This story goes out of its way to sound alarmist, but fortunately it’s accurate if you read the whole thing. Fox News’s George Kindel discovered (as did some of my coworkers this week) that you can buy Polonium-210 — the poison that killed ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko — online.

Later in the article readers find:

“You would need about 15,000 of our Polonium-210 needle sources at a total cost of about $1 million to have a toxic amount.”

Not much of a threat, really. I doubt whoever poisoned the man got a million accomplices to order the substance all at once (it has a short half-life, so spreading the orders out would mainly just require more orders), and I doubt anyone else will pull that off.

The ridiculous undercurrent here is the notion that people absolutely cannot have access to dangerous materials. We can all own knives, rat poison, guns, martial arts training, ropes, box cutters and nail clippers, but we’re going nuts that people can get an obscure chemical in incredibly small quantities. The former spy could have been murdered in any number of ways, with any number of plentiful, legal materials. The murderer just happened to pick polonium.

Also, I almost wonder if picking polonium was an outright bad decision. Doing so eliminates so many suspects, because the perpetrator had to (A) think to use polonium and (B) have access to enough of it to poison someone. Indeed, scientists have already found out which Russian plant the poison came from. Why not slip the KGB alum something else, something that would make everyone in the world a potential suspect?

An aside. From the article:

“It also makes you wonder that if this dead former KGB spy, Victor Litvinenko, and his wife Marina, and a mysterious Italian nuclear expert named Mario Scaramella all were poisoned by it — Litvinenko fatally — then someone’s spending a lot of money on Polonium-210, or has access to a lot of nuclear materials.”

Way to go, genius. If someone poisoned a victim with polonium, that someone HAD POLONIUM!

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.