estimated on the wiki at 100gm per year, so at any given time less than 50 gm are in existence (half-life is shorter than a year), not counting dilute quantities in uranium ore.
The lethal dose seems to be a fraction of a microgram, when ingested. Small, but not as small as reported. HCN is lethal at about 50 milligrams.

You can buy di-deuterium monoxide from isotope.com on the web, it is very widely used in labs in significant quantities.
A kg of 99.96% pure D2O is about $500, and I don't think they would blink if you ordered tens of kilos.

You do need tons for heavy water reactors.

Making it is easy - all you need is a decent (say 100+ MWe) power source, some water and 1930s technology.

[Tom Womack]

I would expect that the low-level contamination of a large district would not be met by levelling the district and burying all the rubble in pits a kilometre under uninhabitable desert, even if that's the current standard for dealing with low-level contamination of otherwise-useless terrain.

I would expect that the detonation of a lowest-level dirty bomb in NYC would be no more damaging to health than the rather large volume of assorted construction material aerosolised and spread finely over Manhattan on 9/11, and that there would be a lot of media messages of the form that the risk was equivalent to smoking ten cigarettes a day for the next month, and if you allow this to cause general chaos then the terrorists have won.

I'd expect more cases of psychosomatic illness than of radiation poisoning, by probably a couple of orders of magnitude.

[arbogast]

The question that I want the answer to is:

Are the British police pussies? I know, that's a really offensive term. In fact, I should not use it, and I apologize to anybody who is offended.

Having said that, parties unknown just poisoned a guy with Polonium 210 in the middle of your capital. Are you going to just go home, kiss the wife and kids good night, and forget about it?

Look, I know, you like your beer warm and your women cold, and your Prime Minister has the biggest set of knee pads in the known universe, but do you have any, any pride at all?

A murder was committed under your noses. Should we get Hercule Poirot, or better yet Inspector Clouseau to solve it?

[Dave Parker]

I imagine the appropriate authorities are investigating the matter even as we speak (well, they're probably enjoying supper at the moment, but they'll be back on the case straight after breakfast).

But if they can't prove who did it, what are they meant to do? And even if they can, if there are political ramifications the decision won't be for the police, it'll be for No.10. So in that case it would depend on the moral fibre of Tony Blair.

Yes, I think we'll forget about it.

[Hedley Lamarr]

We might watch for Heathrow to be supplied with radiation detectors.

[Tangurena]

A "dirty bomb in the US" scenario is no longer possible. Police and fire depts have radiation scanners deployed in many vehicles and their sensitivity is set so high that people who have had radiation treatments for cancer set them off. Common enough that oncologist hand out notes to the patients to show the police when they get pulled over several times in the following week.

[Tom Womack]

The police are looking into it, and seem to be finding radioactivity (I can't work out from the reporting whether they're finding 210Po or something else) in a number of places, some of them vaguely suspicious (Berezovsky's offices and the HQ of the mercenary-procurement organisation Erinys).

British police are always taciturn until a case comes to court, since talking very much about evidence, and particularly mentioning possible perpetrators, is considered to prejudice future trials ... they don't tend to name suspects, preferring to announce 'a 49-year-old man is helping police with their enquiries', though obviously there are situations where you can infer who the suspect might be.

British police aren't famously cowed by political consequences, and at the moment they've a lot of immunity because they're investigating an impressive campaign-finance scandal (peerages for loans, where it's remarkably unclear that the loans would ever have been repaid) involving both major political parties.

[Tom]

They should have just knifed him to death and then everyone would have assumed he got mugged, which is not so uncommon in Britain.

[bigTom]

About those radiation detectors. Back when I worked at Los Alamos, (early 80's) they had an accellerator facility, with a radiation detector on the road entrance in/out. They did irradiate cancer patients there, and warn them about the detectors. Most extraordinarily, a lost flatbed truck carrying illegal (and slightly radiaoctive) Mexican rebar, blundered across the detector and was apprehended.
A lot more things in our world have low level radiation, than most people realize. Does anyone remember Grand Central station in New York. It was built from granite, and because of that the level of radiation was well above health standards. Unless you know your geology real well, moving into a cave to reduce your exposure could backfire.

[radek]

"West needs Russia far more than Russia needs the West. Right now, Russia could cut her total exports by a fifth and still pay for all her imports...and Stabilization Fund growing this year."

