I am amazed that the Litvinenko story is not getting serious attention in the US or in the Europe. The media is so wedded to the possible assassination angle they have totally ignored the equally plausible, and much more disturbing possibility, of the Dirty Bomb. Ever since I began posting on this story the evidence did not sit as well with an assassination as it did a smuggling operation that went bad. Before the trail of Polonium became known, I predicted – because of the massive and immediate PR campaign that was put in place at Litvinenko’s death – the trail would lead to Boris Berezovsky. When there was only two hotels infected and tied to Lugovoi trips to London to meet Litvinenko, I said a smuggling effort would show more than one round of moving the material. Sure enough another hotel was found to be contaminated with many rooms showing signs of Polonium, and it was tied to a trip by Lugovoi to meet Litvinenko and visit some of these suspicious security firms which also show Polonium contamination.

As the evidence for a smuggling ring has grown in the UK, I wondered if and when it would show up in other countries – possible destinations of Polonium. We all know the trail later extended to Germany. But today the LA Times is reporting the Plonium trail reached the United States of America:

Since identifying polonium-210 as the poison that killed Litvinenko, investigators have found traces of it in hotel rooms, airplanes, embassy rooms and other sites in the U.S. and Europe visited by Andrei Lugovoy, a former KGB bodyguard who is considered a potential suspect in the case. Lugovoy has said he is being set up by persons unknown.

This little detail is being reported so off-handedly I cannot wonder if it is not a mistake. First off I am not aware Lugovoi visited America – but it is possible. Did the author mean Russia instead of the US? Maybe, but it is clear the FBI is involved and has been interrogating people here in the US. But if it is accurate then there should be much more news reporting on this incident and its potential implications. It means nuclear material was smuggled into the US – and that would be news.

The article is a wealth of details that establish parameters for the doses that have been seen and the possible amounts and the form of the Polonium that was smuggled through London in October. First are a series of historical incidents that resulted in death in the handing of Polonium. Key to these is how long the effects took to kill the victims:

At the height of World War II, in an isolated medical ward at the University of Rochester in New York, Dr. Robert M. Fink gave water laced with polonium-210 to a terminal cancer patient [later the reporter notes the patient volunteered for this as part of the war effort] and injected four others with the isotope. None of the five apparently died from the minute doses, though one succumbed to his cancer six days later.

…

The first polonium death occurred in 1927.

The victim was Nobus Yamada, a Japanese researcher in Marie Curie’s lab in France. In 1924, he worked with Curie’s daughter Irene Joliot-Curie to prepare polonium sources. After returning home the next year, Yamada fell ill.

…

The Curies’ daughter Irene also fell victim to the isotope. She died of leukemia in 1956, 10 years after a sealed capsule of polonium-210 was accidentally broken in her laboratory at the Radium Institute in Paris.

About the same time, scientists developing Israel’s nuclear program were exposed to its lethal effects.

The first signs of contamination were the traces of radiation on the laboratory desk of Israeli physicist Dror Sadeh. He had taken what he thought were adequate precautions against the hyperactive element.

But those precautions weren’t enough. Radiation was discovered “in my private home, and on my hands too and on everything that I touched,” he wrote in his diary.

Within a month, one student who worked in Sadeh’s lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, was dead from leukemia. The lab’s supervisor died a few years later — contaminated by polonium-210 as well, Sadeh suspected.

These incidents show that exposure is not immediately lethal. It is lethal – but death can take months or years. Not that great for a assassination tool. But it also indicates Litvinenko may not have been poisoned at one incident on November 1st, but may have been accumulating his deadly dose over time. Though I still think Litvinenko did get a large dose at one critical encounter around that date. Another thing to note in the article is how easy it is to block Polonium-210 in transport but how difficult it is to handle it without it contaminating the location where it is being handled:

Unlike other radioactive elements, polonium-210 is relatively safe to transport.

…

“I could put it in a tiny Ziploc bag, and I would be fine,” said Dooley, president and chief executive of MJW Corp., a consulting firm in Amherst, N.Y., that specializes in radiological and health physics services.

…

The energy produced as it naturally disintegrates is so great that “small chunks, perhaps a few hundred atoms in size, are blasted out of the surface and then drift around the room,” Zimmerman said.

“It would tend to creep around the lab,” Dooley said. “If you had polonium in an open jar and you left it overnight, the next thing you knew, it would be all over the lab. It would jump on a dust particle and end up on lab benches and floors and things.”

Interestingly this pattern of dispersion seems to fit what was found at the three hotels. And it may be the kind of pattern scene at Berezovsky’s office, which did have multiple points with Polonium-210 contamination. It does seem that many of the locations of contamination were the result of material flaking off people trailing the material, while hotel rooms may show the more diffuse pattern. Without more details it is hard to say. But clearly the contamination sites show little evidence of an assassination. The assassin would have the Polonium-210 in a salt form which could be innocently dropped into a drink. This form would resist both the flaking off and possibly the random escape of particles on dust. The fact the more controlled form of a small amount (still a very high dose) would not seem consistent with an assassin who hoped to survive his actions.

The other information in this article to note is the dosage levels and the expected biological response:

Pound for pound, polonium-210 is at least a million times more toxic than hydrogen cyanide, the poison used to execute prisoners in gas chambers, according to medical toxicology books. Radiation safety experts calculate that a single gram of polonium could kill 50 million people and sicken another 50 million.

But it is extremely hard to get. About 100 grams — or 3 1/2 ounces — are produced each year, primarily by Russia.

…

A dose of the white powder smaller than a grain of salt could have been dropped into Litvinenko’s drink at the Millennium Hotel’s Pine Bar in London without altering the taste, according to chemist John Emsley of Cambridge University.

Within minutes of ingestion, the energetic particles shooting off the polonium-210 molecules began killing the cells lining Litvinenko’s gastrointestinal tract. As the cells sloughed off, they caused nausea, severe internal bleeding and enormous pain.

descriptions I saw here. But there is one symptom of Litvinenko’s case that are different – the massive inflamation of his mucus membrane areas:

Later I [Marina Litvinenko] was told that not only the mucus membranes in his mouth, but everywhere in his body were horribly inflamed and covered with blisters.

The symptoms seem to indicate Litvinenko encountered a cloud of Polonium-220, ingesting some and inhaling some. The ingested amount caused the symptoms assoiated with the vomiting, but I am of the mind the mucus membrame damage was from inhalation. If Litvinenko was exposed by a cloud of material that he ingested and inhaled, I would say that would really be a sign this was an accident in handling and not an assassination attempt. Assassins would want to control the material to make sure it only hit its intended target. That is why I think the salt form that could be added to a drink is the form an assassin would use, and prepare well before bringing the material into the UK.

In any event, if the material has been shown to have reached our shores, I think it is long past time the news media stopped obessessing with the assassination theory to shore up the biased views of Russia and Putin. This is a very serious situation and it deserves objective, honest reporting. Everyone who could be at risk if this is a smuggling effort for a dirty bomb deserves some clear heads on this matter and how it is reported.