If the jar had been found, and the persons finding it didn't know immediately what they had found, it would have poisoned them. Had they opened it, they would have breathed plutonium dust and would have probably died within days.
Had someone found it who knew what they had...well, that is scary enough, but what is even more frightening is that, somewhere down the line, someone was in charge of that plutonium and decided this was the best way to dispose of it.
That needs to be looked into rather closely. I know they're probably all dead now, but I also know that, in our government, if it was ever done once it's a precedent, and somebody wearing a suit somewhere will think "Hey! That's a pretty good idea they had...."
I'm not really that concerned about the idea of someone making a working fission weapon out of it, because that's just not as easy as they make it look in the movies.
The concern is the number of people you could poison with that amount of plutonium, the amount of land you could poison with it, and the number of people out there who, if they had access to it, wouldn't hesitate to do either.
--James
