The Criminal Use of Nuclear Disintegration
“It’s a good thing we won the war. If we hadn’t, I’d be hanged as a war criminal.”
—General Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay
THE HAGUE CONVENTIONS OF 1899 and 1907 were one of the first statements of the law of wars of civilized nations and a formal definition of war crimes. Many techniques of warfare were strictly prohibited, from the discharge of projectiles and explosives from balloons to the laying of automatic submarine contact mines. Convention IV specifically prohibited the use of poison or poisoned weapons in warfare. This specification was ratified by all major powers except the United States.
Although always prepared to do so until 1972, the United States never used poison in a war. A letter sent to Enrico Fermi from J. Robert Oppenheimer on May 25, 1943, seems to indicate that the use of a nuclear-derived poison was at least considered during World War II. Fermi was a nuclear physicist, imported from Italy, who conducted the first nuclear reactor experiment at the University of Chicago in 1942, and Oppenheimer was the technical head of the Manhattan Project, developing nuclear weapons at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico.
The letter, which was not declassified until 1984, begins:
Dear Fermi:
I wanted to report to you on the question of the radioactively poisoned foods, both because there are some steps that I have taken, and because Edward Teller has told me of the difficulties into which you have run.
The document goes on to suggest strontium-90 as the isotope of choice and to read “I think that we should not attempt a plan unless we can poison food sufficient to kill a half million men . . .” This letter implies that there was a plan to use strontium-90, an otherwise worthless by-product of the plutonium production at the Hanford site, to poison the enemy. To do so would have been a war crime, as defined by Convention IV, ratified by a representative of the Empire of Japan. There is no available evidence that the concept of radioactively poisoned food went any further.190
If somehow the Japanese navy had managed to destroy the United States invasion fleet with a single atomic bomb and had turned victorious in the war in the Pacific, General Curtis LeMay would probably have been near the top of the list of military personnel to be hunted down and prosecuted for war crimes. Not just for orchestrating the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would he be found guilty, but for his even more destructive cremation of Tokyo, the largest and most important city in Japan.
Since November 1944, when airfields were firmly established on Saipan and Tinian Islands, Tokyo was harassed on a weekly basis by B-29 airplanes in LeMay’s XXI Bomber Command. The most destructive mission of the entire war, flown on the night of March 9 into March 10, 1945, was Operation Meetinghouse. Loaded with 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs, 334 B-29s took off and flew to Tokyo. Of the 334 planes, 282 actually made it to the aiming point, and 226 of them were able to unload over the target, releasing 500-pound E-46 cluster bombs. Each E-46 carried 34 incendiary bomblets, loaded with napalm and impact detonators. As the bomb reached an altitude 2,000 feet above ground, a barometric sensor tripped a catch, and all 34 bomblets were set free to fly on their own. Each ignited about 4 seconds after touchdown, hosing down everything in reach with flaming gobs of jellied gasoline. The densely populated, highly flammable residential neighborhoods, unprotected by the most basic firefighting equipment, burned to the ground as the wind gusted at up to 28 miles per hour. More than 100,000 people died that night in Tokyo, about a million people were injured, 286,358 buildings were destroyed, millions were left homeless, and a quarter of the industrial production in Tokyo was lost in that one operation.
It took Japan a long time to get over it, and by 2007, the Japanese people were even starting to blame their own government for the highly destructive bombing raids. By November 1944, it should have been obvious that they were not going to win the war, it was reasoned, and they should have surrendered before Tokyo was wiped out. The wisdom of having attacked Pearl Harbor back in 1941 was even reexamined, and blanket apologies were issued to South Korea for uncivilized behaviors during the war. However, in 2013, in his second term as prime minister of Japan, Shinzō Abe turned it around. The bombing raids were “incompatible with humanitarianism, which is one of the foundations of international law.” He had effectively defined the American bombing raids as war crimes, but was too late to do anything about it. Technically, Curtis LeMay may not be guilty of having committed a crime using nuclear disintegration. He was simply directing warfare operations on a scale that had never before been attempted.
There are many other incidents involving electromagnetic radiation, often of nuclear origin, plus attacks with alpha and beta particles, and at least one mischief involving neutrons. All instances are definitely criminal acts. There have been murders, attempted murders, attempted suicides, and at least one attempted illegal fetal abortion. Many nuclear crimes have involved the theft of valuable or seemingly valuable radiation sources without an inkling of the danger involved with handling highly radioactive objects. When working a crime on the ragged, outer edge of technology, a lack of knowledge can be deadly.
Scheming toward ways of using radiation to maim or kill probably began shortly after Nikola Tesla published the first mention of painful irritation and open, oozing wounds caused by exposure to X-rays in Electrical Review on December 1, 1896. An ability to kill someone while standing off at a distance, not having to actually touch or be touched by the victim, had appealed to the bad side of humanity since the invention of the spear, sometime in prehistory. Using a firearm, as became popular in the fourteenth century, was better than swinging a blade, gouging eyes, beating with a rock, or choking with the hands, but the ultimate murder instrument would accomplish an absolutely clean kill, without spraying blood all over everything, tearing loose body fragments, and sending projectiles to bounce off walls and cause collateral damage to the furniture. This perfect weapon would leave no trace of itself, no bullet, cartridge case, or propellant residue. A singed spot on the shirt and the smell of burnt hair would be acceptable, or perhaps even a neatly cauterized hole in the abdomen, but nothing that bleeds.
Inventors, scientists, engineers, and technologists of every stripe and heritage have worked on this problem or at least thought about it. It has been given many names: the death ray, the death beam, the heat ray, the directed-energy weapon, the laser weapon system, the teleforce, the Ku-Go, and the peace ray. It even became a common device used in science fiction, in which every hero from Flash Gordon in The Flight of the Hawkmen to Han Solo in Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens carries one and uses it with abandon. This weapon class has become such a familiar, expected technology that sometimes we wonder why it isn’t yet available at the local gun shop.
Claims for successful development of a ray gun started in 1923, when Edwin R. Scott made the announcement from his laboratory in San Francisco, California. He hoped, of course, to sell ray-gun units to the United States Army by the tens of thousands, and his device was advertised as capable not only of cutting down enemy soldiers—it could melt an airplane in midair. Scott had worked for nine years in Yonkers, New York, under Charles “Forger of Thunderbolts” Steinmetz, the famous electrical engineer/socialist who pioneered everything from magnetic hysteresis to artificial lightning, and he had picked up a trick or two. Unfortunately, his ray gun did not work as advertised. A similar disappointment was created by inventor Harry Grindell Matthews a year later in the United Kingdom. Proposed demonstrations to the British Air Ministry of bringing down airplanes flying overhead were unsuccessful.
More credible was Nikola Tesla’s public announcement of his new design for a death beam, or “teleforce,” in the New York Times on July 11, 1934. Tesla had been a widely publicized electrical engineer since 1888, when he licensed his polyphase induction motor design to George Westinghouse and helped introduce the United States to alternating current. His list of inventions was impressive, including a radio-controlled boat demonstrated in 1898, a vaneless turbine using aerodynamic friction in 1906, and his famous high-voltage transformer operating at radio frequencies, producing millions of volts of electromotive force, the “Tesla coil.” He had been somewhat idle ever since 1917, when his Wardenclyffe power plant project on Long Island, New York, was abandoned due to lack of development funds. He had hoped to use an electrical resonance of Earth to send electrical power wirelessly, to be used freely all over the world. The concept of giving electrical power away for free did not appeal to those who had enough money to fund the endeavor.
By 1937, Tesla claimed to have a working model of his “charged particle beam weapon,” and that it was capable of dropping armies dead in their tracks and bringing down a fleet of ten thousand airplanes at a distance of 200 miles. It sounded large. He described the design in a paper written the following year as an open-ended vacuum tube used to accelerate charged particles using high-voltage electrical attraction. It is impossible to accelerate charged particles in air. It must be accomplished in a vacuum, but the particles have to move through air to reach the target, and the end of the evacuated tube will always discourage particles from venturing out into the atmosphere. Tesla solved this problem by making a virtual tube-end, consisting of a high-speed air jet blowing across the open end of the tube, provided by a Tesla turbine used as a blower. It was ingenious, in principle.
