Red mercury

β (left) and α (right) forms of Mercury(II) iodide, a real chemical that possesses no explosive capability. Below 126 °C, Mercury(II) iodide exists in the red alpha crystalline form, above 126 °C it transitions to the pale yellow beta form.

Red mercury is a hoax substance of uncertain composition purportedly used in the creation of nuclear bombs, as well as a variety of unrelated weapons systems. It is purported to be mercuric iodide, a poisonous, odorless, tasteless, water-insoluble scarlet-red powder that becomes yellow when heated above 126 °C, due to a thermochromatic change in crystalline structure.^[1][2] However, samples of "red mercury" obtained from arrested would-be terrorists invariably consisted of nothing more than various red dyes or powders of little value, which some suspect was being sold as part of a campaign intended to flush out potential nuclear smugglers. The hoax was first reported in 1979 and was commonly discussed in the media in the 1990s. Prices as high as $1,800,000 per kilogram were reported.^[3]

History

References to red solid mercury first appeared in major Soviet and western media sources in the late 1980s. The articles were never specific as to what exactly red mercury was, but nevertheless claimed it was of great importance in nuclear bombs, or that it was used in the building of boosted fission weapons. Almost as soon as the stories appeared, people started attempting to buy it. At that point the exact nature of the substance started to change, and eventually turned into anything the buyer happened to be interested in. As New Scientist reported in 1992, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory report outlined that:

When red mercury first appeared on the international black market 15 years ago, the supposedly top secret nuclear material was 'red' because it came from Russia. When it resurfaced last year in the formerly communist states of Eastern Europe it had unaccountably acquired a red colour. But then, as a report from the US Department of Energy reveals, mysterious transformations are red mercury's stock in trade.

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.^[4]

A key event in the history of the red mercury story was an article in the daily Russian newspaper Pravda in 1993. Claiming to be based on leaked top secret memos, they noted that red mercury was:

[A] super-conductive material used for producing high-precision conventional and nuclear bomb explosives, 'Stealth' surfaces and self-guided warheads. Primary end-users are major aerospace and nuclear-industry companies in the United States and France along with nations aspiring to join the nuclear club, such as South Africa, Israel, Iran, Iraq, and Libya.^[5]

Two TV documentaries about red mercury were made by Channel 4, airing in 1993 and 1994, Trail of Red Mercury and Pocket Neutron, which claimed to have "startling evidence that Russian scientists have designed a miniature neutron bomb using a mysterious compound called red mercury".^[6]

Samuel T. Cohen, an American physicist who worked on building the atomic bomb, said in his autobiography that red mercury is manufactured by "mixing special nuclear materials in very small amounts into the ordinary compound and then inserting the mixture into a nuclear reactor or bombarding it with a particle-accelerator beam." When detonated, this mixture allegedly becomes "extremely hot, which allows pressures and temperatures to be built up that are capable of igniting the heavy hydrogen and producing a pure-fusion mini neutron bomb."^[6]

Red mercury was offered for sale throughout Europe and the Middle East by Russian businessmen, who found many buyers who would pay almost anything for the substance even though they had no idea what it was. A study for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1997 has perhaps the best summary of the topic:

The asking price for red mercury ranged from $100,000 to $300,000 per kilogram. Sometimes the material would be irradiated or shipped in containers with radioactive symbols, perhaps to convince potential buyers of its strategic value. But samples seized by police contained only mercury(II) oxide, mercury(II) iodide, or mercury mixed with red dye — hardly materials of interest to weapons-makers.

Following the arrest of several men in Britain in September 2004, on suspicion that they were trying to buy a kilogram of red mercury for £300,000, the International Atomic Energy Agency made a statement dismissing claims that the substance is real. "Red mercury doesn't exist," said the spokesman. "The whole thing is a bunch of malarkey."^[7] When the case came to trial at the Old Bailey in April 2006, it became apparent that News of the World's "fake sheikh" Mazher Mahmood had worked with the police to catch the three men, Dominic Martins, Roque Fernandes and Abdurahman Kanyare. They were tried for "trying to set up funding or property for terrorism" and "having an article (a highly dangerous mercury based substance) for terrorism". According to the prosecutor, red mercury was believed to be a material which could cause a large explosion, possibly even a nuclear reaction, but whether or not red mercury actually existed was irrelevant to the prosecution.^[8] All three men were acquitted in July 2006.^[9]

