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"Red Mercury"

Threads - SEC: UNCLASSIFIED - Is This Real, Red Mercury

On 14/11/2002, Scott O'Connell posted:

I have read of a material called "red mercury".  Does anyone know if this is a real substance or something that sounds mysterious?

There is a book called "Ancient Traces" which proposes than human civilizations extend much further back into the past than is generally accepted.  Red mercury gets its own chapter in this book.  Personally I find the book somewhat apocryphal - and yet . . . not impossible . . .

Toby Fiander replied :

                One of the oxides of Mercury is red.  Does this fit with the  context of the book?

to which Scott responded:

Couldn't say.  The significance of the red mercury is supposedly its alchemical origin, and the cyclical discovery and loss of knowledge.

Peter  Macinnis added:

No, this fabulous stuff is supposed to be REALLY explosive -- I think it was cooked up by irradiating mercury or some such.  I was always torn between regarding it as a boys' own sort of yarn and an attempt to rip off the sort of people who buy depleted uranium to make "atom bombs", or get their instructions on making the bomb from the Journal of Irreproducible Results.

I have read of it, I have never seen an account that really explained it -- I *suspect* it does not exist.

On 15/11/2002, Donald Lang wrote:

I rattled this particular chain on 9/9/02 as follows

**********************
I was quietly eating my lunch when I noticed a copy of the New Scientist, in fact several,  in front of me.

So I picked it up, as you do.

I found an idea whose time has passed. An article by Rob Edwards was reporting on something called "Red Mercury". Any of the veteran denizens here remember it? If not, and curious, look in a number dated 29/4/95.

Having established that anything so reported must be authentic, proceed to p 19 on the 16/8/97 and make the acquaintance of somebody who in my writing comes out as Marcus Chown. He is reported as evaluating evidence that neutrinos travel faster than light. I think I will leave the topic there. I am calibrating how much you have to rattle a particular chain....

ttfn

DEE

**************

My memory says that "Red Mercury" was mentioned a few times about the time of the article cited. It was claimed that it had explosive power beyond what would be expected from normal chemistry. There was a suggestion that it might take the place of a fission trigger in a fusion weapon.

I think the article mentioned that the sceptics were claiming that the power would only be available if  you found a way to involve the inner electronic shells in an atom in the chemistry. Chemists on the list may now do their thing. And I have not even greased the top of the soap box I left for them.

Barb Sloan responded:
>I have read of a material called "red mercury".  Does anyone know if
> this is a real substance or something that sounds mysterious?
Almost certainly refers to mercury II oxide (mercuric oxide) which is red in colour and was once highly regarded as a pigment, under the name Vermillion. Not used as such any more because it is highly (and cumulatively) poisonous.

> There is a book called "Ancient Traces" which proposes than human
> civilizations extend much further back into the past than is generally
> accepted.  Red mercury gets its own chapter in this book.  Personally I find
> the book somewhat apocryphal - and yet . . . not impossible . . .
The "mercury engines" described in it are the main motive source in flying pigs - he's just done a Daniken with a carefully selected mishmash of  fact and factoids, with anything which may contradict his thesis diligently removed or omitted.
Scott replied:

Supposedly the main source for red mercury was late Soviet-era Russia.  "Ancient Traces" mentions 2 (at least) sales of the stuff for major bucks.  But the main thrust of the book is supposed artefacts and remains of apparent human creation which pre-date, by thousands of years if not epochs, the known civilisations.  And yes, I have to agree with the categorisation of the book as Daniken-ish.  Though it was surprising to me to find out that a friend of mine, who is generally pretty grounded in fact, gives Daniken himself much credibility (?).  I've read him, and I can't give him the same benefit.

David A Martin responded:

My two bits worth (for what it's worth :-)

As I recall, the topic of "red mercury" surfaced about seven or eight years ago. It was supposed to be a massively powerful, and entirely new, kind of explosive developed in the former Soviet Union. New Scientist ran an article on it around that time. It was certainly nothing to do with red mercuric oxide.

The method of manufacture depended somewhat on which article you read, but basically consisted of cooking mercury and various other ingredients in a nuclear reactor for months at a time.

The explosive power of this stuff was supposedly thousands of times greater than that of conventional explosives, but I couldn't find (after a brief search) any supposed mechanism.

However, it might work like this:

electrons in atoms are bound to the nucleus. The inner electrons are bound more tightly than the outer ones and this binding increases with atomic number. For example it's 13.6 electron volts (eV, a physicists unit of energy) for the single electron in hydrogen and eighty three *thousand* eV for the innermost electrons in mercury.

The outermost electrons are typically bound with energies in the order of a few eV, for all the elements, and these are the ones which take part in chemical reactions.

So, rearrangement of molecules in chemical reactions, including explosions, typically involves energies in the order of an eV for each molecule. This translates as, very roughly, a million joules per kilogram for the most energetic reactions e.g. a TNT explosion (the actual number for TNT is four million joules per kilogram).

Now, the point of all the above is that rearrangement of the *inner* electron shells would lead to vastly higher energies being released, and inner electrons can certainly be rearranged by the high energy particles / rays in a nuclear reactor.

If, for example, irradiating mercury led to ejection of electrons from the innermost shells, and the resulting stuff was metastable, then it would have many thousands of times the explosive power of TNT.

Having said all this, I suspect (like Peter) that the whole business is a hoax. Partly because inner shell ionisation has a very short lifetime (picoseconds) before the atom returns to normal, and partly because I suspect that, even if "red mercury" was metastable, it would take centuries rather than months to cook it up; after all, energy is a conserved quantity.
Chris Lawson added:

I looked into red mercury for a story I was writing approx. 5 years ago, and came to much the same conclusion. There was a LOT of secondary material, dozens of speculations about the possible chemical nature of red
mercury, but absolutely nothing in the way of solid evidence. BTW, my understanding was that red mercury was especially useful as the initiating explosive in a nuclear bomb. I didn't really see why this was so astounding
because they can make effective nukes that fit in a suitcase anyway. I suspect that some Russian with military connections was scamming a potential buyer by inventing this magical stuff.

(In my story, a physicist is on a mission to penetrate a death-cultish group who have been sold some red mercury and want to know if it's the real thing or not. He takes one look at it and realises it's certainly nothing
spectacular (I can't recall what travesty of chemistry I thought up as an alternative), but tells the group it's the real thing, upon which they break out into celebration... This is only a subplot. I think I may be the only writer in the world who puts subplots into 5000 word stories! I never finished the story to a satisfactory level, despite a couple of really good scenes in it. I was thinking of going back to it until S11; after that I didn't feel quite the same desire to warn people about the availability of dangerous materials to lunatic groups.)