Can cancer be weaponized as a political assassination tool

Factual Questions
1

I know a lot of nations have experimented with using various poisons to assassinate people. Ricin, polonium, thallium, blowfish poison, etc. The CIA even admitted to creating a ‘heart attack gun’ in the 1970s that I think was full of blowfish poison. In Saddam’s Iraq they would use thallium poison to deal with dissidents. Arafat was poisoned with polonium. The USSR had an umbrella with a ricin tip. etc.

So what about giving someone cancer, is that likely as a tool of assassination? Would that take too long (compared to a heart attack or stroke)? On one hand it would take a while, on the other it would be less suspect.

I know there are hundreds and probably thousands of carcinogens. It doesn’t seem like it’d be that hard to give them to someone, watch them get cancer and die in a few years.

Could radiation via X-rays or gamma rays be used to give someone cancer from a distance? If someone was a few hundred miles away would a gamma ray gun or an X-ray gun aimed at someone in their sleep be able to infect them with cancer (without making others around them get it too)?

Or is cancer a disease that takes so long to develop it would be a waste of time to even bother (ie, are there carcinogens so potent that just exposure for a few hours or weeks is enough to give someone terminal cancer, or would even the most potent ones take years and years to work)?

Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with TCDD, which is a very potent carcinogen. However he had several thousand times the normal amounts in his body, and he survived.

2

IIRC, politicians have been attacked by stashing large amounts of radioactive material in their desks or elsewhere in their environment. That seems like it’d meet your criteria.

3

Cancer isn’t fast enough. When you assassinate someone, trust me on this, you kind of want them to drop dead immediately. Not slowly decay over several months but still be able to issue orders and give speeches and stuff.

4

buddha_david has an excellent point - even though you know you can induce cancer with sufficient exposure to radiation or other carcinogens, you have no way of knowing how long that cancer will take to develop/progress. You could, through proper selection of agent, give someone one of the less survivable cancers, like liver or pancreatic cancer…

But how could you possibly know how long in terms of months/years before the cancer is detected and before the person finally expires? Generally assassins are insufficiently patient to wait five years before the target dies.

I’ve no doubt that people have probably tried to do this; it’s just not the result of a well-thought-through plan.

5

Cancer is also risky. No matter how much you dose the target, you can’t be 100% sure that they’ll develop cancer. Not speaking from personal experience, but I bet that if you’re assassinating someone, you want them dead now, not maybe dead in a few months or years.

6

Hi, Wesley! I’m just recovering from the effects of lung cancer. It was a highly unusual case, but I had had it (undiagnosed) for eight years before it was biopsied. Doctors kept telling me it was pneumonia.

I wouldn’t think that giving someone cancer (if that can be done) would be very efficient. (I am cancer free now.)

Glad to see you!

7

The facial tumours afflicting the Tasmanian Devilsmight be the nearest thing to a weaponisable cancer. It is a very unusual pathogen, and seems to directly infect the animal and then reproduce into a real cancer. There is some suggestion that it is partly aided by a common genetic weakness in the population’s immune system, but other than that it has mot of the properties wanted. It seems to have close to 100% mortality, and kills in about 6 months. If you needed to assasinate a Tasmanian Devil it would be an interesting choice.

It would not seem to be beyond the bounds of possibility that a similar pathogen might be engineered in the future that afflicts humans. Given humans don’t tend to go around biting one another’s faces, or similar activity, it is less likely to run rampant thought the population, but might remain an interesting way of dispatching someone.

Assassinations are odd things. Sometimes you want the victim to die with no trace of outside influence, sometimes you want them to clearly die violently, and sometimes you want it to be clear who did the deed and why.

The ricin pellet injecting umbrella (Bulgarian, not Russian) was intended so that the victim died later with no apparent cause. The murder of Alexander Litvinenko was almost certainly intended to leave a clear message - only one country in the world had easy access to what was millions of dollars worth of polonium. The message was clear, don’t double cross us, we can, and, will get you. The idea that Arafat was poisoned with polonium doesn’t hold water. We discussed that in a thread here some time ago. The simple problem is that so much time has elapsed that any residual polonium in his body would be lower in level than polonium created as the natural breakdown of other elements that are naturally already in his body. Polonium is going to be detected when the victim is dying, and at that point is very radioactive.

