Posted on 11/25/2006 8:06:31 PM PST by neverdem
If substantial amounts of polonium 210 were used to poison Alexander V. Litvinenko, whoever did it presumably had access to a high-level nuclear laboratory and put himself at some risk carrying out the assassination, experts said yesterday.
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 is extremely rare in nature. Named by its discoverer, Marie Curie, after her native Poland, it occurs in trace amounts in uranium ore and has been found in minute quantities in plants like tobacco, as well as in humans who had eaten caribou that ate lichens growing near a uranium mine.
But making the “significant quantities”...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Do you think that we could find some on ebay?
That is interesting, to say the least...
Seems like someone could embed it into an inert substance like a seltzer pill, that would dissolve when dropped into water.
I suspect that those responsible, while getting extra points for concluding the assignment successfully have had points taken away for drawing attention to themselves.
You're talking about an amount of the stuff that is like one thousandth of a grain of sand... you need special equipment to handle it and special equipment just to keep track of it.
If you were to accidentally breathe it in, you're toast.
"had access to a high-level nuclear laboratory"
Hogwash. Anyone in America has access to lethal quantities of polonium 210, if you know where to look, and if you wanted to kill someone.
Someone mentioned ebay- close, but google is your buddy. And your credit card.
So, anyone estimate how much it actually cost to assasinate this man? This has to be an expensive way to kill someone.
So I wonder if this restaurant in the UK is going to change its name.
http://www.thepoloniumrestaurant.co.uk/
Improvements in film and digital radiographs likely makes this occurrence in tobacco smoke the largest contributor of radiation to the general public, save for those that fly a lot (above the thickest part of the atmosphere for long periods).
Polonium 210 is a material that is regulated by the federal government, but you don't need access to a nuclear lab in order to obtain it. It has scientific/industrial uses and can be found in many chemistry and biology labs, both academic and industrial. It is commercially available, with liscencing, if you know what specific class of products uses it. Most of those places are not heavily secured.
LOL!
Actually, it looks like the operation was quite successful. Assuming that Putin does not wish to publicly say "Yes, I am assasinating my enemies", using an exotic and fantasticaly expensive poison is much better at silicing critics than a drive-by shooting.
["Polonium is extremely rare in nature."]
No it's not. It can be found in either cigarette smoke or in fish.
A little bit of reality needs to set in until a full autopsy is done.
How many Putin enemies have been eliminated or attempted to be in recent years?
Is this like a mob killing, where they don't CARE that you know who did it; in fact they WANT their signatures on the killing as a warning?
Polonium 210 is not expensive. Like I said in my previous post, it is commercially available. Products usingt it are in the $20-50 range. There is a lot of MSM misinformation in this article, probably put there so as not to alert people that this stuff is found well outside of nuclear labs.
Is that the Silesian equivilent of Sicilianing opponents?
I suppose you're right.
The ex-spy would be just as dead and less roads leading to Putin if they'd, say, carved him up, or hung him from a bridge, or cut off his genitals and placed them in his mouth (as the Russians did to Lebanese who kidnapped some of their diplomats in the 1980s)
My point is that the sources of this poison are probably few enough that footprints or fingerprints might actually lead to Putin in such as way as to damage him
Why would it matter if people knew?
NO cheers, unfortunately.
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