His “charged particle” electrically accelerated projectiles were not what we think of as charged particles, which are usually electrons, protons, or ionized atoms. They were small pellets of tungsten, possibly the size of talcum powder dust but still macroscopic and enormous compared to subatomic particles. Tesla had been working on the idea of an electrical weapon ever since 1900, when he noticed that it really stings to be hit by pieces of a metal anode flying off an overstressed, overheated vacuum tube. No demonstration was forthcoming, and on Tesla’s death by natural causes in 1943, nothing found in his effects indicated the location of his working model of the teleforce, the “weapon to end war.”
During World War II, there were two death-ray projects in Germany and one, the Ku-Go, in Japan using a high-powered magnetron vacuum tube to produce a tight beam of microwaves. The plan was to exploit a resonance in water molecules. Water tends to vibrate in resonance with radio waves oscillating at around a gigahertz. The energy of vibration expresses as heat, and the water can quickly boil if enough power is applied. A live human being is made mostly of water, so it would seem that a good way to kill somebody at a distance is to hit him with a beam of microwaves and boil him inside out. Research proved inconclusive.191
In 1960, light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, the laser, was invented. The earliest laser demonstrations could pop a blue balloon several feet away by making a brief, tight beam of red light using a rod made of synthetic ruby, stimulated by a xenon flashtube. Making it into a death ray was only a matter of scale, and it was quickly predicted that in a few years we would be hunting deer with a laser rifle connected to a backpack full of batteries. This application did not materialize, but the laser principle has since been applied to everything from playing video disks to cutting patterns in stainless steel.
There were several technical problems to scaling a laser up to a destructive weapon. For one thing, the laser beam was scattered by fog, clouds, dust, or smoke, ruining the energy concentration. A laser weapon was susceptible to active armor, in which the protective covering on a target would flash off when struck by the beam, diffusing its ability to do damage. Just burning off the paint on a tank could break up the hit, and the weapon gave its position away every time it flashed. However, a laser weapon could pop that blue balloon at a distance of several miles.
In the 1980s, the Strategic Defense Initiative proposed several death-ray methods of knocking out incoming ballistic missiles, and physical experiments included everything from an X-ray laser powered by a hydrogen bomb explosion to a visible-light laser carried in a Boeing 747. Research continues to this day on particle beam, laser, and microwave weapons for military purposes. The main problems with using any existing ray-gun technology for committing crimes are the monstrous size, weight, and cost of the weapon. It is nearly impossible to rob a liquor store with a piece that has to roll in on a tracked vehicle dragging a diesel generator behind it. The scale of any electronic destructive device, from the teleforce to the Excalibur Plus X-ray laser, is simply out of range for normal criminal activity.
An exception to this too-big rule may be an obscure weapon, developed in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when the Cold War between the USSR and the western world was running at its highest temperature. Nuclear annihilation was not impossible in those tense times, and the United States and its Soviet counterpart were still locked in competition on all fronts, including the conquest of outer space. At that time, the next frontier in space travel was to build a “permanent” space station, orbiting Earth and eventually acting as a way station on trips to the Moon or Mars. The Soviet Union was the first up, assembling a modular habitat in low orbit, beginning on February 19, 1986, when the base block, module DOS-7, was lofted into place using a Proton-6 launch system. The United States was far behind but had developed, at great cost, a reusable spaceship, the Space Shuttle. The Space Shuttle Columbia, or STS-5, first gained orbit with a human crew on November 5, 1982, and was successfully recovered in fairly good condition.
It was a time of great secrecy, distrust, and irrational fear verging on paranoia between the two great powers. High officials in the Soviet space program were honestly concerned that the United States, jealous of their successes in space and secretly coveting their sparkling new Mir space station, would come alongside in a space shuttle, throw grappling hooks, forcibly board the peaceful habitat, and claim it as captured territory. To the hard-core Soviet mind-set, the American government was an unstable combination of cowboys and gangsters, unpredictable and capable of any insane action. The cosmonauts would have to be armed against outrageous aggression.
It turns out that all cosmonauts were sent into space armed. The purpose of carrying a concealed weapon was protection from wolves at the landing point, which was usually in the Siberian wilderness, or from peasants with pitchforks having mistaken you for a Martian. The first man into orbit on April 12, 1961, Colonel Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin of the Soviet air force, packed a 9mm Makarov PM semiautomatic pistol. By the time the Mir space station was orbiting, cosmonauts were each issued a TP-82 triple-barrel survival gun, with two 12.5 by 70mm (40-gauge) shotgun barrels on top and a 5.45 by 39mm (0.22 caliber) rifle underneath. The removable buttstock doubled as a machete.
One thing you could never do with a TP-82 was shoot it in outer space, even if the guy who was locked up in the enclosure with you was driving you insane by incessantly popping his chewing gum. Inside the space station, no matter where you aimed, it would blow a hole in the airtight hull, completely ruining the mission, and outside, floating around in space, setting off one of the cartridges could blow you out of orbit from the recoil. Protection from astronauts/pirates would have to be accomplished with a zero-recoil device that didn’t shoot hard projectiles: a ray gun.
An ingenious laser pistol was developed by the staff of the Military Academy of the Strategic Missile Forces in Moscow, directed by the Honored Scientist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Doctor of Technical Sciences, Professor, Major-General Victor Samsonovich Sulakvelidze. The goal was a high-power, mode-locked mono-pulse laser capable of burning a hole in an enemy’s space suit, blinding any optical instrument including human eyes, and doubling as a medical, self-cauterizing laser scalpel. These requirements were met using a flexible fiber-optic cable as the laser resonator. The optical fiber was durable, reusable, driven by a flash of light, and capable of an energy pulse that could melt through steel, but it had to be several meters long. The ray gun had to be the size of a small military sidearm.
This mismatch of lengths was solved by winding the optical fiber on a spool, making it a short solenoid with the output end of the fiber bent so as to direct the beam out the “barrel” of the pistol. The fiber was driven to lase by a 10-millisecond flash of light striking the entire length of the laser medium. A small, disposable, one-shot flash lamp, the size and shape of a 10mm bullet cartridge, fit neatly into the cavity running down the center of the solenoid, and eight lamps were loaded into a magazine that slid and locked into the pistol butt. Each lamp was stuffed with a crumpled piece of thin zirconium foil and back-filled with pure oxygen. A tungsten-rhenium filament, coated with a dried pyrotechnic paste, ignited the zirconium by connection to a piezoelectric crystal struck with a cocked hammer, similar to a butane lighter ignition.192
To fire the weapon, you cock and load by pulling the bolt on top. Aim at the center of mass of the approaching enemy and pull the trigger without staring at the aiming point. It makes a slight bang as the flash lamp goes off and the air expands suddenly around the fiber solenoid. Push the catch on the left side of the gun with your thumb and the barrel tilts up. The spent lamp pops out on a spring. Push the barrel back into locked position and it snaps into place. Repeat until enemy is neutralized and police your empty rounds.
A working prototype weapon was built and was in testing when the Soviet Union started falling apart in late 1989, before it was put into production and given a military designation. The project was abandoned, American astronauts were invited to stay at the Mir while their bigger space station was being constructed, and the military academy was renamed for Peter the Great.193 The great Cold War in which no armies clashed, filled with prioritized and imaginative creativity in the destructive weapons category, simply spun down and closed shop. The production of ray guns would have to wait for another stimulus.
