Red mercury is a discredited substance, most likely a hoax perpetrated by con artists who

Red mercury is a discredited substance, most likely a hoax perpetrated by con artists who sought to take advantage of gullible buyers on the black market for arms. These con artists described it as a substance used in the creation of nuclear weapons; because of the secrecy surrounding nuclear weapons development, it is difficult to disprove their claims completely. However, all samples of alleged "red mercury" analyzed in the public literature have proven to be well-known, common substances of no interest to weapons makers.

HISTORY
References to red 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 purported 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.

An article in the daily Russian newspaper Pravda described in 1993, claiming to be informed by leaked top-secret memos, red mercury as:

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.

Two TV documentaries about red mercury were made by British Channel 4 television, 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".

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."

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 published in 1997 has perhaps the most factual summary of red mercury:

The asking price for red mercury ranged from $100,000 to $300,000 per kilogram. Sometimes the...

LINK TO ARTICLE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury

TAGS: Red mercury, Science and technology-related conspiracy theories, Pseudoscience, Nuclear weapons, Mercury (element), Hoaxes in science, Fictional weapons, Fictional materials

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