Another man’s poison
One of my more fatheaded contributions while on 18 Doughty Street the other night was the assertion that the Government weren’t doing enough to reassure the public over the Litvinenko poisoning.
We’re given endless information, I said, (the terrorism threat level and dark allusions to 30 terrorists plots, to name just two) on which it is almost completely impossible for us to act. How do we modify our behaviour? What positive contribution can we make, other than be good little citizens and assent to confiscation of another civil liberty or two?
On the other hand, with Litvinenko, I argued we have a very specific case which is slowly drawing in a large number of people. The Government could go a long way to reassuring people by releasing details of the poisoning - what the Polonium 210 would look like, for example, and how to spot possible radiation poisoning. I was pretty much shouted down at the time. (’Why, are you scared?’ Rob McGibbon, sitting next to me, gently mocked.)
And rightly so. It was only much later (the l’esprit de l’escalier has been a bitch all week) it came to me that releasing such details would be potentially disastrous. It’s much like why in police procedural movies, they never release the details of a serial killer’s modus operandi - it attracts the copycats and the crazies. In this case, NHS Direct would be inundated by hypochondriacs (if they haven’t already). The malicious and the idiotic, with a description of a deliverable radioactive poison, would be filling envelopes with their facsimiles. False alarms would bring the police investigation to a grinding halt.
No, on the whole, it’s been handled with restraint. Even John Reid, never one to miss an opportunity to burnish his ego, seems subdued. There’s been an admirable lack of hysteria considering Litvinenko fell victim to, what the Guardian this morning describes as, a team of ‘rogue’ Russian agents who it seems were as careful with their isotope as the rest of us are with the Shake ‘n’ Vac. As I’ve followed it, the whole thing’s played out more like a Len Deighton slowburner than a death-on-the-streets potboiler. No ‘45 minutes from doom‘ headlines as of yet. Maybe that will change if anybody else’s hair starts falling out over the weekend.
But is this a radiological attack? I suppose it depends on what you mean by ‘attack’. That this appears to be a seemingly clumsy attempt to eliminate just one man and not a wider group may be why there’s been so little heat in all of this. How hot would things be if it wasn’t Russian agents running amok that we were talking about but a cell of Islamist terrorists bent on ‘mass murder on an unimaginable scale‘?
That said, that these Russians haven’t killed a more people appears to be more by good luck than good management. If we were to be consistent, shouldn’t we be kicking in the doors of the Russian émigré community?
Posted on December 1st, 2006 at 12:00 pm
| See also • Daniel Davies: What we need is spin • Get A Grip, Pinko • Rafferty’s rules |
Permalink • Trackback • Subscribe By Email • Print This Post • • • |
|
Filed under T.W.A.T., The home front, UK politics |
[...] Justin at Chicken Yoghurt has been feeling a bit of the L’espirit too. [...]
There is no reason apart from increasing fear why they coul dnot tell us the potential for actual harm, the half-life, for example, the length over which alpha waves can travel, a comparison with background radiation.
I am of the view that Doctor Death repeatedly popping up saying there’s nothing to worry about whilst saying how many planes have been grounded actually increases fear.
So, whilst I agree with you about copy cat stuff, I agree more with your initial analysis
A quick Google tells me Polonium 210 has a half-life of 138 days.
I’ve definitely heard it mentioned on the news that the alpha waves travel only a very short distance. That’s why Polonium 210 must be ingested or inhaled to be deadly - it’s not dangerous in any other way, apparently.
On background radiation, according to Tim Worstall, who sounds knowledgeable on such matters: ‘Unless someone started stuffing the polonium 210 into your tea, you’d have got more radiation from simply being on a plane at 30,000 feet than anything else.’ No doubt we could corroborate that pretty quickly.
So your valid questions are all easily answered and reassuringly so as well.
And has Reid been continually popping up? I count two statements all week - Monday and Thursday. During the terror plot busts in August he was nigh on ubiquitous. You clearly don’t have to be as diplomatic with suspected Islamist terrorists as you do with ‘rogue’ ‘Russian’ goons.
I don’t know why you would need a government statement on these things. GCSE Physics includes the properties of alpha radiation. The half-life is 138 days.
I don’t think there’s anything botched about this. There are easier ways to poison someone, which don’t involve importing difficult to source radioactive materials. The reason for using Polonium was precisely its scarcity. It made it absolutely clear who was responsible, while making it also abundantly clear that the Russians couldn’t give a damn who knows and that the British state is too scared to do a damn thing about it.
Whereas for the rogue agent story to be believable, you have to think that not only do the rogue agents have access to Polonium, the ability to fly it into the UK, but they’re simultaneously stupid enough to use a substance which makes it bloody obvious who was responsible, instead of something nice and simple like cyanide, or even a gunshot (or for that matter - a hit and run). Not hugely believable.
But isn’t it obvious, Cian…? That’s exactly what the rogue agents want you to think.