Poisoning is a good assassination weapon, as it gives the assassin time to leave the country, makes it hard to link the assassin to the victim anyway, and, with a well chosen poison, 100% effective in a short time frame. A virulent pathogen might be useful, but it is a bit hit and miss. And dangerous. You might consider Ebola, Anthrax, and similar nasties as potentials. But they are not 100%, especially with modern western medical care. Rabies might fit the bill.

The trouble with any mechanism that take a while to do its work, is that circumstances might change, and you change you mind about the deed, but there is no mechanism to call of the assassin.

8

The unpredictable length of time and uncertainty about its effects doesn’t matter or can be an outright bonus if your goal is to torment the person rather than kill them immediately. I recall reading of radioisotopes being used in non-political poisonings for just that purpose; the uncertainty heightens anxiety, and if the target is female she also has to worry about the also the possibility of birth defects if she survives.

9

Cite?

10

Wouldn’t work. Taz face cancers are descended from the face cancer of the taz that bit the victim (and thence, from the face cancer of the one that bit that one, and so on to a presumed long-distant progenitor), not from the victim’s own body. In tazes, this works, because they have an unfortunately very low biodiversity, so low that tissue from an unrelated taz won’t be rejected by a host as foreign. Humans, though, have a much greater diversity, and so human immune systems will almost always reject tissues from other humans. So a human “transmissable cancer” would never be able to get established.

11

Didn’t Hugo Chavez claim this was happening to him back when he was still alive?

12

I’m going to go against the grain here and suggest that weaponized cancer might be useful to someone like the CIA. Not for outright assassination, but rather as a “lifetime shortening tool.” Hugo Chavez would actually be the perfect target for such a thing: he was never enough of a pain to justify assassination, with all the potential political fallout that would follow, but there was ample reason why the US might want to make sure his rule wasn’t a long one.

13

True. I was thinking that an engineered cell might be possible in which the surface markers had been deliberately removed. There is work on doing this for transplants - even zeno-transplants. So it isn’t beyond the bounds to imagine engineering a cancer cell that has no self/non-self markers and is invisible to the target’s immune system. Clearly this would require some serious effort and money. But just the sort of thing for a very large national power with a huge security budget. If the Russians were prepared to waste millions of dollars worth of polonium on assassinating just Alexander Litvinenko, the effort to create such a nasty as this isn’t unthinkable. The ethical aspects on the other hand are at the seriously crazy end of insane. We could end up with the human equivalent of facial tumours.

14

I think there would probably be a category of inside-job type assassinations where you might want the person to get sick and waste pathetically away - if you’re second or third in command and want to use this as an opportunity to present yourself as a nice, capable guy who only has the best intentions.

Oh, and the graped bit. WTF?

15

By the way, all this talk about Tasmanian devil makes it seem like at least some people think that that virus is unique in its ability to cause cancer. It’s not. There are lots of oncogenic viruses, including a fair number of human viruses.

16

The Tasmanin Devil facial tumours are not caused by a virus. The tumour itself is the infective agent. Still not unique, but only a very few like this. The tumour cells are capable of living and replicating in another devil’s body, and evading the immune system. As noted above, common genetic flaws in the population’s immune system possibly contribute, as does a lack of genetic diversity in the population. However the trick is quite specific. You can actually catch the cancer. Delivering a set of engineered human cancer cells to a victim would directly give them cancer, and potentially a very aggressive one.

17

The problem is that isn’t the risk side of the equation (chance of exposure of the plot & political fallout) just as big for giving someone cancer as for an assassination?

So you’re paying the same price as an assassination, but getting less “value” out of it.

18

Absolutely. Worse if anything. The public perception of killing someone that way would move towards revulsion. Depending upon who it was of course.

This is the trick with assassinations. Sometimes you never ever want knowledge of the state’s complicity to ever leak out. Sometimes you really don’t care one way or the other, and sometimes you want it to be quite clear who did it.

As noted above, the idea that you could weaken another nation for a time by causing them to have an ailing, invalid, and slowly dying leader might be appealing. Stalin certainly gained at Yalta with a dying Roosevelt. In dictatorships the political instability with a dying leader makes for easier times.

19

That depends… If you assassinate someone via sniper, even if the sniper gets away free and clear and there are no signs pointing to him or to his organization, everyone’s still going to know that the target died of a bullet in the brain. With a cancer assassination, though, if everything goes according to plan, nobody will even realize it was an assassination at all. So really, it depends on how confident you are that everything will go according to plan.

20

Experts differ: Yasser Arafat autopsy reveals he died of natural causes, NOT polonium poisoning | Daily Mail Online