You say you want to get your mushroom clouds mushrooming easier and cheaper?
You say you want to get more BANG for your buck by enhancing the fissioning of your fissionable material?
You say you want stuff that’ll stealth the stuff you already have?
— then red mercury is the stuff for you!
It’s a particularly disturbing thing to say – especially considering their less-than-stellar track record and even less-than-stellar ethics– but every now and again intelligence agencies might to do something right…
And, oh boy, do they need a few successes. Let’s face it, after Acoustic Kitty, Castro’s estrogen-laced cigars, dosing unsuspecting folks with LSD in their own San Francisco-based brothel … to name a few from our native agencies … there’s nowhere to go but up.
Now that (wink) anyone has come forth (wink, wink) admitting to it (wink, wink, wink) but when you look at the history — and the results — it’s pretty damned neat little plan … not that anyone ever said that it was a plan (wink, wink, wink, wink).
It all began back in the late 1980s: started articles popping up in Russian news outlets chatting about the end-all, be-all additive to everything from being a shortcut to developing nuclear weapons, creating perfect now-you-see-it/now-you-don’t stealth tech, or giving an existing nuke that extra-added kick. Most of these articles didn’t feel all that legitimate … that is until Pravda, in 1993, ran a piece that claimed that red mercury was a form of superconductor: “–used for producing high-precision conventional and nuclear bomb explosives, ‘Stealth’ surfaces and self-guided warheads.”
Soon red mercury was the must-have for anyone up to no good. Even though no one knew what the stuff was, or what it even looked like – the term ‘red mercury’ coined as it first was mentioned in Russia – people began shelling our serious shekels for it. A 1997 issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists listed the underground asking price for the stuff at up to $300,000 a kilo!
Now whoever was selling the stuff – still not saying who that who was – was pretty clever about it: sometimes what was sold was neatly packaged with warning stickers, or even given a camouflage dose of real radioactivity, but what few deliveries that were intercepted up were nothing more than – wait for it – regular mercury with a bit of coloring.
Even though the International Atomic Energy Agency issued a statement that red mercury was, and I’m using their own words here, “–a bunch of malarkey,” the demand never really abated – because, that’s just what they would want you to think, right?
Here’s where things get really twisted … if not outright bizarre. Keeping with the convert agency angle, let’s say you’re desperately trying to figure out a way to catch folks who might, could be, may be trying to develop Weapons Of Mass Destruction. Just keeping an ear out for people looking for plutonium or high quality centrifuges can certainly work but those are pretty high profile — lots of risk and all that – the stuff of high security back-alley dealings.
What you really need is a McGuffin: an innocuous thing that these folks would be really sloppy trying to procure because it’s as common as … oh, I don’t know, grandma’s electric sewing machine needles.
Back in 2009, someone paid almost $60,000 for a single Singer sewing machine in Saudi Arabia. Now there are collectors for just about everything, no matter how weird or yawningly dull, but that sale made a few folks pay attention – especially since the same kind of machine would normally have gone for about fifty bucks.
You see it seems that someone (wink, etc.) had started the rumor that red mercury – that wonder of the nuclear age – could be found in old sewing machine needles. A few folks even claimed that there was a way of using a cell phone to check for red mercury “authenticity” … as Saudi seamstresses began to rake it in selling their own machines.
Meanwhile in Africa the belief in red mercury led to a sadly much more final chapter for many when they blew themselves up trying to “extract” the mythical material from landmines and other discarded explosives.
While it’s more than likely that those misfortunate enough to believe that red mercury was in old munitions were nothing but naive and desperate, and not planning world domination, it demonstrates how there are always those willing to do anything to wreck other people’s lives … for money. In Africa, for example, the red mercury myth has been blamed not on convert actions to expose would-be nuclear terrorists but discarded weapons dealers trying to boost sales. Even in Saudi Arabia, where red mercury was in those sewing machine needles, many people went mad for the stuff … not for making nukes but for conjuring a wish-granting jinn.
I did say some convert agency might have done something right…
While no outfit has ever officially come forth fessing up to red mercury hoax it’s pretty easy to come to a few conclusions about red mercury. First of all, if it was a covert action it worked … at least to some extent. But that, intentions aside, you have to say when all’s said and done that human beings will do whatever it takes to make a buck.
