Red Mercury - Fact or Fiction?

[Neost]

Read this on cnn today:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/09 ... index.html

I noticed the term Red Mercury and wanted to do some reading which lead me to a plethora of articles on about:

http://chemistry.about.com/cs/chemicalw ... ercury.htm

Which has a list of articles linked towards the bottom. There is apparently quite a bit of speculation as to the truth of the existence of red mercury.

Then I hit this link:

http://www.rense.com/general21/del.htm

Now I'm trying to track down more information on what this guy is talking about. I looked at the home page of rense.com and saw very unflattering pictures of kerry/edwards so I have to assume this guy is a right-wing wog of some type, but that's an assumption made without reading anything else on the site but the above link and glancing at the homepage.

I'm trying to find more info on Delmart Vreeland and other names mentioned in the article.

Has anyone else followed any of this and provide more info?

EDIT: Found this link on fromthewilderness.com that is an amazing tale to try and follow. WTF? Who are these people that can hobnob around the world like this?

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/w ... d_gnn.html

Don't know anything about fromthewilderness.com either at this point.

[Arundel Pajo]

Rense.com is one of the worst Internet tabloids out there. You can discount that article right off the bat. Rense frequently runs stories about space aliens, government conspiracies, lost colonies in the center of the earth, etc... They had a long love affair with the "monkey man" that terrorized India a couple of summers ago.

The others are fascinating, but I still don't put too much stock in this "red mercury" thing - at least as it pertains to nuclear material...fusion in particular. It bears all the hallmarks of a "Philadelphia Experiment" sort of story.

[Arborealus]

Yeah was just perusing the content or rense.com...funny stuff...

[Neost]

This is a great tale if you like conspiracy theories or spy novels. Very entertaining.

My problem now is I originally started off trying to figure out if there was substance behind the "red mercury" stuff and now I've spent the last couple of hours or so reading bullshit about vreeland and offshoots of that story.

I read FTW some and the various areas of government conspiracy he believes exist. Some of that stuff is wild.

I don't pay much attention to what sites are extremist. I typically try to avoid them period. I saw stuff from The Nation and other sites. Which ones have a shred of truth to them?

BTW, thanks for the insight on rense.com. Anyone else have opinions on that site and FTW, The Nation etc. etc.?

[Mplor]

Funny, cause I read the same article and also starting Googling red mercury. Didn't find any reputable sources, but some of the less-reputable sources were pretty interesting, including this excerpt from this newsgroup:

Red Mercury

The export price of the material is 350,000 dollars a kilo. According to a report by Yevgeny Primakov, chief of Russia's external intelligence service, to [then] Secretary of State Gennady Burbulis of March 24, 1992, red mercury is used in the production of high- precision fuses for conventional bombs and fuses for nuclear bombs, in the starting of nuclear reactors, in the production of anti-radar coatings for military hardware and in the manufacture of self-targeting warheads for high-precision missiles.

-o-

In recent years unclassified research has been conducted on a new class of materials (including red mercury) , referred to as ballotechnics. These materials use a number of elements in lowdensity powder form. When they are subjected to high-pressure shock compression, chemical reactions take place which under certain conditions can produce energy concentrations considerably in excess of those from high explosives. Ballotechnics therefore offer a significantly greater prospect for success in attaining a verylow-yield pure-fusion weapon than the high-explosive techniques we and other nations have explored. Such success would open a nuclear Pandora's box that U.S. policy would just as soon see closed.

-o-

"The first synthesis of ' red mercury' or the mercurial salt of antimonous acid, Hg2Sb207, was done in the USSR in 1968 in the accelerator at [word omitted]. Because of its technical and operational features this accelerator makes it possible successfully to make alloys of strontium, caesium and other isotopes to produce ' red mercury' .

"The raw material is manufactured at enterprises of the former USSR Ministry of Atomic Power in the cities of (we omit their names - authors). After the synthesis stage at the above-named enterprises the raw material is implanted with a radioactive isotope in the accelerator. As a result of this a product with a density of up to 23 units is obtained. Shelf life of the finished product varies between four and 12 months depending on the alloying isotope.

"It is the opinion of nuclear experts that abroad there is only one accelerator, the one at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, that could be used to implant ' red mercury' . However, in order for it to be used for this purpose it is necessary to carry out a whole series of studies and do further work on the design. This factor, and also the availability in the states of the former USSR of significant quantities of mercury raw material, determine our country's special position in the production of ' red mercury' .

-o-

As the deadliest version of this legend has it, red mercury is an antimony mercury oxide that was developed in the Soviet Union as a simpler, more efficient trigger for atomic bombs. Such triggers, which surround a core of plutonium or enriched uranium, must have at least two attributes: They must be shaped so precisely that when exploded they uniformly compress the core, setting off a chain reaction; and they must provide an adequate supply of free neutrons to sustain that reaction. Red mercury supposedly combines both functions within one substance; moreover, because it is liquid it can be shaped more easily, simplifying one of the more difficult aspects of bomb design.

-o-

The mixed signals have likewise driven some Western physicists to distraction, as they attempt to reconcile what is known with what's rumored. "It's a very odd story, and at first sight it sounds very improbable," acknowledges Frank Barnaby, a noted British nuclear weapons expert. "But the thing that has to give you pause is the seniority of the Russians who are claiming it exists and has these applications, and it's very hard to see these people involved in a hoax."

-o-

Barnaby postulates a liquefied form of the compound to which is added, in a reactor or particle accelerator, a transuranic actinide such as californium 252, "an extremely good emitter" of neutrons.

John Hassard, a lecturer in nuclear physics at Britain's Imperial College and an expert in nuclear weapons proliferation, is even more skeptical but
also reluctant to declare red mercury a hoax. "If you put a gun to my head and forced me to say whether it's true or not, I would probably have to say it's not true, but I don't think we can be so cavalier as to dismiss it," he contends.

Hassard muses that antimony and mercury are both very heavy atoms which, when joined, create a lattice of "boxes" just about the size of plutonium atoms -- "and that makes me think you might be able to drift plutonium into it. Do that and you overcome, on one stroke, the problems of thermodynamics in the implosion of your nuclear weapon."

-o-

SO what exactly is red mercury? According to scientists in Russia who claim to be familiar with its chemical properties, it combines two important functions in a nuclear weapon by acting as a conventional explosive and a powerful source of neutrons.

In a normal atom bomb, explosives such as TNT are used to produce a powerful implosive force on a ball of plutonium, crushing it so that it becomes an unstable critical mass. An electronic gun mechanism then fires a burst of high-energy neutrons into the plutonium, initiating a fission chain reaction and releasing huge amounts of energy.

In its basic form red mercury is a powder, but it can be converted into a liquid by pressure and radiation. It then acquires explosive properties and can affect atoms of a variety of elements called actinides that are powerful neutron emitters, substituting for the TNT and the neutron gun and making bomb design much simpler.

This technology, involving a liquid explosive, is apparently unknown in the West, but a scientific paper published in 1968 by Du Pont, the American chemical company which makes explosives for the US nuclear weapons programme, mentions the synthesis of a chemical with the same formula as red mercury. The compound, HgSbO, was made in Du Pont laboratories and added to the international chemical register, where it is still listed as number 20720-76-7. No documentation exists to explain its possible uses and the company was not prepared to comment.