There is no manufactured ray gun or even a radiation-throwing assault rifle to fill the needs of antisocial behaviorists, but there is something even better. It can be small enough to fit in a pocket. It is completely solid state, and it has no moving parts. It makes no sound, and it has no odor, but if you lose it, it has a built-in locator beacon. If used correctly, it is 100 percent lethal, and the victim is unaware that he or she is being killed until it is too late. Death can be slow and agonizing. The simple threat of its implementation is strongly terrifying. It is the industrial radioactive source.
The use and proliferation of industrial sources of radiation have increased since shortly after the discovery of radium-226 in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie. Radium-226 emits alpha rays, which are heavy, highly energetic subnuclear particles emitted as a radium nucleus decays down into radon gas. It has a half-life of 1,600 years. It is only a rare contaminant in uranium ore, but its use as a cancer treatment made it, gram for gram, the most valuable substance on Earth in the early twentieth century. The alpha particles destroy what they slam into, but they have an extremely short range. In air, they travel about 1 centimeter before they are stopped by crashing into air molecules. Total shielding from the dangerous alpha particles can consist of a sheet of typing paper. Oncologists found that inserting a needle coated with radium into a cancer tumor would destroy whatever was touching the needle without causing damage to anything else in the body of the patient. It was an excellent therapy for an otherwise untreatable disease. One needle could be reused indefinitely, or until it stuck to a bandage and was lost. The radium needle was even self-sterilizing, as no bacteria could exist on a radium-226 alpha-ray source.
The use of solid-state radiation sources plus electrically generated X-rays became an important division of medicine with many applications. Although radium is now rarely used medically, radiation sources are still used to treat specific cancer tumors, both with implanted “seeds” and with externally directed radiation beams. In the technically advanced medical world, beams of tightly controlled radiation for disease treatment are now made artificially, using electrically driven particle accelerators, but similar therapy can be used in less developed situations where there isn’t even any electrical service, using metallic gamma-ray sources, such as cobalt-60 or cesium-137. These constantly radiating sources are controlled and kept safe by confinement in heavy metal shielding structures.
Radioactive sources are also used for medical diagnosis, from tracing the motion of blood flow using technetium-99m to observing metabolic localizations using fluorine-18. Both procedures involve injecting a radioactive isotope into the patient, and computer-assisted tomography (CAT scanning) is used to construct readable images, mapping the locations of radiation concentrations in the patient’s body. Dangerously large concentrations of gamma rays, controlled by aggressive shielding techniques, are also used to sterilize a wide range of medical devices, including surgical instruments. Bacteria can be wiped out on the surfaces of delicate plastic tools that could not withstand the high temperature of autoclaving by exposing them to high-energy gamma rays. The same technique is used to pasteurize dairy products and to keep fruit looking good and edible way past its expiration date.
Manufacturing and heavy industries also use radioactive sources for a wide range of tasks. Alpha emitters, such as americium-241, are used to ionize the air with alpha rays in smoke detectors, or to neutralize the electric charge that builds up on the product in a soft-drink can factory as it rolls through the fabrication process. Penetrating gamma radiation sources, such as iridium-192, cobalt-60, and cesium-137, are used to examine the quality of welds in applications ranging from shipbuilding to the plumbing in a nuclear power plant. The use of a simple, shielded metallic radiation source is much more practical in the field than using a fragile electronic X-ray machine that requires a power cord. Lighted buoys in the ocean, remote weather stations, every space probe sent out beyond the Moon, every lander on another planet, asteroid, or moon, and every Apollo Moon mission uses a chunk of very active plutonium-238 to generate electricity and make heat to prevent freezing. There are radioactive sources all over the Earth and the solar system, working twenty-four hours a day, never turning off, and covered with DANGER signs.
Small radioactive sources can do no harm, as long as the user is trained to be careful, always knows where the source is and where the open end is pointed, and, when the business dries up, does not abandon the thing. A new and appropriate home must be found for it. Owning a radioactive source is like owning a trained attack dog. It is useful to have when you need it, but when the job is done, you cannot just set it free.
The most common crime involving nuclear material is the petty theft of an abandoned industrial radiation source, leading to indirect death or injury due to ignorance of the danger involved. No matter how well a source is locked up when it is no longer needed, a scrap-metal thief will find a way to get his hands on it. Metal scroungers will take down light poles and industrial air-conditioner evaporators, which is a labor-intensive feat, just to get the copper for resale. A radiation source is particularly attractive because it is locked away securely, implying great value in a small, easily carried piece of metal.
A classic example of this type of crime occurred between February 27 and March 5, 1996, in Houston, Texas. A company named Larpen of Texas owned two gamma-cameras, and they provided radiographic services to a steel manufacturer on its 37-acre site in east Houston, near highway I-10. These cameras were heavy, shiny, and potentially dangerous. The larger of the two devices weighed 1,665 pounds and held 35.3 curies of cobalt-60. The small one weighed only 631 pounds and had 8.6 curies of cobalt-60. Most of the weight was very dense gamma-ray shielding, which in this case was depleted uranium. Uranium is much heavier than a like volume of lead, and its density makes it an excellent radiation shield.194 It takes a lot of shielding to protect yourself from 35.3 curies of a gamma-ray source. A naked source that size glows blue-green from Cherenkov radiation when under water, and it generates its own warmth.
Larpen of Texas went bankrupt in 1992, and by October the Texas Bureau of Radiation Control ordered the sources to be impounded and locked away. Proper disposal of the sources was mandated by 1994. It is difficult and very expensive to dispose of 43.9 curies of cobalt-60. You cannot just put it on a truck and send it to another state. Instead, the bureau had the door on the storage facility welded shut. The steel company went out of business, and all the structures surrounding the storage facility were torn down in 1995 until 1996, making the welded door look even more abandoned than it actually was.
An industrial radiographic camera of this type is a solid block of uranium-238 with a narrow, S-shaped passage through it, running back to front. A stainless steel covering protects the metallic uranium from corrosion, and there is a lifting lug on top. The cobalt-60 is a round or cylindrical pellet, as small as 1.5 millimeters in diameter, welded into a stainless steel capsule. The capsule is connected to a short piece of flexible steel cable called the pigtail. The cable is run into the entrance hole on the back of the uranium block until the source at the end is in the middle of the S-shaped passage. Gamma rays can only travel in a straight line, so in the S-shaped passage they cannot escape the shield, even though it is open at the front and back of the uranium block. In this safe condition, gamma rays from the powerful cobalt-60 source are not detectable.
To operate the camera, a long, flexible cable is connected to the pigtail and a hollow, flexible tube is connected to the front of the shield. The end of the tube is placed where a radiographic image is desired, usually on one side of a steel weld, and an X-ray film is affixed to the other side of the weld. Standing far away from the camera, the operator turns a crank on the end of his cable, the source capsule snakes out of the S-shaped passage and through the hollow tube, until it touches the test subject, and the weld is penetrated by the gamma rays, exposing the film. When the exposure is complete, the operator winds the source back into its place in the S-shaped passage.
On February 27, 1996, three thieves breached the door with vigorous use of hand tools and stole the radiographic cameras to sell to the highest bidder in the metal recycling trade. Fortunately for the men, the extremely active cobalt-60 sources were enclosed in the heavy shields, but they peeled off all the yellow-and-purple labels reading DANGER RADIOACTIVITY to make them easier to sell. Marketing the devices as stainless steel, they sold both to the Lockwood scrap yard for $200 cash.
Lockwood then resold them to A-1 Metals the same day. A-1 quickly determined that they were not junked stainless steel, as assumed. They mixed the two radiographic-cameras into a big load of scrap, and sent the lot to Gulf Materials Recycling Company, hoping that nobody would notice the hot potato that A-1 was trying to palm off.
Just as the truck from A-1 Metals entered the gate at Gulf Materials, the radiation alarm went off. Any big recycling yard has radiation detection equipment with a preset alarm point, specifically to prevent what was happening. Although the cobalt-60 radiation sources were deeply buried in the devices and could not give off radiation, the comparatively slight radiation from the uranium shields was enough to set off alarms. Gulf Materials segregated the cameras out of the scrap heap and sent them back to A-1 with a hearty “No, thanks.”
