Litvenko Story

[Pangloss]

I don't know if you guys have been following the Litvinenko story or not, but the minor sub-stories that keep spinning out of the thing are just fascinating. This is the one about the former Russian security agent who was poisoned and died this past week.

 

British Airways cleared one of their "radioactive" 767s today for flight, and unsurprisingly it flew back from Moscow to London passenger- (and hopefully polonium-) free. (Would YOU fly on that airplane?!)

 

One of the more interesting statistics that came out of this is that BA finds itself having to contact thirty THOUSAND passengers who flew on the two planes over the subsequent ONE MONTH after the victim flew. If that's not a revealing statistic about the efficient state of the aviation industry (not to mention Boeing's airframes) I don't know what is. Both of those planes would basically have had to fly twice, absolutely full, every single day in order to hit that number. Pretty impressive.

 

And all because of only a few *drops* of liquid as someone walked by the guy's table at dinner. Far less than the three *ounces* now allowed by our trusty airport screeners.

 

I don't know if it was Russian security or what, but whoever these people were who got Litvinenko, they kinda make Al Qaeda look like small potatos, don't they?

[Severian]

I don't know if it was Russian security or what, but whoever these people were who got Litvinenko, they kinda make Al Qaeda look like small potatos, don't they?

 

I am not sure about that. Why use polonium. Why not just use cyanide? Cyanide is easier to get, a lot less tracable, would kill just as surely and wouldn't attract so much media attention. It seems like a particularly inconvenient way to kill someone...

[Dak]

some people can smell cyanide. if this guys a paranoid ex-spy, it's likely that he knows that cyanide smells like rotten/bitter almands, and if he's one of the people who can smell it, he'd know if he was about to eat something laced with cyanide.

 

from the looks of it, polonium can work as a contact poison (or a 'remote' contact poison, i suppose, as he wouldn't actually have to come into direct contact with it), making it's application easyer.

 

also, it's apparently very difficult to detect, 1, which is reminiscent of the last KGB killing in the uk of Georgi Markov(where ricin was used, which was, at the time, either undetectable or very hard to detect, i forget which).

 

[pure speculation]

 

it also apparently seeps-out in body fluids (ibid), so i guess maybe they were trying to bump his wife off aswell? presumably, at the dose he got, his semen and sweat could have been fatal?

 

also, there might be a dose of polonium which will cause enough radiation-induced mutation to cause massive cancer, which will reveal itself (and kill him) relatively quickly, but not so quickly that the target would find himself in hospital before any trace of polonium had left his body, thus making the poison effectively undetectable by the time it was looked for -- possibly leading to a record of 'natural death', and that the assasin just messed the dose up.

 

[/pure speculation]

[Sisyphus]

That's kind of what I figured, as well. They were trying to give him cancer, which is certainly an ingenious method of assassination, because it looks like, well, cancer. Or at least mimic some other disease. Or even radiation poisoning, if they thought they wouldn't detect the polonium in time.

 

In any case, it looks pretty amazingly bad for the Russian government, doesn't it? It pretty much had to be some government, in order to have the resources to produce polonium, and the Russians really have the only motive.

[Pangloss]

Actually a lot of the articles I've been reading suggest the polonium could have come from many sources. I don't know if that's a misconception on the media's part (perhaps not understanding the concept of isotopes), or if that's for-real.

[emcelhannon]

They make polonium for anti-static brushes by encasing bismuth between two gold plates and bombarding it with neutrons. Why does it take a government to manufacture it?

[swansont]

They make polonium for anti-static brushes by encasing bismuth between two gold plates and bombarding it with neutrons. Why does it take a government to manufacture it?

 

Possibly because of its use as a neutron trigger for atomic bombs. If you have Beryllium nearby, the alpha collides with it and pops a neutron out.

[John Cuthber]

1 Marie Curie was not a government.

2 Marie Curie extracted polonium.

Therefore you don't need a government to get polonium.

Why did anyone ever think you did?

 

Also, re. "If you have Beryllium nearby, the alpha collides with it and pops a neutron out." Actually, something like 999940 times in a million, it doesn't. I'm not sure about the figures but the yield is certainly poor.

[swansont]

Also, re. "If you have Beryllium nearby, the alpha collides with it and pops a neutron out." Actually, something like 999940 times in a million, it doesn't. I'm not sure about the figures but the yield is certainly poor.

 

Po-210 has a specific activity of 4490 Ci/g, which is 1.66e14 decays per second per gram. So even at a poor efficiency of 60 per million, that's 1e10 neutrons per second per gram.

[emcelhannon]

So, how did Marie do it?