Radiation Check

Per your second site:

Smoking 1 1/2 packs of cigarettes per day "is comparable to total-body exposure to natural background radiation containing 80 mrem per year in someone living in the Boston area."

Now, I don't smoke anything anymore, but did for years.

Death comes to everyone sometime, only the rate differs.

..."Winters and Di Franza [14] at the University of Massachusetts (Boston, MA) much later reported that in a person smoking one and a half packs of cigarettes (i.e. 30 cigarettes) per day, the radiation dose to the bronchial epithelium in areas of bifurcation is 80 mSv y−1 (8,000 mrem) - the equivalent of the dose to the skin from 300 X-ray films of the chest per year. This figure was comparable with total-body exposure to natural background radiation containing 0.8 mSv y−1 (80 mrem) in someone living in the Boston area."...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672370/

"It is a common practice to assume that the exposure received from a radiation source is distributed throughout a tissue. In this way, a high level of exposure in a localized region -- e.g. bronchial epithelium -- is averaged out over the entire tissue mass, suggesting a low level of exposure. However, alpha particles have a range of only 40 um in the body. A cell nucleus of 5 to 6 um that is traversed by a single alpha particle receives a dose of 1000 rems. Thus, although the total tissue dose might be considered negligible, cells close to an alpha source receive high doses. The Po-210 alpha activity of cigarette smoke may be a very effective carcinogen if a multiple mutation mechanism is involved. "

I too smoked for many years....It seems the filtered cigarettes block a portion of the bad stuff....but then I've been exposed to all manner of pollutants, I guess it comes down to genetic predisposition, and well a host of other factors really.... Hey sooner or later the odds catch up with you, I've beaten them consistently for many years...Still it seems that if people had known about the radiation, smoking would have ceased in the cold war years...

Unfortunately, there could be a lot more radioactive places on earth if some of the folks acquiring nuclear weapons decide to use them.