www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/weekinreview/03broad.html
WILLIAM J BROAD Published: December 3, 2006 THE trail of clues in the mysterious death of Alexander V Litvinenko may lead to Moscow, as the former spy claimed on his deathbed. But solving the nuclear whodunit may prove harder than Scotland Yard and many scientists at first anticipated.
Forum: The Future of Eastern Europe and Russia Lou Beach The complicating factor is the relative ubiquity of polonium 210, the highly radioactive substance found in Mr Litvinenkos body and now in high levels in the body of an Italian associate, who has been hospitalized in London. Experts initially called it quite rare, with some claiming that only the Kremlin had the wherewithal to administer a lethal dose. But public and private inquiries have shown that it proliferated quite widely during the nuclear era, of late as an industrial commodity. You can get it all over the place, said William Happer, a physicist at Princeton who has advised the United States government on nuclear forensics. Today, polonium 210 can show up in everything from atom bombs, to antistatic brushes to cigarette smoke, though in the last case only minute quantities are involved. Iran made relatively large amounts of polonium 210 in what some experts call a secret effort to develop nuclear arms, and North Korea probably used it to trigger its recent nuclear blast. Commercially, Web sites and companies sell many products based on polonium 210, with labels warning of health dangers. Radiation from polonium is dangerous if the solid material is ingested or inhaled, warns the label of an antistatic brush. Peter D Zimmerman, a professor in the war studies department of Kings College, London, said the many industrial uses of polonium 210 threatened to complicate efforts at solving the Litvinenko case. Mr Litvinenko, 43, a vocal critic of the Russian government, died on Nov.
The British authorities soon found that Mr Litvinenko had died of polonium 210 poisoning in what appeared to be its first use as a murder weapon. Conspiracy theorists said Russia had the motive and means, noting its long history of polonium work, as well as creative assassinations. The recent discovery of traces of radioactivity on British commercial jets flying to and from Russia has heightened the suspicions. As in any good murder mystery, the deadliness was foreshadowed. Marie Curie, who discovered the radioactive element in 1898 and named it after her native Poland, organized its close study. One of her polonium workers died in 1927 from apparent poisoning, according to Susan Quinn, author of Marie Curie: A Life (Simon & Schuster, 1995). At first, mines provided minute samples nearly invisible to the human eye. But the debut of nuclear reactors let scientists make polonium 210 by the pound. The substance emits swarms of subatomic rays, and the Manhattan Project in 1945 used them to trigger the worlds first atom bombs. Such initiators became the global standard for basic nuclear arms.
President Eisenhower, eager to promote atoms for peace, had the high heats of polonium 210 turned into electricity for satellites. But the batteries lost power relatively fast because of the materials short half-life, just 138 days. By the 1960s, researchers worried increasingly about polonium 210s deadly health effects.
Harvard researchers found it in cigarette smoke and argued that its concentrations were high enough to make its radioactivity a contributing factor in lung cancer. Vilma R Hunt, who helped lead the studies, called polonium 210 a nightmare for health workers, and perhaps sleuths, because it tended to move about in unexpected ways. Though dangerous when breathed, injected or ingested, the material is harmless outside the human body. Industrial companies found polonium 210 to be ideal for making static eliminators that remove dust from film, lenses and laboratory balances, as well as paper and textile plants. Bits of dust with static attract the charged air, which neutralizes them. Once free of static, the dust is easy to blow or brush away.
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