Yeah, the key words are "right now" and "this year". Who knows five years from now when the Mongol hordes pour out of the steppe once again? That stabilization fund will dry up like the blood of boyars on the ground of Riazan.

(There is a serious point in the above.)

[dilbert dogbert]

BigTom,
I remember that one. Seems a defunct cancer treatment center in Mexico was abandond by the owners with the usual result. The equipment was sent to a scrap yard and converted into rebar.
I also remember the same thing happening in
Brazil where instead of the scrap yard tearing the equipment up, the locals did it and found this wonderful glowing powder that they smeared on their bodies and carried around in their pockets. A very sad story.
Shows that you should just get the government out of the way of the market and let very efficient processes take charge.

[w]

Simple stuff: Oil, money laundering & murder!

MOSCOW, Aug. 17 -- The Russian prosecutor's office announced Thursday that it had opened a criminal probe into allegations of money laundering and embezzlement by Steven M. Theede, the American former chief executive of the embattled Yukos oil company, and three other expatriate executives.

Among those seeking redress in the Dutch court is an arm of Group Menatep, the Yukos shareholder, as well as Rosneft.

Last month Theede resigned from Yukos after London courts refused to stop a huge stock offering by Rosneft, which had earlier acquired Yukos's prime oil assets at auction. Yukos said the auction amounted to state-sanctioned theft. Theede also said Yukos had been grossly undervalued by the court-appointed administrator in an effort to hasten its liquidation.

[w]

"Tensions among the military elites"

“Looking into Putin’s pocket” - that implies a serious allegation against the president. Do you have grounds for this?

Yes. By the way, Andrei Vavlilov, the former owner of Sevneft, told me: “It’s a shame Misha did that, why did he look into his pocket — they won’t forgive him.” I drew a conclusion for myself that we’re dealing with Putin and Sechin — there’s no one else, really.

Shuvalov said he does not rule out that there will be others after Yukos. Do you have any idea who?

At first I thought they would stop with us. I mean big companies, because small and medium-sized companies face property confiscation all over the country every day. I can even accept that Putin would not want such a development. But the train is moving, he can’t stop it now. So I think the next will be TNK.

Yes, the tax police have already gone after TNK-BP.

They want to hit two targets — TNK, its oil assets, and the English. Relations with the English are growing ever cooler. Our officials can’t come to understand that the British court does not obey the prime minister or the Queen. Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair or any other official cannot just pick up the phone and order the court of London to refuse refugee status to Boris Berezovsky or extradite our people. The Kremlin simply cannot understand such strange relations between the executive power and the judicial branch, because it controls its judicial branch. The conclusion — we should demonstratively punish the English. Especially since Blair faces elections in a month. So what if it’s BP.

You said that MENATEP is leaving Russia. What does that mean?

We’ll sell some of the business, freeze some other parts. Under the current conditions, when one manager is in jail and another is abroad, we cannot be responsible for projects that we cannot control.

What will happen to the Yukos assets that are left? Will they go to Tomsknefteftegaz and Samarneftegaz?

They have already been lost. The tax police will bankrupt them, then appoint a manager who will draw a tender for his own people.

For us, Yukos is already dead. It will cease to exist before July.

But Steven Theede said that the company still has prospects, that it still has a chance of surviving.

That is his job: to fight for the company’s survival till the very end. But we must fight for people that are in jail.

With Yukos destroyed, and Khodorkovsky awaiting sentence, have you thought about how you were among those who planted all the mines yourselves — the oligarchs involved in the bank crisis and the information wars of 1997-1998, and then the war against the government and the reformers, first of all against Anatoly Chubais?

But that was before the economic crisis of 1998, when depositors, including those of MENATEP bank, lost their money.

The government is to blame for the default. Where the depositors are concerned, we paid them their money as far as I know, ruble for ruble.

According to my information, 17 cents for every deposited dollar.

I know that we paid out of Yukos’ stock capital to cover the bank’s debts. The other issue is that the ruble crashed — once again, because of the government — and people got the sums that they deposited, but having lost on the ruble devaluation.

Political forecasts are a dangerous thing. Still, the events in the CIS, in Georgia and in Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, have obviously initialized a wave of political instability that can reach Russia. How will the situation develop here, in your view?

