I was under the impression that the polonium used to kill the former KGB spy was quite inexpensive, but now it looks like Litvinenko’s killers used polonium worth $10m to give him a massive overdose:
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.
They believe that whoever orchestrated the plot knew of its effects, but are unsure whether the massive amount was used to send a message — it made it easier for British scientists to detect — or is evidence of a clumsy operation.
A British security source said yesterday: “You can’t buy this much off the internet or steal it from a laboratory without raising an alarm so the only two plausible explanations for the source are that it was obtained from a nuclear reactor or very well connected black market smugglers.”
[...]
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.