Red Mercury

LoLth

I remember my brother telling me, years ago, about red mercury and how it was produced in Russia and the Americans were forced to buy every drop they produced to stop it form going on the world market for fear of nuclear arms proliferation.

well, years later it popped back into my head and , being a dilignet nerd, I looked it up on wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury

An Interesting article. So, I thought I'd ask to find out what stories the CTs have heard over the years.

Is it a real substance?
Is it a fake put out by the Russians to flush out potential nuclear weapons makers?
Is it a US plot to obfuscate its existence by spreading rumours of its existence and then discrediting them?

Diogenes

LoLth wrote: »

I remember my brother telling me, years ago, about red mercury and how it was produced in Russia and the Americans were forced to buy every drop they produced to stop it form going on the world market for fear of nuclear arms proliferation.

well, years later it popped back into my head and , being a dilignet nerd, I looked it up on wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury

An Interesting article. So, I thought I'd ask to find out what stories the CTs have heard over the years.

Is it a real substance?
Is it a fake put out by the Russians to flush out potential nuclear weapons makers?
Is it a US plot to obfuscate its existence by spreading rumours of its existence and then discrediting them?

New Scientist; Only fools still search for red mercury

The report, compiled by researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, shows that in the hands of hoaxers and conmen, red mercury can do almost anything the aspiring Third World demagogue wants it to. You want a short cut to making an atom bomb? You want the key to Soviet ballistic missile guidance systems? Or perhaps you want the Russian alternative to the anti-radar paint on the stealth bomber? What you need is red mercury.

LoLth

yep, that was quoted in the wikiedia article as well but there was alos a strange quote from a scientist: Cohen http://nuclearfiles.org/menu/library/media-gallery/image/tredici/47.htm

Cohen, the "father of the neutron bomb", has been claiming for some time that red mercury is a powerful explosive-like chemical known as a ballotechnic. The energy released during its reaction is enough to directly compress the secondary without the need for a fission primary. He claims that he has learned that the Soviet scientists perfected the use of red mercury and used it to produce a number of softball-sized "pure fusion" bombs weighing as little as 10 lb (4.5 kg), which he claims were made in large numbers.[6]

He goes on to claim that the reason this is not more widely known is that elements within the US power structure are deliberately keeping it "under wraps" due to the scary implications such a weapon would have on nuclear proliferation. Since a red mercury bomb would require no fissile material, it would seemingly be impossible to protect against its widespread proliferation given current arms control methodologies. Instead of trying to do so, they simply claim it doesn't exist, while acknowledging its existence privately. Cohen also claims that when President Boris Yeltsin took power, he secretly authorized the sale of red mercury on the international market, and that fake versions of it were sometimes offered to gullible buyers.[6]

Cohen's claims appear to be difficult to support scientifically. The amount of energy released by the fission primary is thousands of times greater than that released by conventional explosives, and it appears that the "red mercury" approach would be orders of magnitude smaller than required. Furthermore, ballotechnic materials are those that do not explode, so it is difficult to understand how their energy could be used to produce compression at all.

Additionally, it appears there is absolutely no independent confirmation of any sort of Cohen's claims to the reality of red mercury. The scientists in charge of the labs where the material would have been made have publicly dismissed the claims (see below), as have numerous US colleagues, including Edward Teller.

According to Cohen,[6] veteran nuclear weapon designer Dr. Frank Barnaby conducted secret interviews with Russian scientists who told him that red mercury was produced by dissolving mercury antimony oxide in mercury, heating and irradiating the resultant amalgam, and then removing the elemental mercury through evaporation.[7] The irradiation was reportedly carried out by placing the substance inside a nuclear reactor.[8]

a scientist april fools along the lines of the spaghetti trees?