When I posted the orignal thread everyone was searching for this mysterious Red Mercury... Later on I located another interesting reference to it. Copied below.
Nuclear Trafficking Hoaxes: A Short History of Scams Involving Red Mercury.
Multiple instances of profit-motivated nuclear hoaxes have been reported in the media in the past two decades, in which sellers offer weapons-usable or weapons-grade nuclear material and instead deliver some other bogus radioactive, or in some cases, nonradioactive substance. Such scams increased when economic conditions in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe declined in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The region's economic decline coupled with weakened security and enforcement mechanisms and a growing interest on the part of both state and non-state actors to illegally obtain nuclear materials all created favorable conditions for nuclear trafficking scams.
Nuclear scams often involve natural uranium, depleted uranium, or low-enriched uranium (LEU) reactor fuel, none of which is suitable for nuclear weapons. Other scams involve highly radioactive sources, such as cesium-237 or cobalt-60, which, though not fissile material, could be lethal components in a radiological dispersal device.
Two non-fissile substances that frequently have been used by con artists as substitutes for nuclear materials are so-called red mercury and osmium-187. Hoaxes involving both substances have become legendary after being the subject of widely reported trafficking attempts throughout the 1990s. A major reason these scams have been so widespread and common is likely related to the fact that there is some truth in the claims made by the con artists. Red mercury is the name given to an alleged nuclear weapon ingredient that does not exist in the form (Hg2Sb207) and with the characteristics described by nuclear scam artists. Some experts have suggested, however, that red mercury is in fact another name for lithium-6, a substance that can be used in the production of compact and highly efficient thermonuclear devices. Osmium-187 is a bona fide nonradioactive material not used for weapon construction, but because it is indeed an expensive commodity and one that is produced through a process similar to uranium enrichment, nuclear traffickers seized on it as a marketable product. This issue brief provides background on the two substances and summarizes some of the high-profile hoaxes in which they have been used.
Red Mercury
Red mercury has been the subject of dozens, if not hundreds, of cases or attempted cases of illicit trafficking. Some of the more interesting cases involving the transfer of materials under the name of red mercury include the following:
- After his defection, a former deputy unit chief of the North Korean uranium refinery plant Namchon Chemical Complex claimed that North Korea imported beryllium and red mercury from sources in Russia in 1993 through a smuggling organization in Pyongyang that involved the Russian mafia.
- In one attempt that stands out for the quantity offered and price requested, a Romanian woman reportedly offered to sell 138 kg of red mercury purchased in Chelyabinsk and acquired in Moscow to the Swiss firm Mueller Troihand for $340,000 per kg.
- A December 1997 New York Times article reported allegations made by a political rival that former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic attempted to purchase a nuclear weapon in 1995 from sources in the former Soviet Union in order to put an end to the Bosnian War. Karadzic allegedly paid $6 million up front for the device, with an additional $60 million to follow. Told that the device was made from red mercury, Karadzic received a brass container filled with jelly-like material. Surprised at the contents, he reportedly sent aides to Moscow to determine whether the device was in fact a nuclear weapon. To his dismay, the word from Moscow was that he had been swindled.
- A June 1999 issue of Jane's Intelligence Review cited Western intelligence analysts as saying that al-Qai'da operatives with little technical expertise were being swindled in their attempts to locate and purchase nuclear materials. One of these agents, later arrested in the United States, may have been swindled by con artists selling red mercury.
Red mercury has been the subject of films, books, newspaper articles, and high-level political intrigue, yet, according to much-publicized statements from British, Russian, and U.S. government officials, no material matching the properties of red mercury exists, and no such material is used in the construction of nuclear weapons. How, then, did red mercury become the nuclear commodity of choice for con artists and unwitting buyers?
References to red mercury began to appear in major Russian and Western media sources in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The articles were never specific as to what exactly red mercury was, but the accounts claimed that the substance was a valuable strategic commodity and a necessary component in a nuclear bomb and/or that it was important in the production of boosted nuclear weapons. Supposedly citing a leaked Russian government memorandum, an April 1993 article in the widely-read Russian daily Pravda reported that red mercury is "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." Red mercury was peddled throughout Europe and the Middle East by Russian businessmen, who made fortunes in the process. In one case, a Saudi Arabian sheikh reportedly paid £2.5 million for several shipments of the substance. Described as a brownish powder or a red liquid, red mercury was said to originate from various locations in the USSR, namely Ust-Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan, and Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, and Sverdlovsk in Russia.
Western media also carried accounts of red mercury and its nuclear applications. According to a July 1993 article in Nucleonics Week, red mercury was a code word used in the USSR nuclear weapons program since the 1950s to describe enriched lithium-6, which, according to the article, can be used to produce tritium, which, when fused with deuterium, can be used in the fusion stage of a thermonuclear weapon. Lithium-6 received its code name because of the red-hued impurities in the mercury used to produce lithium-6. According to the article, the USSR built a large complex in the early days of its nuclear weapon program to produce and stockpile lithium-6.
The Nucleonics Week article was followed by two television programs on red mercury produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation as part of its Dispatches series. Trail of Red Mercury (1993) and Pocket Neutron (1994) presented "startling new evidence" that Russian scientists had designed a simple, cheap, pure fusion weapon or neutron bomb, the size of a tennis ball, using a "mysterious compound" called red mercury. A June 1994 article in the venerable International Defense Review quoted Western and Russian nuclear physicists as confirming the existence and destructive capabilities of red mercury. One of those quoted, U.S. nuclear physicist Sam Cohen, to this day continues to write passionately about the nuclear applications of red mercury, which he describes as a "ballotechnic" explosive that, "when ignited, does not actually explode but stays intact long enough to produce the enormous temperatures and pressures sufficient to enable deuterium-tritium fusion."
However, beginning in 1992, at the height of the red mercury scams, government and independent experts from Russia, the United States, and elsewhere made repeated attempts to debunk the idea that red mercury was a wonder-weapon. In September 1992, Yuriy Tychkov, deputy minister of the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy and Industry, called rumors about red mercury's usefulness in weapons a sham. According to Tychkov, many entrepreneurs were using the name of red mercury, an uncontrolled substance, as a cover for smuggling controlled substances—precious metals and fissile material—out of the country. Tychkov reported that dozens of Russian ministries were inundated with requests for export licenses for the non-existent substance. The head of Interpol's National Central Bureau in Russia, Militia Lieutenant General Vasiliy Ignatov, made the following statement at an Interpol congress in March 1993: "No red mercury exists in nature, either factually or physically, and such an element is impossible to create. What is being sold, as a rule, are different reagents." In a July 1993 Pravda article, Major General Aleksandr Gurov, director of the Russian Security Ministry's Scientific Research Institute of Security was quoted as saying that red mercury is a slang term for "oxide of mercury." Gurov was later appointed head of a special government commission tasked with investigating red mercury. In his findings, released in 1995, Gurov insisted that red mercury does not exist.
In their ayurvedic medicine apparently there's a reference to a red sulphide of mercury. I am not so sure about this.
