The idea seems reasonable enough--if the technology is cheap enough and the drain on batteries low enough, you could put environmental testing into a cell phone and have it relay back the GPS coordinates when something untoward is detected.
One reading isn't any use. I doubt they can get the false positive rate down to anything near 0, and in a city with a hundred thousand cell phones somebody's phone will always be setting off a warning. So it isn't very good for detecting as-yet-unused munitions--they need to be leaking enough so that more than one phone in the area is effected.
That doesn't mean the technology is of no use. If you have a dozen flags up all at once, civil defense can send out warnings, try to isolate traffic, get people indoors--the usual stuff.
But a couple of questions come to mind.
- Are there chemicals that will give false positives? If so, the usual suspects will make it happen.
- Can the control be turned off by an app? A mole app, if popular enough, could generate false positive patterns, or disable the system entirely so civil defense has less active systems than they think. If their models lead them to expect 100 and they only have 30, what does that mean?
You could make a simple compromise radiation detector that just looks for gammas. Most alpha emitters will include beta and gamma in the decay chain somewhere (tritium is tough, though). Pity the poor guy who got radio-isotope therapy. He'd have to stay indoors for a week.
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