Word: polonium
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...Litvinenko's fate. On Nov. 23, a few hours after the scientists isolated what was causing his body to disintegrate, he succumbed. His was not the quiet, inexplicable demise that a poisoner usually seeks. Instead, those alpha particles, which were shown to come from the rare isotope polonium 210, opened a box of mysteries that have grabbed the world's attention for weeks and turned a gruesome death into the center of a global manhunt and a potential row between Russia and the rest of the world...
...POLICE ARE TAKING ALL SUCH CLAIMS with a grain of salt--and turning their attention, rather, to the grains of polonium 210 that are at the center of the case. This is no garden-variety poison: polonium needs a nuclear reactor to cook it up and extremely careful handling. At first, the discovery of the element seemed to hang responsibility on the Kremlin. Russia is a big producer of polonium (although its annual output, less than a hundred grams a year, shows just how rare it is). The element is hard to procure. In the U.S., it takes a government...
...Polonium 210 has some prosaic applications; it is used, for example, in antistatic devices found in photo shops and fabric mills. It would be very difficult, but for less than $1,000, just a few such gizmos could theoretically be disassembled and the contents reworked in a laboratory to produce a lethal dose. To be usable as a poison, Michael Clark, a spokesman for Britain's Health Protection Agency, said last week, the polonium would then have to be mixed in solution, probably with a gelling agent. "If it was some sort of liquid, it could have been...
...retrospect, it would have been a lot less trouble for someone to push Litvinenko under a bus than to feed him polonium. But it's likely his poisoners did not anticipate the brouhaha his death would cause. "I believe this was a botched operation," says Litvinenko's friend Alexander Goldfarb, who helped him escape from Russia and runs the Berezovsky-funded International Foundation for Civil Liberties in New York City. Without the intervention of Britain's nuclear-bomb lab, the cause of death would have remained shrouded. Boris Zhuykov, chief of the radioisotope laboratory at the Nuclear Research Institute...
SCOTLAND YARD HAS HAD ONE BIG BREAK IN the case: polonium, once released, is like a persistent, invisible dye that marks whatever it touches. Someone who ingests even small amounts will leave an unmistakable trail through sweat and even fingerprints. London's gumshoes have spent the past two weeks following such spores all over town--and beyond...