US 'planned radioactive murders' like Litvinenko's
The US Army once considered using radioactive poison to assassinate enemy leaders, newly-released documents show.
Decades before Alexander Litvinenko was killed, apparently by Russian agents by a dose of polonium 210 in London, military chiefs in Washington were considering similar methods.
The recently declassified documents, seen by the Associated Press, show the idea was approved at the highest levels of the Army in 1948.
It was a well-hidden part of the military’s pursuit of a “new concept of warfare” that was to have used radioactive materials from atomic bomb-making to contaminate swaths of enemy land or to target military bases, factories or troop formations.
Military historians said they have never before seen evidence that the overall strategy included individual assassinations.
No names appear in the government documents declassified in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the AP.
The records were released, heavily censored by the government to remove specifics about radiological warfare agents and other details.
The documents give no indication whether a radiological weapon for targeting high-ranking individuals was ever used or developed by the US.
And they leave unclear how far the Army project went. One memo from December 1948 outlined the project and another that month indicated it was under way. The main sections of several subsequent progress reports in 1949 were removed by censors before release.
Whether the work was moved to another agency such as the CIA is also unclear. The project was given final approval in November 1948 and began the following month, just one year after the CIA’s creation in 1947.
Papers said: “This class of munitions is proposed for use by secret agents or subversive units for lethal attacks against small groups of important individuals, e.g., during meetings of civilian or military leaders.”
A memo said any lethal radioactive attacks against individuals should be made impossible to trace to the US government.
“The source of the munition, the fact that an attack has been made and the kind of attack should not be determinable, if possible,” it said.
“The munition should be inconspicuous and readily transportable.”
Radioactive substances were thought to be ideal for this use, the document said, because of their high toxicity and the fact that the targeted individuals could not smell, taste or otherwise sense the attack.
“It should be possible, for example, to develop a very small munition which could function unnoticeably and which would set up an invisible, yet highly lethal concentration in a room, with the effects noticeable only well after the time of attack,” it said.
Tom Bielefeld, a physicist at Harvard University who has studied radiological weapons said that the Litvinenko poison polonium has just the kind of features that would have been suitable for the lethal mission described in the documents.
