Who poisoned the KGB agent?

Only a state with a highly sophisticated nuclear program could kill a person with a radioactive toxin.

By Alex Koppelman

Read more: Politics, News, Vladimir Putin

Dec. 1, 2006 | It's been just a week since the death of Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB agent and recent vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose murder by radiation poisoning has yet to be solved, but the intrigue surrounding the case becomes ever greater. On Thursday, the FBI announced that it would join the investigation, and British authorities say they've found traces of radioactivity in a dozen sites around London, including five planes, some reportedly used for a Moscow-London route. Additionally, another Putin critic, Russia's former acting prime minister Yegor Gaidar, has fallen mysteriously ill while in Ireland for a conference. As of this writing, no cause for Gaidar's illness had been determined.

Litvinenko's murderer has not been found, but the poison that killed him has: polonium-210, an isotope of polonium, an element first discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie and named for Poland, Marie's native country. Used as part of the trigger in the earliest atomic bombs, including those dropped on Japan, polonium-210 is a highly radioactive substance. The alpha particles it emits can be lethal when absorbed into the human body.

Salon spoke with John Large, who spent some 20 years as a research fellow with the British government's Atomic Energy Authority before starting his own firm, Large & Associates, where, among other things, he was responsible for risk analysis during the salvage of the sunken Russian nuclear submarine Kursk. Large told Salon he believes the poisoning of Litvinenko was too sophisticated -- potentially involving radical innovations like nanotechnology -- to be the work of anyone not connected with a state. He also thinks the sushi that has been the focus of public speculation about the case may not have been the means used to kill Litvinenko.

Who could produce this amount of polonium-210?

Polonium, although it does occur naturally, is at the very end of the uranium decay train.

You need a nuclear reactor, you need a radiochemical laboratory that can handle radioactive material, and then you need a clinical laboratory that can cut it into a designer drug. Now, those facilities are simply not available in other than state enterprises. So countries like the United States, the Russian Federation, Britain, France and Israel are the sort of countries that can do this.

So this isn't something that a well-equipped chemistry professor could do.

No. The other point is this: Let's assume it was an assassin. The assassin has to work backwards. He has to know when the victim is going to be available for dosing, and he has to work backwards to know when the material is coming into the country, how it's coming into the country, when it's going to go through the clinical lab. So he has to order this several weeks in advance. The target area in the nuclear reactor has to be booked in advance for that material to be made, and it has to be done very carefully because of the short half-life of polonium. If there's a long delay in this, that means the radioactivity will decay; it will become less and less effective.

So not only could it be produced only by a state enterprise, but it also requires a rather formal sort of way of making it. All those resources have to be put together in advance.

Could you trace this back to some country or to some particular reactor?

This material, polonium-210, is primarily an alpha emitter, but it has about 1 to 2 percent of beta gamma activity in it, usually from contaminants or pollutants. A little bit of decay activity produces beta gamma. So what you have is a spectral signature. That means you can tell when it was put in the reactor to be generated. The first thing you can get from decay, from its strength, is, you can trace back and say, "Ah, OK, this was in a reactor 15 days ago, or 28 days ago."

It is possible to get a signature for the lab that separates [the polonium] from the other radioactive materials that are generated. If you have a signature for that particular lab, then you could identify it. Now, because this would have come from a military type of establishment, it's unlikely that other countries would have a signature of that establishment.

Are the Russians in particular known for producing polonium?

Well, most countries that have an atomic weapons program are. It was a little device, or a trick, used to initiate the earlier series of atomic weapons. It has one or two other uses, but in very small quantities, very specialized. I believe it's on the [Nuclear] Non-Proliferation [Treaty] embargo list.

Next page: "Come one assassin with some polonium, and the whole system just collapses"