Red Mercury, Real Conspiracies, and Strategic Waste
I first heard about it in a book about nuclear terrorism that discussed a 20 year old murder of Alan Kidger, a South African chemical company executive found dismembered in the trunk of his car “smeared with an oily black substance.” Though never confirmed, Mossad is said to have killed Kidger for trying to sell the WMD red mercury to enemies of Israel. Either that, or he was killed by the customer to whom he was selling it (the murder has never been solved). Having never heard of red mercury I had to do a bit more research. Very quickly I found an unending rabbit warren of conspiracy theories, and learned some interesting lessons about the practical utility of conspiracies along the way.
The theoretical origins of red mercury lay in a difficult physics problem that has consumed countless billions in research funding over the last half-century. How can we build a smaller bomb? The classic thermonuclear device requires either massive amounts of hard-to-obtain high-grade nuclear materials, or high explosives surrounding a mass of tritium-deutronium that in turn triggers a plutonium core. I don’t have the knowledge or space to explain the details (go here if you’re interested) but the basic message is that nukes are HEAVY. As in, thousands of pounds for a decent yield heavy. Yes, a variety of small tactical nukes were developed during the Cold War, but they still weighed enough to be difficult for one person to carry around and they had no more power than a truck bomb with many times the price tag and complexity. A true suitcase nuke with megaton yield would be a game changer. And in the 1970s word began to filter out of the USSR that Soviet physicists had found a way to do it using irradiated mercury antimony oxide, i.e. red mercury. Theoretically this compound made possible a two-megaton warhead the size of a baseball, which might easily be smuggled across borders, hidden away until use, and hand-delivered if necessary.
The only problem is that most scientists argue not only that such a device is impossible, but that red mercury itself doesn’t exist. Numerous governments including our own have repeatedly said it’s all a hoax, and a majority of physicists (including the IAEA) say it’s simply not possible. But there is still a non-negligible minority who argue it is real including father of the neutron bomb Sam Cohen. With disagreement between scientists about what it might be and how it might be used, the CIA publicly arguing it didn’t exist, and the potential of a catastrophic weapon in the hands of terrorists, all the components for good conspiracy theories were in place. And did they ever take off! By the mid 1990s conspiracy theorists were busily writing about possible incidents involving red mercury and there were dozens of documented cases of terrorists, warlords and even governments paying up to a million dollars per kilogram of the mythical substance. When they invariably turned out to be scams, the sellers were often murdered viciously as Alan Kidger illustrated.
Though it’s impossible to say for sure, there are a few interesting theories about where the idea of red mercury gained prominence before it became just another conspiracy (albeit a potentially lucrative one). One is that “red mercury” was a code word for some ingredient or process unrelated to mercury, and there is evidence that it simply referred to lithium 6. Others have speculated that “red” only referred to the fact that it came from Russia.
My favorite, however, and the one that seems most likely, was argued in the first few pages I read about the subject by Brian Jenkins, referencing sources as far back as the 1960s: “Soviet research on red mercury initially appeared promising… Red mercury had cachet; money flowed and the research continued but without yielding results.” At some point it became clear that the process was not feasible, “but by then, red mercury had attracted the attention of Western spies. Whatever its utility in weapons design, it gained utility as a weapon of deception in the intelligence war…a useful diversion for American intelligence…a honey pot to attract and observe spies.” Who knows how much money was spent to continue researching a project that was a known (if not admitted) failure, but the Soviets apparently decided it was worth maintaining the facade as it continued for many years.
The knee-jerk reaction to this among many Westerners might be to scoff at this purposeful waste of resources, but perhaps no nation has been more guilty of such a strategy over the years than the United States. Ronald Reagan’s famous Strategic Defense Initiative (also known as “Star Wars”) spent over $200 billion to develop a missile defense system that virtually everyone involved knew was not technically feasible, and never developed a single working weapon. Nevertheless there was a full-court-press in the media about its likelihood of success. It is now recognized to have functioned “better as a psychological lever to force the Soviets back into arms talks than as a piece of technology.” Depending on which of Reagan’s aides one asks, the purpose of missile shield research was to eventually get defensive technology for future generations; to improve our strategic bargaining position; or just to ensure that the USSR would keep spending enough that they’d collapse. Regardless which of these was true (and all likely played a part) the simple fact that billions were wasted on a failed technology project for political reasons while the official “conspiracy” of a workable missile shield was maintained for more than a decade. It had to be, because all of Reagan’s strategies would make sense only if it was really possible.
At the end of the day I’m left with a more complicated view of conspiracy theories. Through red mercury and star wars, the big powers of the cold war spent vast sums to purchase credibility. If billions were being invested in these projects, there had to be something real behind them, right? That’s the thinking we were inciting in the minds of our enemies, and in so doing we modified their behavior to better align with our goals. Such is the nature of these “official conspiracies,” which are almost the mirror image of what one generally imagines as conspiracies. Instead of working to cover up something real and pretend nothing happened, they try to get people to imagine something real out of nothing. And when they work (as red mercury did in a big way) they take on a life of their own, and not always in a predictable way. The stickiness is much greater and the half-life far longer for some than for others and it’s often tough to guess which ones will really take off.
At the end of the day, how do you determine whether such an approach is an efficient security strategy? Or is that even a valid question for ideas that continue to affect the way people behave? Regardless, as long as terrorists believe in the existence of red mercury I wouldn’t be surprised if its viability as a weapon continues to be propagated by Sam Cohen and others purely as a way to bait the bad guys. In fact, I think that’s probably what’s going on….excuse me while I step over to the Conspiracy Cafe to float the idea.