On the afternoon of February 29, A-1 Metals tried to return the cameras to the Lockwood scrap yard. Unfortunately, as it was being forklifted onto the truck, the pigtail in the larger camera was torn loose, and the source capsule was now outside the uranium shield. The truck driver showed up at Lockwood, but the yard was closed for the day. A-1 Metals got the Lockwood yard operator, Jesse Santana, on the phone to inform him that the stainless steel scrap he had sold them contained radioactive sources, and they were returning it. On March 1, the truck from A-1 returned to Lockwood. After the unwanted objects had been unloaded, the driver noticed a small piece of steel cable lying on the bed of his truck. The pigtail had fallen through the wooden pallet when the larger camera was off-loaded. He picked it up by the source capsule end and tossed it on the ground in the Lockwood yard, not realizing that it was a naked, 35.3-curie gamma-ray source. An employee noticed it on the ground, and wishing to neaten the yard, he kicked it under the corner of the office building.
Not knowing that the source was lost out of the big camera and was under his office, Santana sold it to another scrap yard. He sold the small camera, knowing full well that both devices were dangerously radioactive, to yet another scrap yard. If he had simply turned the devices over to the authorities, he would not have been paid for them. The yard that bought the small camera, realizing what it was, then palmed it off to another scrap yard. In three days, the radiographic cameras, which were supposed to be tightly controlled, made a tour of five scrap yards in Houston, Texas. Meanwhile, Jesse Santana and everyone at the Lockwood yard who came to his office was being hosed down with the 35.3-curie gamma source immediately under the wooden floor.
The right hand of the A-1 truck driver sustained a nasty radiation burn, and doses were sustained by everyone working at the Lockwood yard, the yard owner’s two children, five investigating police officers, and two Radiation Bureau personnel. When tracking down a naked 35.3-curie cobalt-60 source, “Show me where it’s at” is the incorrect way to proceed.
The two cobalt-60 sources were recovered by the Radiation Bureau on March 5, 1996, and six men were arrested for stealing and for knowingly receiving stolen property. The truck driver’s thumb received 3,000 rem of radiation. The scrap yard owner, 1.8 rem; the yard manager, 53 rem; his wife, 55 rem; his children, 39 rem; workers at the yard, 15 rem; and customers at the scrap yard, 0.16 rem. In perspective, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission sets a maximum permissible radiation dose to the public of 0.1 rem per year. A nuclear industry worker is permitted a dose of 5 rem per year.
Similar shenanigans have occurred in Russia but in greater number and with a larger death count. In 1990, when the Soviet Union caved in, it was a season of unprecedented plenty for metal thieves. The radionuclide power sources and heaters, abandoned in careless quantities all over the vast Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, were free for the taking once the government was no longer interested in owning and managing them. As was the case everywhere else, having them locked away only gave them an apparent high value, and the average person did not have a clue as to the danger of touching highly radioactive objects or even being in the vicinity of them.
The record time for dying by stealing an industrial radioactive source was set by a male resident of the town of Urus-Martan in the Chechen Republic, Russia. He was one of a gang of six Islamic Chechen guerillas attempting the theft of cobalt-60 from a chemical factory in Grozny on September 13, 1999. Anticipating an invasion of Grozny by the Russian army in what would become the Second Chechen War, the gang was probably planning to build a weapon using the stolen radioactive material. Grozny is the capital of the Chechen Republic. The Russian siege, attempting to regain central control over Chechnya, began a month after the attempted theft, on October 25, 1999.
The metallic cobalt-60 was formed into rods, each 12 centimeters long. There were nine rods per container, and twenty-eight containers were stored in a shielded underground vault in the basement of the building. Each rod had an impressive radioactivity of 27,000 curies, and without shielding, it was dangerous to be in the same building with it. The thieves managed to break open the vault and pry off the lid on a container. One of them grabbed a cobalt-60 rod and immediately felt unwell. He was dead in 30 minutes. Two of the others who were next to him died later, and the remaining three made it to a hospital in Rostov. Specialists from the Chechen Ministry of Emergency Situations worked to decontaminate the site as the city came down around them in a Russian artillery barrage.
That same year, three scrap-metal thieves broke into an unmanned lighthouse near St. Petersburg, Russia, and stole the radio-thermal generator, used to power the light. They managed to remove the strontium-90 radioactive core and drag it 50 kilometers to a bus station in the town of Kingisepp, before falling over dead from the 1,000 rad-per-hour of beta and gamma radiation at the surface of it.
Two years later, in May 2001, a similar thing happened in the Kandalaksha Nature Reserve near Murmansk, Russia, when four scroungers stole the radio-thermal generator out of a lighthouse and tried to remove the three strontium-90 radiation sources, each producing 35,000 curies of radiation.195 All four men were hospitalized with radiation poisoning.
The most completely analyzed case of radioactive-source theft was the Tammiku incident of 1994. It is unique in that it resulted in the death of both one person and one pet dog.
In 1963, a management facility for low- and medium-level radioactive waste was established at Tammiku, Estonia, in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. A concrete vault was buried in the ground, according to criteria established in Moscow in the 1950s, in a remote, wooded area about 12 kilometers south of the town of Tallinn. A barbwire fence surrounds the vault at a distance of 500 meters, and entrance is through a gate with a guardhouse. There were two metal signs on the gate, painted yellow with the international symbol for radiation in purple and the warning, in Estonian: DANGER RADIATION.196 When the central Soviet government dissolved in the early 1990s and Estonia became an independent country, no guard was left in the guardhouse.
After more than thirty years of operation as an active repository, 97 tons of radioactive waste were left in the vault, producing a combined radioactivity of 200 trillion becquerels, or 5,400 curies. By January 1993, the radiation had decayed down to 76 trillion becquerels, or 2,900 curies. That was still a great deal of radiation. Of those 2,900 curies, 24% of it was sealed cesium-137 radiation sources, probably retired from use in a sterilizing irradiator for medical instruments. The rest of it was a mixed bag of strontium-90, plutonium-239, radium-226, and americium-241.
There was also a separate, underground liquid-waste storage facility, consisting of a 200-cubic-meter cylindrical tank lined with stainless steel. The entrance door was secured with a padlock.
After midnight on October 21, 1994, three brothers, known only by RiH, RaH, and IH, sought to enrich themselves by stealing valuable metal from the Tammiku waste disposal facility and selling it to a scrap dealer in Tallinn. They easily scaled the 6-foot fence and cut the padlock on the steel door, bypassing the alarm system. The above-ground portal looked like a lean-to, with the doors on the slanted side. The doors creaked as they manhandled them open.
RiH climbed down into the open vault, and he grabbed the first thing on the top of a stack of fancy, machined metal containers. He passed it up to his brothers, and in transit, a metal cylinder fell out of the metal tube that was nestled in the container. It was 18 centimeters long and 1.5 centimeters in diameter. It was a dummy spacer, used in the tube to prevent a cesium-137 source from rattling. RaH picked it up and tossed it back into the pit. RiH noticed that another cylinder had fallen out at his feet. It was only 3 centimeters long. This was a 190-curie (7 TBq) cesium-137 radioactive source, producing a dose rate of 250,000 rem per hour at a distance of 1 centimeter from the cylindrical source.197 Bear in mind that a nuclear power worker has a maximum allowed dose of 5 rem per year. RiH picked it up and slipped it into his coat pocket. RiH had an odd feeling. Before long, the odd sensation evolved into a very sick feeling.
Wishing to explore further, the brothers defeated the lock on the liquid waste facility and entered, finding it stacked with nice-looking, shiny aluminum drums. They emptied several of them onto the floor and carried them out. Feeling woozy, RiH let a drum slip out of his hands, and it slammed one of his legs against the concrete wall of the entranceway. It hurt, and he was bleeding, but not much.
