Something fell from the sky Sunday night, and it wasn't a lucky star. Apparently, something went wrong, and instead of travelling sixty million miles to Mars it ended up in our own backyard, probably in the Pacific Ocean. That may sound comforting, but when you're dealing with plutonium, the stakes don't come any higher.
Plutonium is the most toxic substance known.
It is so toxic that less than one millionth of a gram, an invisible particle, is a carcinogenic dose. The launching of rockets containing plutonium is a deadly game of Russian Roulette. No less than the health of every living thing on the planet is at risk. At the time of this writing, nobody knows if the plutonium container remained intact and sunk into the ocean, or if it spewed its lethal contents. In either case the plutonium will remain hotly radioactive for thousands of years.