Posted on 12/13/2006 12:22:30 PM PST by jdm
German investigators say the radioactive polonium-210 used to kill a former Russian spy in London last month would have cost $25 million on the black market.
The Berliner Zeitung quoted a police source Wednesday as saying police were investigating the possibility some of Alexander Litvinenko's business activities involved the illegal smuggling of nuclear materials.
"We know that there has been a demand for nuclear materials in terrorist circles for several years," the source said.
Litvinenko was a former Russian spy who defected to Britain and became an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He died of radiation poisoning in London on Nov. 23, and one of his business acquaintances, Dmitri Kovtun is now in a Moscow hospital with radiation sickness, the Novosti news agency said.
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
Somebody REALLY wanted him gone.
I don't think Putin got it from the Black Market. He paid wholesale prices, which is a lot cheaper, I'm sure.
Only if you have to buy it.
He bought on clearance for $9.95 (million).
I knew Paul McCartney could have saved a ton of money by switching to ..........
I'm starting to wonder if this guy was carrying the Polonium 210 to sell to terrorists, and his plan "backfired" on him. The "death bed" conversion to Islam is rather scary.
Can you say smuggling.
I think I read elsewhere that Pulonium 210 doesn't aerosolize very easy due to particle weight, and is most efficiently delivered via liquid (or possibly incorporation in prepared food?).
Makes me wonder if it wouldn't be ideally suited for a foodborne "dirty bomb" attack and if that isn't what was in the works here. A truly frightening thought.
With cost now known in addition to the sloppiness of the trail left behind it seems safe to assume that this wasn't a political assassination -- a good old fashioned car bomb would have been just as discrete.
I think this is baloney as little old me found places to buy it online.
Jeez that is a ton of cash for a micro-gram of gas.
I'm not sure about particle weight, but at room temp, a surprising percentage of it will vaporize.
The even more sinister possibility is that the polonium was being smuggled either as part of, or with the intent of making, polonium-beryllium neutron sources to refurbish the trigger mechanism on a stolen or black-market 'suit-case' nuke.
The online sites sell vanishingly small quantities of the stuff for people to use in cloud chambers. (I had one when I was a kid.)
$25 million/gram translates into $25/microgram, and the online sites are selling quantities measured in micrograms.
This is beginning to remind me of Sum of All Fears - the book, not the movie. Remember the guy that got sick from the radioactive material whose sickness telegraphed that something sinister was afoot?
Maybe it's just tinfoil hat stuff, but there are some reasonable speculations to be made here.
I read, in the Daily Mail, that the polonium was in a cup of tea he drank at the Millennium Hotel. One of the cups has tested very high radiation readings, other crockery low readings, possibly contaminated by being washed next to the cup used to poison him.
One of the early MSM stories on this said it basically had to be ingested or put on some other path to the bloodstream.
Well, one thing we do know is that this stuff seems to end up everywhere once it's out in the open. Talk about sloppy KGB work!
I posted this information a few weeks ago, from a web site that sells small amounts of Polonium. The answer that I got from other posters (and they are probably correct) is that the source of the pollonium was probably not commercial, but a government source. If a gov't had huge amounts left over from the cold war, that it had no further use for, a dose small enough to kill someone would have little monetary cost.
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