This morning, the Times of London is reporting that Litvinenko’s guest for sushi dinner the evening of December 1, is suffering significant pulonium poisoning. The amatuer sleuths are going wild, and have some very interesting analysis. TRex at Firedo…

I wonder too whether the perps were aware of how big the story would play. What with stories propogated through blogs and available for days after filing on millions of desktops through archives, it’s more like submitting data to a massively parallel processing system than the whisper the Bulgarian story got when it happened. Maybe someone somewhere is stunned that, instead of achieving a nice, obscure murder—at least conpared to following someone into their apartment in broad daylight and putting a bullet in their skull practically in view of the neighbors—they have put the names Litvinenko, Gaidar, and Polonium near the forefront of the minds of hordes.

NKorea

Pakistan

are all in the nuclear business & could be a source of the material as could Israel, India, Germany, France, Japan, Canada etc.

As several others have suggested, this isn`t, I think, as straight forward as it seems.

Wonder what John Robb is thinking about this episode ?

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.” – Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi

If the method of delivery were smoke from a cigarette, I’d assume Litvinenko would’ve been on a respirator during his last days. But it doesn’t appear to be the case. Litvinenko’s mouth and throat were reported to be inflamed and swollen, but no mention of trachea or lungs, suggesting the poison was either eaten or drunk.

I’m not so sure. I don’t have access to the full text article, but this paper suggests that lung exposure to Po isn’t so straightforward. My slightly inebriated reading of this abstract tells me that the radiation damage to the trachea and pharynx you describe is very consistent with inhalation of Carolina’s finest. My guess is that Po gloms onto charged surfaces (hence the film duster function), so it doesn’t go very far into the airway before finding a deep sink of (charged) fluids to bind.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/en…..t=Citation

It’s really, really hard to type with my hands waving like this, so I’ll stop guessing now…

Pete

Therefore, there are two ways to increase the dosage. First, increase the absolute amount, and second, to make the metal very finely divided so that the hydrochloric acid in the stomach will convert more of it into a metal chloride.

Both of these are the mechanisms by which depleted uranium is deposited in the body, so it’s not exactly impossible for it to happen this way with polonium-210. It’s a bit disingenuous for the news to repeat the minimum fatal body load as no more than a grain of sand, because that leads people to think that was what was used. A guaranteed fatal dose might be many times that. After all, Litvinenko was excreting it in noticeable quantities in his urine–that suggests excess to me.

While the minimum fatal amount might be a milligram, what’s to say that a couple of hundred milligrams, in the form of finely divided powder (>80 nanometer diameter) wasn’t used? Sprinkling that on one plate in the kitchen could easily cause it to be transported to the Italian’s nearby plate by even very mild air currents.

While any country with the facilities to reprocess spent nuclear fuel would have access to polonium-210, it’s worth mentioning that countries with active nuclear weapons manufacturing programs would be more likely to have access to lots of the material. It’s used as part of the iniator, because when it’s mixed with lithium-6, it’s a rich source of neutrons.

For what it’s worth.

I would also submit that the idea of a “false flag” operation is common to both (and the ‘93 trade center bombing). Thus, anybody coulda done it.

No Western false flag op is going to leave a glow in the dark trail all over London and on two aircraft, endangering public safety. Believe it or not, those things are considered.

And what would the purpose be, except to make the Russian spies look really incompetent? Even then, the press is still writing about what professionals it took, comparing it to James Bond. It’s Get Smart, all the way.