Analysis

A variety of different items have been chemically analyzed as putative samples of "red mercury" since the substance first came to the attention of the media, but no single substance was found in these items. A sample of radioactive material was seized by German police in May 1994. This consisted of a complex mixture of elements, including about 10% by weight plutonium, with the remainder consisting of 61% mercury, 11% antimony, 6% oxygen, 2% iodine and 1.6% gallium. A formula reported for the powder component of the mixture was Hg₆Sb₂O₈ (mercury(II) cyclopyrorthoantimonate), with some of the mercury present in its pure metallic form.^[10] The reason why somebody had assembled this complex mixture of chemicals is unknown; equally puzzling was the presence of fragments of glass and brush bristles, suggesting that someone had dropped a bottle of this substance and then swept it up into a new container.^[11]

In contrast, an analysis reported in 1998 of a different "red mercury" sample concluded that this sample was a non-radioactive mixture of elemental mercury, water and mercury(II) iodide, which is a red colored chemical.^[3] Similarly, another analysis of a sample recovered in Zagreb in November 2003 reported that this item contained only mercury.^[12] One formula that had been claimed previously for red mercury was Hg₂Sb₂O₇ (mercury(II) pyroantimonate), but no antimony was detected in this 2003 sample.^[12][13]

Explanations

Red mercury was described by many commentators, and the exact nature of its supposed working mechanism varied widely among them. In general, however, none of these explanations appear to be scientifically or historically supportable.

Background

Traditional staged thermonuclear weapons consist of two parts, a fission "primary" and a fusion/fission "secondary". The energy released by the primary when it explodes is used to (indirectly) compress the secondary and start a fusion reaction within it. Conventional explosives are far too weak to provide the level of compression needed.

The primary is generally built as small as possible, due to the fact that the energy released by the secondary is much larger, and thus building a larger primary is generally inefficient. There is a lower limit on the size of the primary that can be built, known as the critical mass. For weapons grade plutonium, this is around 10 kg. This can be reduced through the use of neutron reflectors or clever arrangements of explosives to compress the core, but these methods generally add to the size and complexity of the resulting device.

Due to the need for a fission primary, and the difficulty of purifying weapons-grade fissile materials, the majority of arms control efforts to limit nuclear proliferation rely on the detection and control of the fissile material and the equipment needed to obtain it.

Shortcut to fissionable material

A theory popular in the mid-1990s was that red mercury facilitated the enrichment of uranium to weapons-grade purity. Conventionally, such enrichment is usually done with Zippe-type centrifuges, and takes several years. Red mercury was speculated to eliminate this costly and time-consuming step. Although this would not eliminate the possibility of detecting the material, it could escape detection during enrichment as the facilities hosting centrifuges normally used in this process are very large and require equipment that can be fairly easily tracked internationally. Eliminating such equipment would in theory greatly ease the construction of a clandestine nuclear weapon.

Shortcut to fusible material

A key part of the secondary in a fusion bomb is lithium-6-deuteride. When irradiated with high-energy neutrons, Li-6 creates tritium, which mixes with the deuterium in the same mixture and fuses at a relatively low temperature. Russian weapon designers have reported (1993) that red mercury was the Soviet codename for lithium-6, which has an affinity for mercury and tends to acquire a red colour due to mercuric impurities during its separation process.^[14][15]

Red mercury as a ballotechnic

Samuel T. Cohen, the "father of the neutron bomb", claimed for some time that red mercury is a powerful explosive-like chemical known as a ballotechnic. The energy released during its reaction is allegedly enough to directly compress the secondary without the need for a fission primary in a thermonuclear weapon. He claimed that he 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 claimed were made in large numbers.^[16]

He went 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 frightening 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 claimed 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.^[16]

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 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,^[16] 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.^[17] The irradiation was reportedly carried out by placing the substance inside a nuclear reactor.^[18]

Stealth paint

As mentioned earlier, one of the origins of the term "red mercury" was in the Russian newspaper Pravda, which claimed that red mercury was "a super-conductive material used for producing high-precision conventional and nuclear bomb explosives, 'stealth' surfaces and self-guided warheads."^[5] Any substance with these sorts of highly differing properties would be suspect to most, but the stealth story continued to have some traction long after most had dismissed the entire story.

