Litvinenko's killers used polonium worth $10m to give massive overdose (1 Viewer)

[jujuman13]

If 200 Journalists were murdered in the US under any President, the howl of protests woukld be so enormous and quite rightly so.
And President Bush says that he counts Mr. Putin as a friend, wow, some friend?
I would hate to see someone he counts as his enemy, wait is not Mr. Chavez, Mr. Castro, President Kim Jong Il, President Ahmadinejad etc etc, yes they imprison journalists, but murder 200 of them?
Link
Litvinenko's killers used polonium worth $10m to give massive overdose - World - Times Online

 

[Hatuey]

If 200 Journalists were murdered in the US under any President, the howl of protests woukld be so enormous and quite rightly so.
And President Bush says that he counts Mr. Putin as a friend, wow, some friend?
I would hate to see someone he counts as his enemy, wait is not Mr. Chavez, Mr. Castro, President Kim Jong Il, President Ahmadinejad etc etc, yes they imprison journalists, but murder 200 of them?
Link
Litvinenko's killers used polonium worth $10m to give massive overdose - World - Times Online

Who uses a murder weapon worth 10M$ to murder a journalist?

 

[RightinNYC]

News stories on the estimate of the cost have ranged between $1 and $40 million, but it seems this is simply a case of one news source getting a hold of bad numbers and other sources following along wily-nily.

The article linked above:

British investigators believe that Alexander Litvinenko’s killers used more than $10 million of polonium-210 to poison him. Preliminary findings from the post mortem examination on the former KGB spy suggest that he was given more than ten times the lethal dose.

Police do not know why the assassins used so much of the polonium-210, and are investigating whether the poison was part of a consignment to be sold on the black market.

United Nuclear Scientific Supplies of New Mexico, one of the few companies licensed to sell polonium-210 isotopes online, said that as a single unit costed about $69, it would take at least 15,000 orders, costing more than $10 million, to kill someone.

The company said that as it sold to only a handful of outlets in the United States every three months, anyone placing an order for 15,000 units would be spotted.

Experts reckon that as little as 0.1 micrograms of polonium-210 would be enough to kill — the equivalent of a single aspirin tablet divided into 10 million pieces.

So according to this article:

The lethal dose is .1 micrograms.
He was given ten times that.
His 1 microgram dose cost $10 million.

What about this article?

Polonium, $22.50 plus tax

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.

The complicating factor is the relative ubiquity of polonium 210, the highly radioactive substance found in Mr. Litvinenko's 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. "And it's a terrible way to go."

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. By some estimates, a lethal dose might cost as little as $22.50, plus tax.

Manufacturers of antistatic devices take great pains to make the polonium hard to remove. Even so, Dr. Zimmerman of King's College said it could be done with "careful lab work," which he declined to describe.

The Health Physics Society, a professional group in McLean, Va., that distributes information on radiation safety, estimates that a lethal dose of polonium 210 is 3,000 microcuries (a radiation measure named after Marie and Pierre Curie). Other experts put the figure slightly higher.

An antistatic fan made by NRD, of Grand Island, N.Y., contains 31,500 microcuries of polonium 210 - or, in theory, more than 10 lethal doses. The unit often sells commercially for $225.00. Repeated calls to NRD were not returned, but the company in sales literature describes its products as unusually safe.

The company's antistatic brushes contain less polonium, typically 500 microcuries of radiation. The three-inch brush often sells on the Web for $33.99. In theory, by spending $203.94, before tax and any handling charges, and then disassembling six brushes, someone with lab experience could accumulate a lethal dose.

So, judging by Occam's razor, what seems more likely? The people who did this spent $10 million and risked international scrutiny by purchasing it directly in raw form? Or they spent $225 and did it in a way that allowed them to cover their tracks?

 

[Volker]

If 200 Journalists were murdered in the US under any President, the howl of protests woukld be so enormous and quite rightly so.
And President Bush says that he counts Mr. Putin as a friend, wow, some friend?
I would hate to see someone he counts as his enemy, wait is not Mr. Chavez, Mr. Castro, President Kim Jong Il, President Ahmadinejad etc etc, yes they imprison journalists, but murder 200 of them?
Link
Litvinenko's killers used polonium worth $10m to give massive overdose - World - Times Online

Your source says 200 Russian journalists have died violantly since the fall of the Soviet Union. I don't know, how many American journalists died in the last 15 years violently. Mr. Putin has not been in charge for 15 years.

It's not ok trying to bring 200 journalists who died violantly in connection with Mr. Putin.