The brothers dragged the metal container and the drums through the woods 50 meters to the road, dropped them there, walked to their car, drove back to the drop point, and loaded the metal container into the trunk. They would figure out what to do with the drums later.
IH drove, and first he stopped at RaH’s house to let him out, and then to RiH’s house in Kiisa. By now, RiH was vomiting, over and over again. There was nothing left in his stomach to bring up, but still he vomited. The other occupants of the house were his stepson, RT; his wife, BK; his wife’s grandmother, AS; and the family dog. RiH hung his coat, containing the cesium-137 source, in the hallway and went to bed. Curious, the stepson, RT, went through the coat pockets, found the little metal cylinder, examined it up close, turning it over and over in his hand, and transferred it to the tool-drawer in the kitchen. IH drove on to Tallinn. He wanted to be at the recycling center when it opened and collect money for the metal in the empty container.
RiH was not getting any better, and a few days later, on October 25, 1994, he was checked into the hospital. He claimed that he had injured his leg working in the forest, and didn’t mention that a drum had fallen on him as he tried to steal metal objects at the Tammiku radiation waste facility. He was diagnosed with a crush injury, was medicated accordingly, and died on November 2, 1994. He was twenty-five years old. There was no reason to think that the death was related to radiation, except for the classic radiation sickness symptoms.
Six days later, on November 8, there was a need to dispose of some radioactive waste at the Tammiku facility. The workers immediately noticed that the padlocks had been cut off the doors to the vault and to the liquid-waste facility. Always monitoring their activity with radiation instruments, they noticed that the dose rate at the entrance had gone down by a factor of 100 since the last time they were here. They didn’t think to tell anybody about the broken locks or the decreased activity.
On November 9, RT was working on his bicycle, and he rummaged in the drawer in the kitchen, looking for a tool. He noticed the small metal cylinder that he had found in the coat pocket. He picked it up, examined it for a second, and put it back in the drawer. RT was thirteen years old. The dog, only four months old and living in the kitchen, was vomiting and urinating blood.
On November 16, the dog died. The next day, RT was admitted to the hospital with severe burns on his hands, and he had started vomiting. With questioning, it became clear that the injuries were caused by radiation. The police were summoned.
The Estonian Rescue Board dispatched a team to the house in Kiisa, arriving at 11:30 on the night of November 18. Their instruments picked up radiation before they even entered the house. All neighbors within 200 meters of the house, living in fifteen houses, were quickly evacuated. The rescue team cautiously opened the front door and stepped in. In the front hall they were measuring 5 rem per hour, meaning that if they stood there for an hour, they would receive their entire dose allowed for the next year. The team found the source to be a drawer in the kitchen, close to which their instruments registered 120 rem per hour. They left quickly and ordered up a lead shield box.
It took 2 minutes and 15 seconds to retrieve the cesium-137 source and drop it in the shield box. Two team members were outfitted with lead aprons and rubber gloves, but unfortunately, they lacked handling tongs. One of the team picked up the source with his index finger and thumb and dropped it into the shield box. The 2-second exposure to his hand was significant. With the lid screwed down, the dose-rate outside the lead box was 10 rem per hour.
By 2:30 P.M. the next day, November 19, the site was declared safe, and the neighbors were allowed to return. The source, never leaving its new lead shield box, was taken back to the waste facility at Tammiku. Six members of one family had been exposed to dangerous gamma radioactivity for twenty-seven days. The worst cumulated dose was to RiH, who received 183,000 rem to his thigh, the location of the pocket on his coat. Seven other individuals who had been in the house were also exposed.
It had been a sobering incident, instilling caution bordering on fear, and it pointed to problems in the control of radioactive sources in Estonia. The team, still spooked by the incident, kept their radiation detection gear turned on at all times. On January 14, 1995, they were on the road between Tallinn and Narva, on a routine inspection trip, when the dose set-point on the Geiger counter was exceeded and the instrument made a beeping noise. It took a while, digging through the snow, but eventually they found the cause. It was another cesium-137 source, loose, naked, and lying by the side of the road. They never found out how it got there. The metal container that was taken to the recycling yard was never recovered.
Premeditated murder is possible using radioactivity. Over the past sixty years, at least fourteen people have been purposefully killed and ninety-three injured using industrial or medical radiation sources, and at least one person was injured using an X-ray machine. Eight crimes were committed using cesium-137, five using cobalt-60, four with iridium-192, two with strontium-90, two with phosphorus-32, and one each with polonium-210 and californium-252, which wins the prize for the most exotic nuclide used as a weapon.198
Crimes by nuclear means are unusual and often purely evil. Many are difficult to document and verify, as criminal case records involving radioactivity are often sealed and unavailable. The only leakage may be through research papers or presentations in health physics symposia. An example is the case of a woman who attempted to self-induce an abortion using a medical X-ray machine. It happened in Pennsylvania, sometime between 1965 and 1968. That is all that the scientific community knows about the incident. In Suffolk County, New York, in 1996 two disgruntled citizens planned to commit murder using five canisters of radium. The intended victims were two county officials, and the radium was to be hidden in their food, homes, and cars to ensure adequate contamination. The only source of this crime report is the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Preliminary Notice of Event or Unusual Occurrence PNO-I-96-043, June 14, 1996. It would be interesting to know where the conspirators got enough radium to be dangerous.
One of the most horrifying cases of assault by industrial radioactive source involved a petroleum engineer and his eleven-year-old son. It happened in Harris County, Texas, in 1974, and interesting details of the crime are available.
A petroleum engineer in Texas named Kerry Andrus Crocker married the love of his life, Barbara, in December 1955. Their first son, Kirk, was born in 1961, and a few years later another son, Patrick, was born. By May 1970, that loving feeling was lost, and the couple divorced. Finding that they couldn’t live without each other and it was all just a misunderstanding, they remarried two months later. Further discovering that they honestly could not stand each other, they re-divorced seven months later, in February 1971. Crocker had visitation rights with the two boys at his place two weekends each month, normally on the first and third weekends, and during a month each summer.
Kirk, the older boy, immediately got the impression that his father wanted him dead, possibly as a once-removed retribution against his mother. First, there was the waterskiing incident in which he almost drowned, crying for help as he bobbed to the surface ten times while his father watched with studied detachment, and then there was the potentially fatal explosion and fire in the camping trailer where Crocker had insisted that Kirk stay by himself.
Eight months after the second divorce, on November 18, 1971, the oil well logging and perforating service involving Crocker was granted a license to have 1 curie of cesium-137 for wireline well logging.199 Thirty-seven billion atoms in 1 curie of cesium-137 decay each second. One curie is considered to be a great deal of radiation. The dangerous product of each disintegration is a 662 KeV gamma, capable of running clean through human body parts, leaving an ionized path of cellular-level micro-injuries behind it. Damage adds up as the highly radioactive source remains in place, shooting gamma rays in random directions.
In very small, sub-microcurie doses, the danger from gamma rays is easily controlled by heavy-metal shielding, distance from the source, and limited exposure times. Severe, life-threatening gamma-ray destruction from large radioactive sources, fractions of a whole curie, is undetectable as the radiation invades the body, until later when the dead and injured tissues begin to break open and ooze. The 1 curie of cesium-137 owned by the drilling company was divided into small pellets, each a tiny, metallic cylinder about the size of a pencil eraser.
The original license was amended twice, to allow the company to have two sealed canisters, each containing enough cesium-137 pellets for a disintegration rate of 2 curies. Crocker was named in the license document as the only person to use and be responsible for these radioactive sources, all 4 curies of them.
