[codethief]

> except for a very small spike at 803 keV. Some of the scientists were talking about the case and they were overheard by an older scientist who had worked on the UK's atomic weapons program back in the 50s. The early bombs relied on Po-210 and he recognized that 803 keV line as being characteristic of Po-210

I don't understand. So professionals from the AWE tried to identify the measured radiation lines from memory(?!), instead of consulting a publicly available database of spectral & decay lines? It's been a while since I've done any spectral analysis but I used to use ie.lbl.gov a lot (seems offline unfortunately) and they had a search function[0] that allowed you to filter their entire database of isotopes and decay chains by whatever line you were looking for.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150408041531/http://ie.lbl.gov...