Nuclear "sting" operations

Red mercury is thought by some to be the invention of an intelligence agency or criminal gang for the purpose of deceiving terrorists and rogue states who were trying to acquire nuclear technology on the black market.^[19] One televised report indicated that the Soviet Union encouraged the KGB and GRU to arrange sting operations for the detection of those seeking to deal in nuclear materials. The Soviet intelligence services allegedly created a myth of the necessity of "red mercury" for the sorts of nuclear devices that terrorists and rogue governments might seek. Political entities that already had nuclear weapons did nothing to debunk the myth.

Jane’s Intelligence Review in 1999 suggested that victims of red mercury scams may have included Osama bin Laden.^[20]

Red mercury in southern Africa

Organisations involved in landmine clearance and unexploded munitions disposal noted a belief amongst some communities in southern Africa that red mercury may be found in certain types of ordnance. Attempting to extract red mercury, purported to be highly valuable, was reported as a motivation for people dismantling items of unexploded ordnance, and suffering death or injury as a result. In some cases it was reported that unscrupulous traders may be deliberately promoting this misconception in an effort to build a market for recovered ordnance.^[21]

An explosion in Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe that killed five people is attributed to a quest to reclaim red mercury from a live landmine.^[22]

Saudi Arabia

In April 2009 it was reported from Saudi Arabia that rumors that Singer sewing machines contained "red mercury" had caused the prices of such machines to massively increase in the Kingdom, with some paying up to SR 200,000 for a single machine which could previously have been bought for SR 200.^[23] Believers in the rumor claimed that the presence of red mercury in the sewing machines' needles could be detected using a mobile telephone; if the line cut off when the telephone was placed near to the needle, this supposedly proved that the substance was present.

In Medina there was a busy trade in the sewing machines, with buyers seen using mobile phones to check the machines for red mercury content, while it was reported that others had resorted to theft, with two tailors' shops in Dhulum broken into and their sewing machines stolen. At other locales, there were rumors that a Kuwait-based multinational had been buying up the Singer machines, while in Al-Jouf, the residents were led to believe that a local museum was buying up any such machines that it could find, and numerous women appeared at the museum offering to sell their Singer machines.

There was little agreement among believers in the story as to the exact nature or even color of the red mercury, while the supposed uses for it ranged from it being an essential component of nuclear power, to having the ability to summon jinn, extract gold, or locate buried treasure and perform other forms of magic. The official spokesman for the Riyadh police said that the rumors had been started by gangs attempting to swindle people out of their money, and denied the existence of red mercury in sewing machines.^[24]