Feeling a vague sense of danger, in April 1972, Kirk, then eleven years old, was visiting his father’s apartment when he was left alone for several hours. He was told to watch television while Crocker went on some errands but to listen to the programs using the headphones. The walls were thin, and Crocker said that he did not want his neighbors to complain of the noise. Kirk could not help but notice that the earpieces were stuffed with cotton, and he started picking them apart. Out rolled two shiny silver pellets. He called his mother, expressing concern over the strangeness of it, but she told him not to worry about it. For some reason, Crocker had tried to expose his son to cross-fired gamma rays to the brain from cesium-137 radiation sources borrowed from the well-logging set. Where he had handled the pellets, Kirk’s fingers turned red and painful, as if he had picked up the wrong end of a hot fire poker.
Kirk visited Crocker again on the first weekend of July 1972. This time, he was instructed to drink a glass of orange juice, and at the bottom of the glass was a partially dissolved pill, apparently a sleep-inducing pharmaceutical. He passed out on the couch in the den. He was suspicious upon waking, and he poked around in the cushions, finding a thin sock retaining two impressions of small cylinders. It looked as if the sock had recently contained two pellets, similar to the ones he had found in the headphones. On the end table, he saw some sort of unusual instrument. He was terribly nauseous. Showing classic signs of radiation sickness, he vomited until the dry heaves were exhausting. Crocker explained to him that the instrument, which was later identified as a radiation survey meter, was used to clean guns. Kirk also noticed a pair of long metal tongs nearby.
Visiting again on the third weekend of July 1972, there was a party going on in the apartment, so Crocker had him once more drink orange juice with a pill in it and go to sleep in the bedroom. He awoke the next morning, again feeling terribly nauseous and finding a medicine bottle containing three of the little cylinders rattling in his pillow. He found his father and his little brother sleeping off the party in another apartment. Back home, his mother was concerned with a red rash developing on his thighs. His right thumb, where he had handled the medicine bottle, was red, painful, and swollen.
Kirk was again obviously exposed to radiation in August 1972, when during his scheduled visit he was instructed to lie down on a couch where he could not help but notice a sock with two cylinders in it under a cushion. His father and his younger brother left for an outing, and after they returned, he noted that his father carried the sock out to his car, held at arm’s length.
The last provable exposure incident occurred in a motel room during a visitation in October 1972, when again he was instructed to take a pill dissolved in orange juice. He awoke to find a sock with two cylinders in it draped over his legs and his father asleep in his car. Between April and October 1972, there were probably eight purposeful irradiations, but no connection was immediately made to the strange metal cylinders and Kirk’s fits of vomiting or the ever-worsening rash on his thighs. The hair on one side of his head was coming out in clumps.
Kirk was under a doctor’s care by this time, but the cause of the rash remained a mystery. He wasn’t responding to any attempted treatment. The skin was dying, leaving bare sores that would not heal. A plastic surgeon, Dr. Thomas Cronin, was called in to repair the affected areas, and he immediately recognized the symptoms. His specialty was rebuilding tissues that had been severely damaged in cancer treatment by directed radiation beams. The injuries he saw on this child, necrosis ulceration, were caused by prolonged exposure to gamma rays. His right ankle was obviously affected, showing “deep indolent ulceration” and “a tendon which was dead due to the effects of radiation.” His inner thighs, right at the groin, showed “extensive ulceration and scarring with telangiectasia,” or “spider veins.” Further testing revealed that his right testicle was no longer a functioning organ. Its internal mechanism had been replaced with inert fibrous tissue, and the left testicle was reduced to a nonfunctioning, hardened lump. In medical terms, he had been castrated. Kirk would have twenty-three reconstructive surgical procedures over the next six years, he would have to take testosterone replacement injections on a regular basis to prevent eunuchism, and he was likely to develop leukemia in the next twenty years.
On January 31, 1974, Kirk’s enraged stepfather, Harrie Smith, called the Texas Department of Health Resources, Radiation Control Branch, to accuse Kerry Crocker of having willfully exposed Kirk to radiation and causing burns on his thighs, ankle, and thumb. Smith was asked to put his accusations in writing, and the department received his letter on February 4, along with a list of sixteen doctors who had examined the boy, sketches of the cylindrical pellets, the handling tongs, and the radiation survey meter. Satisfied that a felony had occurred and realizing that the laws regarding radiation handling were inadequate to deal with it, the department notified the district attorney in Houston.
A grand jury on May 2, 1974, indicted Kerry Crocker for assault with intent to murder, castration, disfigurement, assault with intent to maim, and intentionally causing injury to a minor. He was arrested later that day and was released on $10,000 bond. The trial started on March 31, 1975, in the 178th District Court of Harris County, Texas, and a six-man, six-woman jury was selected. The prosecution called thirteen witnesses, almost all of whom declined to accept a professional fee.
On April 16, 1975, the case went to the jury, and after ten hours of deliberation Kerry Crocker was found guilty of castration. He was given the maximum sentence, ten years in prison plus a $5,000 fine. He immediately posted an appeal and was set free on a $10,000 bond. He retained visitation rights to the younger child, but only under the mother’s supervision. The appeal was denied in May 1978, and Crocker immediately jumped bail. It would take three years to recapture him, and he began to serve his sentence in January 1981.
A model prisoner, Kerry Crocker was released on parole in October 1986. Kirk still fears him, believing that revenge may be his only goal in life. Kirk’s mother died in 1982. He works in real estate and champions the cause of children affected by marital discord.
As a method of expressing murderous intentions, using radioactive sources has been more common than one would hope. In February 1995, in Zheleznodorozhny (near Moscow), Russia, someone quietly placed a 1.3-curie cesium-137 industrial radioactive source in the left door pocket of a truck belonging to someone he did not like. The victim rode around for five months with gamma rays impinging on his left thigh, soaking it down with a cumulative dose of 6,500 rads. (A 1,000-rad exposure is considered fatal.)200 His whole-body exposure totaled at 800 rad. On July 7, 1995, the reason his thigh was bothering him was found in the door pocket, and he immediately checked into a hospital. He was suffering from epilation of the thigh (hair falling out), moderate pancytopenia (reduced red and white blood cells), and azoospermia (reduced sperm count). After eight months of treatment, he developed myelodysplastic syndrome (bone marrow failure), which progressed into full-blown leukemia. He remained hospitalized until his death on April 27, 1997, fifteen months after having discovered the tiny pellet of cesium-137 in his truck.
Also in Moscow, on April 14, 1993, Vladimir Kaplun, director of the Kartontara packing company, was not popular among all of his employees. Someone slipped a cesium-137 radiation source into the seat of his chair, and he sat on it for several weeks, developing what would eventually be diagnosed as symptoms of radiation sickness. He died a month later in the hospital, after which the contamination of his seat was identified by colleagues.
A similar radiological assault occurred at the La Hague site, a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant on the Cotentin Peninsula in northern France, on May 11, 1979. The plant was originally built for producing military plutonium, but by 1969, the plutonium-239 stockpile was sufficient, and the facility was turned over to civilian power companies for power-reactor waste processing. It extracts plutonium from spent reactor fuel, which is then mixed with new uranium fuel for power production. About 1,700 metric tons of spent fuel are processed yearly, and fuel from power reactors in France, Japan, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain, and the Netherlands has passed through the La Hague plant.
An employer had incurred the wrath of an employee who tried to kill him by hiding a graphite fuel element plug, warm to the touch with an energetic mixture of fission products, under the seat of his car. By the time he figured out that something was wrong, the victim had sustained a 10- to 500-rad accumulated dose to his testicles, and 25 to 30 rads to his spinal bone marrow. The employee was terminated, fined $1,000, and confined in prison for nine months, convicted of poisoning by radiation.
A similar crime occurred on August 24, 1991, in Bratsk, an industrial town in Siberia on the Angara River. Bratsk is famous for the Gulag Angara prison labor camp, a pollution of mercury in the ground equal to half the world’s total mercury production in 1992, and a record low temperature in January of 95 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. It has been declared an ecological disaster zone, and it was evacuated in 2001 due to pollution from the Bratsk aluminum plant.
