I think that their little research reactor, Soreq, is inspected on a voluntary basis, but I don’t think that the Negev site gets inspected. Israel is not a member of the non-proliferation treaty and thus are not subject to inspections to verify account balances for special nuclear material (stuff that can be used to make bombs).
FYI: here is an overview of the U.S.'s interaction with the IAEA et al
NRC: International Safeguards
So it’s a method which best relates to motives like a personal vendetta (that’s where the horribly suffering part enters into it), but the means require the resources of a nation state. Tricky.
It does remind me of the Bulgarian Umbrella, though. Not a very pleasant death either, it must’ve taken a lot of time and effort to develop the method, the gear and refine the ricin, and if I recall it correctly, Georgi Markow was murdered because Todor Schiwkow was personally offended.
Since Blum wrote the article, I feel the need to point out that her book, The Poisoner’s Handbook, is one hell of a read. Part real crime, part history of forensic pathology.
Thanks! this is helpful.
The Wikipedia article Cause of Yasser Arafat’s death quotes a report claiming,
an unexplained quantity of Polonium-210 has been detected on the personal effects of Mr. Arafat.
Seems they’re not looking at decay products at all. The tests are claimed to have been done almost 20 half-lives of ²¹⁰Po after Arafat’s death; how much of a 1µg lethal dose would be detectable? (2⁻²⁰ ≈ 10⁻⁶, or one part in a million; do you believe a test that claims to have found a picogram of the stuff?)
As far as decay products, http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/003360.htm suggests normal levels are “less than 20 µg/dL of lead in the blood”. Assuming 5L = 50dL of blood in the body, and ignoring the rest of the body, 1µg of ²¹⁰Po would yield an excess of—at most—2% ²⁰⁶Pb. There’s no plausible way that was detected, given the variation in the percentage of ²⁰⁶Pb in normal lead.
That would be around 1 nCi (37 Bq) of Po-210, which would be very detectable.
Bioassay (urinalysis) for Po-210 can “see” ~0.05 pCi/liter (1e-17 g/liter) – could get a wee bit lower level of detection with a longer count time.
That is the great thing about radioactive material – you can detect very small quantities of it using relatively simple equipment. It is also what makes it scary to people – because “if you can measure it, then it must be dangerous”.
There was actually a vote at the IAEA this September as to whether Israel should be made to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. … which failed to pass, with Europe and America block-voting in favour of Israel keeping out of the NPT, Latin America abstaining, and Russia, Iran, Saudi, voting in favour of compelling Israel to join. The BBC suppressed the news of this vote completely whilst shrilly harping on about Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.
A microgram of 210Po contains contains 3×1015 atoms and has got an activity of ~620,000 decays per second … so after 20 half-lives the remaining picogram of polonium would still be producing about one decay every two seconds.
The energy of the alphas emitted by polonium is distinctive - if you had an energy resolving alpha particle detector, you could count the number of ~4.9MeV alpha particles and use that to measure the polonium concentration. If you’ve got a few hours to measure integrate the counts, you can be very sensitive.
In a sense, that’s why it’s a terrible poison - if you know to look for it, you can easily detect picogram quantities, which wouldn’t be true of cyanide or other poisons.
The long wait time until death seems likely to raise flags, especially considering the political nature of the target. However if the assassins got away with it in the case of Arafat (sya, hypothetically, that it was KGB Jr.), would they be overconfident of the same result with Litvinenko?
It seems unlikely to me; it would make more sense that the assassins wanted the assassination to become public knowledge as a sort of warning.
EDIT: On the wiki article, they quote a member of the Duma (a legislative body in Russia) as saying “The deserved punishment reached the traitor. I am confident that this terrible death will be a serious warning to traitors of all colors, wherever they are located: In Russia, they do not pardon treachery. I would recommend citizen Berezovsky to avoid any food at the commemoration for his accomplice Litvinenko.”
So that seems fairly clear cut. Talk about brazenness Arafat less so. Can anyone provide context as to Arafat’s activities at the time?
Given that Israel is a sovereign nation, “made to join” is nonsense.
At the time? Mostly cowering in his compound in Ramallah with Israeli snipers chipping at the paint job outside to remind him of their opinion of him. If it were the Russians, it would mostly be because he had knowledge of past events in the Kremlin from the multiple times he spent thre, knowledge they prefer he take with him to the Lake of Fire. If the Israelis, it would be because he was Yasser Arafat. And while he wasn’t doing much in 2006, one thing he was doing was being Yasser Arafat.
But regardless of the source of the polonium, if he was fed any, he was fed it by someone in his retinue. And the reason for that would again be because he was Yasser Arafat.
To illustrate @anon68287401’s example here is an actual measurement looking to quantify the amount of Po-210 in a urine sample:
Here’s a 12 hour count that gives a Po-210 minimum detectible activity of ~0.013 pCi (0.00048 decays per second) – the sample has an activity of ~0.035 pCi (0.0013 decays per second), so it is positive for Po-210.
At the resolution of this pic, one can hardly even see the Po-210 counts…
You could think about coercive means to encourage Israel to join, e.g. sanctions, relentless political pressure, targeted computer viruses, targeted assassinations of workers at Dimona etc.
Given that Iran is a sovereign nation too, I do get a bit of cognitive dissonance when I think about how much pressure our governments put on Iran - and there seem to be plenty of dirty tricks employed against individual Iranians - exploding motorcycles and boobytrapped cars used to take out anyone identified as key in the Iranian nuclear programme.
Let’s play name that dead Iranian:
And now somebody just assassinated the Iranian tasked with leading cyber warfare efforts in that country.
The only conclusion you can draw is that some western / Israeli aligned influence is sponsoring terrorism (gasp!) in order to wipe out inconvenient Iranians.
Arafat was more useful to the Israelis alive, because he was someone they could legitimately refuse to do business with. It’d have been good for the Palestinian cause if he were assassinated. The reality that he got sick and died of old age is less glorious.
Frankly I’d be happy to see Israel just cut the bullshit, admit that they’re xenophobic and racist, commence genocide and push the occupants of the Gaza strip into the ocean, and be done with it; or treat the Palestinians like fellow human beings and make a lasting peace.
It saddens me to think that the Palestine / Israel conflict might well fester on for the rest of my natural life, and that people who aren’t born yet will suffer the same gross injustice that takes place today.
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