Sorry for obsessing on Litvinenko, but I wanted to resurrect one important point from the bowels of the massive post I wrote late last night. In that post Lugovoi reiterates a point I made – much of the Po-210 evidence was found a month after Lugovoi and Kovtun left London and cannot be deterministically tied to them. And I noted the prime example of this was the extremely ‘hot’ teapot and cup found at the Millenium Hotel.

I also noted that the reporting of discolored porcelain and the one barman witness who claims to have seen melted tea leaves creating a some kind of gooey mass tells me the tea pot was way too contaminated to be the vessel that delivered ten millionths of a gram (or whatever the autopsy supposedly says) as his deadly dose of Polonium. Now I don’t think I have to be even that close (was in 100 thousandths of a gram that killed Litvinenko) because the amounts required to discolor porcelain and melt plant tissues is so much higher we can use estimates.

I worked for a while, a long time ago, with nuclear tagging medical tests, where we subject samples to solutions of nuclear material to see how much nuclear material binds to the biological sample. Low doses to be sure – but repeated constantly over and over again. The fact is animal cells can be killed off easily by radiation – Po-21o shows this to be true. But plants are designed to absorb radiation, it takes a little more melt them away into a pool of muck. But even ignoring this, porcelain is a tough material and the precursor of a lot of heat and energy resisting products we have today.

But forget my suspicions, this can be tested now by the UK and even the media. One only needs to gather up some representative tea pots and run two experiments. The first is to brew some Po-210 traced tea that will in the proper dosage to impart 10 millionths of a gram of Po-210 in six ounces (the teas Litvinenko supposedly gulped down and died from). The second is to brew tea with ever increasing amounts of Po-210 until the porcelain discolors. That will give the amount of Po-210 to discolor the tea pot – and I would bet the two doses will be miles apart. Orders of magnitude different.

If so then this would be the plausible scenarion: When Berezovsky, Zakayev and Litvinenko realize his poisoning could expose the smuggling effort they concoct a way to blame Lugovoi – whom Litvinenko met the day he fell ill. The story involves the tea at the Pine Bar (which was a very early theory it seems). They also plan the PR story about a Putin-directed assassination to buy time and misdirect the media. They wait to see if Litvinenko survives and the news can be contained.

But Litvinenko succumbs and they put their plans in place. But their concocted story has timeline problems – especially in Berezovsky’s office. They begin to realize how much of a trail Po-210 can leave. So they need to bolster their story. But being smugglers, and not scientists, they botch the effort to plant evidence. In a naive misunderstanding of how much Po-210 is required to kill and how solutions contain the same dosage/volume whether in a tea pot or tea cup and they soak the tea pot in Po-210 tea to make sure it is detected when they plant it. But that ruins the planted evidence – which is now way too hot to be the vessel that killed Litvinenko.

A simple test can confirm or dismiss this possibility. I know it. And now the others know who can act. And maybe even those responsible will hear about this – and realize it is only a matter of time before they are discovered.