Two company directors at the wood fiberboard plant in Bratsk discovered cesium-137 radiation sources that had been hidden in the seats of their chairs. One of them developed radiation sickness, but not trusting anyone who worked in their plant, they found the sources before absorbing fatal doses.
On June 8, 1960, a nineteen-year-old radiological laboratory worker in Moscow having unfavorable relationships with his family committed suicide by purposefully exposing his body to a cesium-137 radiation source. He took a pellet in a hermetically sealed aluminum capsule from the “plant gamma defectoscopy” lab, put it in his left pants pocket, and walked around with it for five hours. He then shifted it to his lower abdomen and then to his back, experiencing close contact with the source for another fifteen hours. The dose to his trunk was 3,000 rad, and his whole body received somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 rad. He developed radiation sickness symptoms in a few hours. Bloody diarrhea became intense after thirteen days of agony, and he passed away in the hospital two days later. It was a miserable way to die.
By 1978, iridium-192 had taken over as the most used radiography source, knocking cobalt-60 out of first place. Both nuclides, cobalt-60 and iridium-192, are metastable, having two sequential decay modes, with the first decay leading to no transmutation of the element. In the case of cobalt-60, the first decay has a very short half-life (10.47 minutes), but the second (beta minus) decay has a longer half-life of 5.27 years, and it emits an impressive 1,333 KeV gamma ray. The half-life is short enough to make it vigorously radioactive but long enough that a source does not play out too quickly to be practical. The iridium-192 first decay has a half-life of 250 years, making it much less radioactive than the cobalt nuclide, and the gamma ray is less energetic, at a modest 317 KeV. It takes a physically larger iridium-192 source to do the same job that a tiny pellet of cobalt-60 or cesium-137 will accomplish, but this makes the source larger and less likely to be lost, and the gamma rays require less shielding for safety. Radiography in industry, particularly of welds, is carried out routinely in the field. The monolithic radiation source acts as an X-ray machine, exposing a large sheet of photographic film and disclosing otherwise invisible cracks and voids in a metal test subject.
In 1978, in the United Kingdom, a radiographer intentionally exposed himself to an iridium-192 radiation source, trying to commit suicide. Iridium-192 was the wrong nuclide for this, and he only got a whole body dose of 152 rads, enough to make him very sick but not to end his life.
Another incident involving iridium-192 occurred in Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China, in May 2002. A Chinese nuclear medicine specialist, Guy Jiming, used forged papers to get a license so that he could buy a radiography source full of iridium-192 pellets. His business rival, whom he wanted gone, had an office in the local hospital. Jiming sneaked in and unloaded the entire barrel of iridium-192 pellets on top of the ceiling panel right over his desk. Soon, the victim was reporting a list of strange symptoms to his supervisor, including memory loss, fatigue, appetite loss, headaches, lots of vomiting, and bleeding gums. Another seventy-four hospital staff members who came in and out of his office began complaining of similar though lesser symptoms. A quick examination of the office with a radiation survey meter turned up the iridium-192 pellets, which were serial numbered. Jiming was soon arrested, convicted of attempted murder on September 29, 2003, and given a suspended death sentence. He is spending the rest of his life in a prison somewhere in China.
Phosphorus atoms are found in many organic compounds, occurring in everything from metabolic pathways to the DNA molecule. A synthetic phosphorus isotope, phosphorus-32, is made by bombarding sulfur with neutrons for use in biochemistry and molecular biology studies. It emits a beta ray that can be tracked with radiation detection instruments, and this feature makes it valuable for tracing phosphorylated molecules. The beta ray, an electron, is energetic at 1.7 MeV, and in air it has a range of about one meter. It has a very short half-life of 14.29 days, which makes it extremely radioactive and potentially harmful in anything but trace quantities.
Anything radioactive can be accused of causing cancer, but phosphorus-32 is one of only six radionuclides rated as causing cancer in humans by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). The others are iodine-131, thorium-232, radium-228, radium-226, and radium-224. Although it is automatically deposited in bone tissue, phosphorus is also incorporated into DNA, and as such it can turn up in any cell in the body.
In 1996, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that in the past twenty years there were ten known deliberate poisonings in biological research laboratories in the United States using phosphorus-32. In bio-research, a disgruntled employee “going postal” with the silent, undetectable, but deadly effects of a phosphorus-32 dose is apparently more probable than having the offender show up with an assault rifle. It is also possible to get away with this crime.
The worst case may have been at the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1995, when twenty-seven researchers, including a pregnant female scientist, were purposefully exposed to phosphorus-32. The female victim, Dr. Maryann Wenli Ma, had the largest internal dose, somewhere between 8.0 and 12.7 rem, which was significant. She had been pregnant for seventeen weeks when her contamination was discovered, and she may have been the only intended victim. She and her husband, Dr. Bill Wenling Zheng, were visiting fellows in Dr. John Weinstein’s lab on the fifth floor in Building 37, and there were no radionuclides in their lab.
For reasons not divulged, late in the afternoon on June 6, 1995, Dr. Zheng turned on a Geiger counter in the lab and noticed that there was a radioactive source somewhere near it. The rate meter on the instrument, indicating the number of gamma and beta rays intersecting the detector tube per minute, showed a reading that was obviously above the normal background level. The source was found quickly. It was his wife, Dr. Ma, internally contaminated with phosphorous-32. She was taken to Holy Cross Hospital that evening.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) immediately sent an Augmented Inspection Team to NIH to find the source and the cause of the contamination. It was clearly not accidental. There was phosphorus-32 on the floor in front of the refrigerator in the break room, where Dr. Ma had taken out her leftover Chinese dinner to eat for lunch. Dr. Ma and Dr. Zheng were quick to point to Dr. Weinstein, their supervisor, as the culprit, saying that he wanted them to abort their child so that their research would not be interrupted and their work could be patented. The water cooler in the hallway was found to be internally contaminated with phosphorus-32. Everyone in the building was required to pee in a cup, and from these samples it was discovered that this one source had contaminated another twenty-seven NIH personnel.
Weinstein was eventually cleared of any suspicion, although Zheng and Ma accused him in every way possible, including that he delayed her trip to the hospital and he interfered with her treatment for radiation poisoning. Zheng and Ma demanded that the radiation source license for NIH be suspended, but there was nothing found wrong with the NIH radiation handling procedures or records, and the request was denied.
There were questions regarding Dr. Zheng’s candor. Why, for example, did he turn on a Geiger counter in a lab that contained no radioactive sources? How did he know that it was phosphorous-32? When he and his wife had used a phosphorous nuclide, it was phosphorous-33, with a longer, 25.3-day half-life and a weaker beta ray. The only ways to tell which nuclide was making the beta radiation were analyzing a sample with a beta spectrometer or reading the label on the original container. Zheng never answered these questions posed by the NRC investigation. No one was ever accused of any wrongdoing in the NIH radiation poisoning case.
This particular type of crime is not confined to the United States. In Taiwan, the Republic of China, from October 1, 1994, to February 15, 1996, a young male graduate student at the Institute of Plant Pathology was poisoned by phosphorous-32 on his eating utensils and in his drinking cup. The phosphorus-32, stolen from an adjacent molecular biology lab, was put there on thirty occasions by a fellow student who apparently had bad feelings toward him. The victim suffered from diarrhea, abdominal pains, a poor appetite, and the loss of his moustache before the perpetrator was finally caught in the act. His adverse health effects persisted through 1999.
So, what can one do to prevent injury or death by the unnoticed presence of a deadly radioactive source? Ideally, an individual should carry a Geiger counter with the beta-filter opened and the power turned on at all times. Check your seat before you sit down! Unless you are an experimental nuclear physicist or a health physicist at a nuclear plant, this is not going to happen. However, most people in the industrialized world now carry a radiation detector with them wherever they go. It is your smartphone.