One possible way is stagnation. Another — developing according to the Belarus scenario. Escalating authoritarianism on the one hand, growing protest on the other. I’m afraid this can lead to scarier things than the Bishkek pogroms. I fear that the government’s actions may lead to growing tensions among the military elites, the creation of some union of patriotic officers. Especially since the recent interview by Dmitri Medvedev showed that the Kremlin is scared. And that’s when we’ll have an era of men of steel, who associate themselves with the sword and armor, and who think that only they can save the floundering fatherland.

http://mosnews.com/interview/2005/04/25/nevzlin.shtml

[RKKA]

"Yeah, the key words are "right now" and "this year". Who knows five years from now when the Mongol hordes pour out of the steppe once again? That stabilization fund will dry up like the blood of boyars on the ground of Riazan."

Do you see global oil consumption doing anything but going up over the next 20 years or so? Then the West will continue to need Russia far more than Russia needs the West.

And the day of the Mongol Hordes is long past.

[Ponzi Q. Globalization]

Yegor Gaidar Poisoned?

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20845077-2703,00.html

[centrist]

If Iran had a sliver of this amount evidence against it, in a simmilar incident....the bombs wouold be flying...mass hysteria...global caliphate... blah blah!

[TEL]

I don't know if this point has already been made - a nuclear reactor is NOT necessary to make Polonium 210, what is needed is a particle accelerator. This may sound like splitting hairs, but there is a big difference. In the Bay area alone, there are facilities located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Stanford University capable of creating Polonium 210. There are no nuclear reactors that I'm aware of in the immediate Bay area.

[Movie Guy]

bigTom - "Unless you know your geology real well, moving into a cave to reduce your exposure could backfire."

That bit of information will come in handy with my global warming preparations.

[Movie Guy]

An interesting read:

Russia's Interest in Litvinenko
Stratfor
November 29, 2006
http://www.stratfor.com/products/premium/read_article.php?id=281243

Best way to access this intelligence brief without a subscription is to type the title into Google News. It will pop right up.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=Russia%27s+Interest+in+Litvinenko&btnG=Search+News

[John]

According to Chris Doss posting on the lbo mailing list, polonium 210 is not hard to get. It is apparently used in anti-static brushes. See
http://www.2spi.com/catalog/photo/statmaster.shtml

[Important difference between microgram and milligram quantities of the stuff. The number I saw was that the poisoning took $500K worth of Polonium...]

[Madison Guy]

Yeah, the capacity demonstrated by some shadowy somebody who may or may not be in Russia is scary -- but no more so than the shadowy somebody who took the equally lethal weapons grade anthrax spores from a U.S. weapons facility and infiltrated the US postal system with the stuff. Even more people died in that case. Nobody was caught in that case either. Remember?

Let's face it, current and past superpowers have long had the capability to kill damn near everybody on the planet and every once in awhile some individual affiliated with one or the other just can't resist taking the toys out and playing with them, just a little.

http://letterfromhere.blogspot.com/2006/09/washington-post-update-what-elephant.html

[Ian S]

"Important difference between microgram and milligram quantities of the stuff. The number I saw was that the poisoning took $500K worth of Polonium..."

That's probably for very pure stuff. The key factor in poisoning by Po210 would be the amount of alpha radiation generated by the particular sample and it would not need to be pure at all or even in elemental form. According to wikipedia, the "maximum allowable body burden for ingested polonium is only 1,100 becquerels (0.03 microcurie)." (A microcurie is a commonly used unit of radioactivity.) Each Staticmaster brush contains 250 microcuries of Po210 or approximately 8000 times the maximum allowable body burden. The Staticmaster brush has the Po210 bound up within a matrix which normally would provide adequate protection against poisoning. However, IMHO as a materials engineer, I believe a determined person could readily fabricate an effective poison by physically and possibly chemically modifying the compound in the Staticmaster brush.

[Dave Parker]

"Fortunately, the matrix in which it is encased, renders probability of exposure extremely small unless the matrix is damaged by abration or grinding so as to generate dust particles that may be inhaled."

Oh, great.

[Michael Silver]

Thought American Elements' website (www.americanelements.com)would a useful resource--info on Po 210 and 100s of other Isotopes, Nanomaterials, etc. (Disclaimer: I'm an engineer with the company!)