Don't you feel safer knowing that the maniac running around with Polonium 210...

[951-Riverside]

so far has not been connected to any muslim group or Al Qaeda? :eyes:

[warrior1]

1. Isn't it

polonium 210?

[951-Riverside]

5. Corrected.

Thankies!

[Gwerlain]

2. This caught my eye...

because Polonium-210 is used along with beryllium in the initiator for a nuclear weapon. That's the part that makes a burst of neutrons to start the chain reaction.

A little investigation, however, turned up the fact that its half-life is so short that it is probably only useful for a few weeks at most for this purpose. That, of course, implicates only countries that have extensive nuclear facilities, since a country that did not would have a very hard time getting ahold of this stuff while it was still fresh enough to be usable as a poison. It also makes it extremely unlikely that any private citizen was involved. The use of this particular material, in fact, implicates a national government that has an extensive nuclear program, and it kinda tends to limit the field a bit. I'd say Russia did it, specifically an arm of whatever foreign secret service is currently running over there, and most likely Putin knew about it, just based on the material used.

[aquart]

3. Which is ever so arrogant.

Why such a complicated, traceable poison, when you can just shoot him?

[Gwerlain]

4. Pour encourager les autres. n/t

[htuttle]

6. You can order polonium-210 online

Here:
http://www.unitednuclear.com/isotopes.htm

Don't quite need Boris and Natasha to do that...

[Gwerlain]

7. Errrmmm,

I kinda suspect they'd notice along about order number 10,000 or so.

"You would need about 15,000 of our Polonium-210 needle sources
at a total cost of about $1 million - to have a toxic amount."

[htuttle]

8. I doubt they are the only source

Point is, you can obtain it without a license.

[Gwerlain]

9. No, the point is,

you can't obtain enough of it to poison someone without a license.

[htuttle]

10. The same is true of dynamite, C-4 and automatic weapons, is it not?

You theoretically can't get enough explosives to hurt someone without a license -- but that doesn't stop those with the resources from obtaining it to do just that.

Just as you don't need a superpower's resources to get dynamite, C4, and an Uzi, you don't need a superpower's resources to get polonium-210, either.

[Gwerlain]

11. How much do you know about Polonium-210, anyway? n/t

[htuttle]

12. Squat

Just what I read in the papers.

[Gwerlain]

14. OK, here's the deal...

getting enough of it to kill someone in the first place is pretty damn difficult if you don't work for a government. Sure you can get 1/15000 of a lethal dose; now go try ordering fifteen thousand of them. All from the Department of Energy breeder reactor at Oak Ridge. Pretending to be a university. Good luck. Say "hi" to the DHS folks for me. Have a good time in Gitmo.

Weapons, including plastic explosives, are relatively easy to get ahold of; radioactive materials, much harder. But Polonium-210 is a special case: its half-life is 138 days. That means that it loses half its potency in four months; three quarters in eight; seven eighths of its potency is gone in a year. Most weapons don't lose their potency over a period of years or even decades. You can't stockpile this stuff.

A great deal of the black market weaponry is old stuff. That's part of how you launder it. You can't do that with this stuff. And where you gonna keep it? You need to go read the Wikipedia article on it; it's so radioactive that a half gram of it put in a single place will immediately heat to 750K (that's almost 900 degrees F- higher than the melting point of lead).

To obtain it, you have to process fission products- and friend, you ain't doin it by hand.

This one was done by pros.

[Roland99]

13. Just breath in cigarette smoke. Polonium-210 is present in cigarette smoke.

[Subdivisions]

15. This is what is really scary:

http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2006/11/traces_of_radia.html

Nice to know air security is paramount importance and a has become such a great success.

[951-Riverside]

16. Fluids on plane.... baaaad

Radioactive materials... okay

:eyes: