1. A system for radiation detection comprising: a radiation event detector; two spectroscopic buffers, one holding background data and one holding integrated detection event data received from the radiation event detector; means for precision peak identification that receives data from the two spectroscopic buffers and provides a list of corrected source peak locations and intensities; means for spectral region analysis that receives the detection event data; pattern recognition algorithms receiving data from the means for precision peak identification and means for spectral region analysis to identify a source isotope from a standard library; and, alarm means responsive to output from the pattern recognition algorithms upon exceeding a predetermined threshold for the source isotope.