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'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.
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.
"Reports that KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko converted to Islam before his mysterious poisoning with radioactive polonium 210 is raising suspicions that he may have been involved in a plot to smuggle the deadly substance to terrorist groups willing to pay millions even for a gram, Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin is reporting today...Their biggest fear, the paper reports, is that Litvinenko, who died of polonium-210 poisoning in a London hospital, may have been helping al-Qaida or other extremist groups get hold of radioactive material to be used in a devastating "dirty" atom bomb."
>From WorldNetDaily.com
There has been a lot of speculation as to how Litvinenko came to be poisoned with Polonium 210. Most of it endlessly repeating that Po210 is "highly radioactive". The truth of that is Po210 is an Alpha emitter. Alpha particles are stopped by as little shielding as a sheet of paper. The human skin is more than enough to stop Alpha radiation. The danger comes once it is within the human body as it causes damage to lungs and the digestive tract. There is further speculation that he was dabbling with Po210 for a dirty bomb, which makes no sense. Po210 has a half-life of 138 days as compared with. Pu-239, a more common isotope of Plutonium which has a half-life of 24,000 years. The half-life of Po 210 is short enough to make isolation a useful treatment strategy for contaminated areas. In short, if you are going for a dirty bomb, skip the Polonium 210 which must be manufactured fresh because of its' short half life and go for the Plutonium which may be found in spent reactor fuel and lasts virtually forever.
All of this begs the question "What was Litvinenko doing with Polonium 210? The answer lies back in the early days of nuclear bomb development. Polonium 210 was combined with beryllium to make an "initiator" for the early (crude) nuclear weapons. These initiator devices acted rather like a spark plug to guarantee that the nuclear chain reaction started at precisely the right time. This function has been replaced by an electronic component in more modern designs. The early, crude designs have the merit of being simple and straight forward requiring no high speed timing electronics. As a mater of fact "little boy" required no electronics at all to fire, it could have been as simple as yanking a lanyard on an artillery piece.
There has been speculation that more then a few "suitcase nukes" of KGB origins have gone missing. They have been sitting around since the height of the cold war and so their beryllium/polonium initiators have long ago ceased being functional. All they require to bring them up to speed is replacement Polonium in their initiators. I think that Litvinenko was working with an extremist group to provide a key component for an actual nuclear weapon already in their possession.
Regards,
GtG
PS FYI ...At the bottom of the hole one or more beryllium/polonium initiators (different from the implosion initiators; simpler in design, with less polonium) could be mounted...4 ABNER initiators out of a batch of 16 shipped to Tinian were used in Little Boy. These were fastened radially to the front end of the target assembly.
-Click Here- Search in page for "polonium".