Edited sentence: According to an article in British newspaper The Independent by Mary Dejevsky, "Scientists who know anything about polonium-210 find it hard to believe that anyone would choose it as a murder weapon against one individual, even if the purpose was to evade detection.But it also fits much more comfortably into another scenario: that of nuclear smuggling.For a start, it is extremely expensive.It seems far more likely that the polonium tracked in London was part of some sort of deal – a deal that, for whatever reason, went disastrously wrong.There have also been suggestions that polonium-210 was never intended to be used for assassination in the first place, in support of the theory that Litvinenko was part of a nuclear smuggling operation