Short of a few Christmas gift ideas, maybe for someone you don’t really like? That fat idiot of a brother-in-law, for example, or your boss? I can help.

United Nuclear Scientific Supplies (UNSS), based in New Mexico, will flog you, perfectly legally, a chunk of polonium-210 for $69 (£35). Better still, you can get its special offer gift pack of three radioactive isotopes — polonium-210, strontium-90 and cobalt-60 — for the extremely decent price of $179 (£90).

Now, it’s true that, according to UNSS (its motto — “Putting the fun back into science!”), the amounts of this stuff it will sell you are too small to actually kill your brother-in-law; you would need (its website explains) to buy 15,000 chunks of polonium-210 to do that. And then you’d have the problem of separating the stuff from the needle upon which it has been affixed by electroplating. Get through a hell of a lot of J Cloths doing that.

In any case, if all that’s too tricky, it will also bung you very large bits of uranium, though it warns you to wash your hands after chopping it up into bits, in case you die of cancer. You are cautioned that bits might fly off and that these could turn nasty, being radioactive and all.

UNSS also suggests that if you’re going to fill your entire garage with uranium it might be a good idea to keep the various chunks in a Ziploc bag, presumably because of the possibility of radon gas killing you when you’re about to check the tyre pressure on the car.

Uranium, polonium, strontium-90 — these are potentially dangerous bits of stuff, so you might be hoping that UNSS is a responsible firm, set up by a level-headed and respectable individual.

Well, let me put your mind at rest: people who buy radioactive materials from the company are required to sign for their purchases, and if you look a bit funny, you might not get any.

Also, its founding member is a chap called Bob Lazar who does indeed have a remarkable scientific background. In 1989, Bob claimed to have been hired by the US government to “reverse engineer” a, um, flying saucer that had arrived from the Zeta 2 Reticuli solar system.

According to his own website and others very interested in his activities, he had a poke around in the saucer and concluded that its locomotion system was “an anti-gravity system powered by ununpentium”. Bob was kind enough to tell the press about this, under the mysterious pseudonym “Dennis”.

It would be exaggerating a little to say that he was, you know, widely believed, but never mind. More recently, UNSS has been raided by the US authorities for allegedly selling chemicals that might be used to make fireworks.

At this point, you may be beginning to, well — if not worry, then maybe wonder a bit about Bob, UNSS and indeed the vigilance of the US authorities.

The good news, at least, is that those radioactive isotopes are flying off the shelves down in New Mexico. “We’re just inundated with orders,” Bob said last week. “We can’t keep up.”

The website, incidentally, proclaims “over 250,000 satisfied customers”.

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