Usage in fiction

• In the 1936 novel The Ultimate Weapon by John W. Campbell scientists trying to harness atomic energy create a strange red crystalline substance from mercury in an experimental reactor. This substance becomes the key to atomic power in the story. The term "red mercury" is never used by the author.
• Red Mercury Blues is the first Artie Cohen mystery written by Reggie Nadelson. Published 1995. Reissued in 2006.
• Storylines based on the sale and terrorist applications of red mercury have appeared in episodes of two BBC drama series. Bugs contained an episode during its second series concerning a large quantity of red mercury being held by international arms dealers and being traded to fictional middle-eastern factions. In the BBC thriller series Spooks series 3, episode 2, "The Sleeper", a Nobel Prize winning chemist is coerced into participating in an MI-5 sting of a terrorist group in possession of plutonium who are seeking a short-cut to a bomb. It suggested that red mercury was a myth.
• There is a brief mention of red mercury being used as a weapon (along with "foam-phase hydrogen" warheads) in the novel Redemption Ark.
• Red mercury bombs are used in the 7th Son trilogy by J.C. Hutchins.
• In the Dark•Matter role-playing game, red mercury does exist, and the player characters may find themselves having to hunt down terrorists who may want to use it for weapons of mass destruction. In keeping with the conspiracy theory and unidentified flying object themes of the game, while red mercury is indeed usable as a seemingly impossibly potent nuclear fuel, it is actually originally meant to be a foodstuff for a bizarre alien race. The red mercury on Earth arrived when that species visited, and humans have been trying to duplicate it (with very limited success) since.
• The video game Warhawk also featured red mercury as a central component of its plot. In the game red mercury is an extremely powerful weapon as well as a vaguely alluded-to serum that is exploited by the primary antagonist and megalomaniac, Kreel.
• The video game Shadow Ops: Red Mercury revolves around hunting down a terrorist who controls two red mercury nuclear bombs.
• Red mercury also plays a central role in the plot of the videogame Splinter Cell: Double Agent when Emile Dufraisne seeks to acquire some in order to build a bomb capable of destroying the greater NYC area.
• In an episode of the American spy-fi television series Alias (#1.22, "Almost Thirty Years"), a character refers to an explosive device as a "red mercury charge with a mechanical fuse". When the device explodes later, it acts similarly to a conventional explosive such as C-4.
• Red mercury is also used as a plot device in the novel The Double Tap by Stephen Leather, where an arms dealer is attempting to purchase the substance from a Russian salesman.
• In Scepticism Inc., a novel by Bo Fowler, red mercury is described as "mercury antimony oxide dissolved into mercury and then left to irradiate in a nuclear reactor for twenty days". A bomb made of red mercury is used to destroy the Sceptic Tower, headquarters of the metaphysical betting company Scepticism Inc.
• Yet another appearance is in the thriller Bunker 13 by Aniruddha Bahal where it is described (by a Russian mafia arms-dealer) as being in the nose of a "Swift arrow" missile, creating a "super-high-temperature blowtorch" that can burn its way through "three feet of steel armour."
• In science-fiction stories Samolot von Ribbentrop (Von Ribbentrop's plane) and Atomowa Ruletka (Nuclear Roulette) by Polish writer Andrzej Pilipiuk, "red mercury reactors" are used as highly efficient power sources, although no further information about either the substance or said reactors is given.
• In the last episode of Japanese drama series Galileo, red mercury is said to be "a legendary alloy that reflects 100% of neutrons" and "an urban legend among scientists". Nonetheless it is actively and covertly researched by the main character's antagonist (and seemingly successfully, as it is used to create a small bomb with enough nuclear yield to wipe out half of Tokyo).
• Red mercury appears in the novel Blood is Dirt, by Robert Wilson, as a nuclear material sought by a corrupt West-African tribal chief.
• In "Mayhem", an episode of Criminal Minds, after an explosive device was used to destroy a Federal SUV, SSA Dr. Spencer Reid says, "[The device] was likely made using oxidizing agents including chromates, peroxides, perchlorates, chlorates, and red mercury all jammed into a device no larger than a cell phone."
• The titles of three films: Red Mercury, a 2005 UK film about terrorists making a bomb; Finish Line (2008, released as Red Mercury on DVD in Australia), which purports to be on a similar subject but instead spends most of its running time on race car drivers; and an Estonian film from 2010 about small-time criminals who venture to Russia to buy a case of red mercury.
• In the manga Mudazumo Naki Kaikaku, the Chernobyl meltdown was caused by a test run of a reactor that used red mercury as a neutron reflector. Some of the alloy was salvaged from the ruins afterwards.
• Matthew Reilly's 2011 novel Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves includes "red uranium" as a critical part of a Soviet-era superweapon that can ignite the atmosphere.
• In the 1999 novel Manifold: Time by British writer Stephen Baxter, a resentful worker uses red mercury "capable of releasing hundreds of times the energy contained in the same mass of TNT" to destroy the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• In the season 6 episode of the original Hawaii Five-O titled "Anybody Can Build A Bomb" a nuclear blackmailer claims to have built a nuclear device and enhanced it with "red mercury". The blackmailer threatens to detonate the bomb unless he's paid a large sum of money.
• In the reboot of the Star Trek film franchise, one of the plot elements is a room-temperature liquid referred to as "red matter", a substance that is able to rapidly produce artificial black holes.
• In a short story "A Tall Tale" written by Charles Stross on Tor.com ^[25] in 2012, red mercury (and its use in an experimental Russian reactor) is purported to be the reason for the meltdown of the B reactor at Chernobyl.
• The plot of the 2013 film RED 2 involves a nuclear device made utilizing red mercury, making it undetectable by radiation-detecting devices, and were it detonated, it would have no radioactive fallout.

See also

• Mercury(II) oxide
• Nuclear isomer
• Philosopher's stone

References

Further reading