All smartphones now have at least one matrix of millions of charge-coupled photo-sensors on board, used as a camera to record visible-light images. This feature is not only useful for making self-portraits and YouTube videos, it can be used to detect gamma or X-rays. This phenomenon has been thoroughly studied and verified by Rolf-Dieter Klein of the Helmholtz Institute in Jena, Germany, home of the rapidly advancing field of laser-induced Wakefield particle acceleration. There is now an application to exploit this effect available for Apple and Android smartphones. Look in the App Store under “radioactivity counter.” Most of the Geiger-counter apps are pranks, meant to simulate a Geiger counter and cause panic when you surreptitiously turn up the radiation count. After reading this chapter that should not seem amusing.
The image plane of the built-in camera is essentially two-dimensional for this application, and it lacks the depth and mass of a scintillation crystal or even a gas-filled Geiger-Mueller tube, so most of the gamma rays pass right through it without interacting with the pixels. Its lack of sensitivity is therefore worse than a civil defense ion chamber, but it has the advantage of being connected to a powerful digital computer in the telephone. The computer can integrate counts over minutes or hours, averaging continuously and displaying a remarkably accurate gamma-ray count rate and even a radiation dose rate. The camera’s response is linear over a wide range of rates, and it therefore can be used for dosimetry if calibrated using a known gamma source. Light to the camera must be blocked by covering the lens with a piece of black tape. Use it in “cloud” mode so that it shows each gamma ray hitting the camera as a flash of light on the screen, have fun, and try to stay away from recycling yards.
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190 This document seems odd and out of place in the steady stream of important letters bouncing around the country during the hectic days of the Manhattan Project. It is vague and wordy, but there is obvious effort to mention several people, including theoretical physicist Edward Teller, Harvard president James Conant, General George C. Marshall, Nobel Prize winner Arthur Compton, medical physicist Joseph Hamilton, director of the Metallurgical Laboratory Samuel Allison, and director of the chemistry division of the met lab, James Franck. No documented response or follow-up to this letter seems available. It is almost as if it were a dummy proposal, meant as a test to find any security leakage. This was definitely a tactic used during the war, to drop a false letter-bomb into the stream of communications and listen for an immediate response from Japan or Germany in encrypted messages. In this case, it may well indicate a security leak. The Japanese military was never convinced that the United States had an atomic bomb, but they were braced for an attack using gravity bombs and artillery shells filled with radioactive poisons.
191 The only useful thing related to these projects was the microwave oven. Although the formal military projects remained classified, navy personnel could not help but notice that the way to clear birds off a radar antenna, which blasts out hundreds of watts of pulsed microwave power, is to turn it on, which makes them instantly flop over dead. The dead birds falling on the deck appeared cooked and ready to eat. The microwave oven was patented by Percy L. Spencer of Raytheon on October 8, 1945, when he noticed that a candy bar melted in his pocket when he got too close to a radar transmitter being tested on a bench. Microwave ovens were used to make food in cramped submarine galleys long before the Radarange became a popular accessory in American kitchens.
192 The effect is very similar to an old-fashioned flashbulb, once used as a light source for indoor photography, but flashbulbs used crumpled magnesium wire or, in the most powerful bulbs, magnesium foil. The zirconium foil gives a threefold increase in the specific light energy over magnesium, with a 5 to 10 millisecond burn at 5,000 degrees Celsius. Certain metal salts are added to the zirconium foil to skew the light spectrum toward the absorption resonance of the laser medium.
193 This was not the only laser sidearm in the works. There was also a smaller revolver version, having six flash lamps in a cylinder that would rotate into position and activate a ruby-rod laser. The flash was ignited by a percussion cap instead of an electrical pulse from a piezoelectric crystal. There may have also been a single-shot derringer version that a cosmonaut could keep hidden in a pouch on his right boot. It was rough out there in space. These devices are now on display in the Peter the Great Military Academy museum in Moscow.
194 Larpen of Texas actually had three radiography “cameras,” used to expose X-ray film to find hidden flaws in steel. The radioactive sources were shielded so as to direct gamma rays out a small opening in the front of the device, and a shutter would close when it was not in use, protecting people from the directed rays. The third camera used iridium-192, but it was old, and its radiation source had decayed down to the point where it was no longer useful or even terribly dangerous.
195 There were actually eight different types of radioisotope thermal generators used in lighthouses in the Soviet Union, ranging from the Beta-M, generating 10 watts of electricity and 230 watts of heat, up to the IEU-1M, making 120 watts of electricity and 2200 watts of heat. The Beta-M weighed only 560 kilograms, and it was the easiest one to steal. The IEU-1M weighed about 2,100 kilograms, and it was just too bulky to make off with. The electricity from a radioisotope thermal generator is made by heating up one side of a thermocouple array using a strontium-90 heat source, made into a hard, ceramic block, and cooling the other side with air moving by convection over a circle of fins. There are no moving parts. A shield made of depleted uranium is supposed to protect handlers from the strontium-90 radiation. The 10 watts provided by a Beta-M was almost enough to run a small fluorescent light, warning ships in the dark several meters away.
196 Signs cautioning about the dangerous presence of radiation are officially available in most languages, including Klingon.
197 “TBq” is short for terabecquerels, or trillions of becquerels. One becquerel is 1 nuclear disintegration per second.
198 The case of californium-252 used for an attempted murder in Riga, Latvia, on August 18, 1988, is insufficiently documented for inclusion in this chapter, but the successful use of polonium-210 as a poison on November 1, 2006—the murder of Alexander Litvinenko—has been publicized to the point where there is nothing I can add. I recommend the book The Litvinenko File: The True Story of a Death Foretold by Martin Sixsmith (Macmillan, 2007). I agree with the author’s analysis and his conclusions.
199 For gas and oil-well drilling, a nuclear wireline log is a record of the gamma-ray backscatter intensity from a fixed radiation source into a Geiger counter probe slowly lowered into a drilled well on a steel wire. The amount of backscatter indicates the level of porosity or the density of the rock in the hole along its depth, usually recorded on a strip-chart or stored as a digital recording on a portable computer. It is particularly useful for mapping the shale beds in a drill hole. A layer of shale makes a tight cap over an underground oil or gas reservoir, and its presence indicates that you are drilling in the right place. The shale is unusually solid and impermeable to oil, and it gives an enhanced gamma backscatter over sand or broken rocks. A nuclear log has an advantage over other methods of shale-finding, in that the gamma-rays from cesium-137 can penetrate the steel pipe that lines a cased well and feel for the quality of the rocks on the other side of the tube wall. Crocker was an independent consultant at the time, and he was employing Sidney Morrison’s well-logging company for oil-drilling jobs. Without his knowledge, Crocker made a copy of Morrison’s radioactive source license and used it to justify access to the controlled cesium-137 pellets on demand.
200 A rad is 1 erg of energy from radiation deposited in 1 gram of matter. It is considered an obsolete measure of accumulated radioactive dose, but it was in use for so long, used in so many thousands of nuclear physics documents, it remains a familiar measure. The more current, SI measure is the gray, which is equivalent to 100 rads. The rad (or the gray) is used to express the amount of radiation absorbed by anything solid. To more accurately express the amount of radiation absorbed by a human, the rem (radiation equivalent man) can be used, or the current SI unit, the sievert. To improve a rad or gray measurement into to a rem or a sievert, it is multiplied by a fudge factor that takes into account the biological damage specific to the type of radiation involved. The “quality factor” for alpha particles, for example, is 20. Neutrons have a quality factor of 10, and gamma rays, X-rays, and beta rays have a quality factor of 1. When discussing radiation damage by gamma rays, 1 rad is the same as 1 rem. Further rem improvements can involve taking into account the sensitivities and vulnerabilities of individual human organs or the age or gender of the subject, but for postexposure estimates of whole-body exposures to radiation, the quality factor based on radiation type is as good as can be expressed.