Cherry red Page | 1

and very
dangerous
By Rob Edwards
“RED MERCURY”, a uniquely powerful
chemical explosive which has been dismissed
by many experts as a myth, could be real, and
it could pose a serious threat to the world’s
attempts to control the spread of nuclear
weapons. New information leaked from South
Africa, Russia and the US has convinced
leading nuclear weapons scientists that the
chemical’s potential risks should now be taken
seriously.
The scientists, who include Sam Cohen, the
American nuclear physicist who invented the
neutron bomb, and Frank Barnaby, the former Page | 2

director of the Stockholm International Peace

Research Institute, are worried that red
mercury could make it much easier for nations
or terrorist groups to construct small but deadly
thermonuclear fusion weapons. They are
calling for the 178-nation conference on the
future of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,
due to end in New York in two weeks, to
introduce tougher controls on the international
trade in tritium, one of the raw materials of the
fusion bomb.
“I don’t want to sound melodramatic,” says
Cohen, who worked on the Manhattan Project
to build the atom bomb in the 1940s and was a
nuclear weapons adviser to the US government
with the Rand Corporation for 20 years. “But
red mercury is real and it is terrifying. I think it
is part of a terrorist weapon that potentially
spells the end of organized society.” He claims
that it could be used to make a baseball-sized
neutron bomb capable of killing everyone
within about 600 meters of the explosion. Page | 3

Barnaby, a respected nuclear weapons analyst

who has been investigating red mercury for the
past six years, is more cautious. He accepts that
there have been many cases in which offers of
red mercury for sale at enormous prices have
turned out to be hoaxes. But he believes “on
the balance of probabilities” that a mercury-
based high explosive which could revolutionize
the design of nuclear weapons was developed
within the former Soviet Union.
The latest evidence Barnaby has seen is two
documents leaked to Greenpeace, apparently
from a former mercury production plant in
South Africa. The documents detail chemical
specifications for a substance called “red
mercury 20:20”; a compound of pure mercury
and mercury antimony oxide (Hg Sb O )
2 2 7

described as “cherry red” and “semi-liquid”.

The documents seem to form part of a request
from an unknown buyer for the supply of “4-10
flasks per month” of the substance. Page | 4

One of the documents, dated 2 April 1990, is

addressed to Wolfgang Dolich at the British-
owned Thor Chemical company at Speyer, near
Mannheim in Germany. Dolich, who was a
sales manager at the time and is now the
company’s German director, could not
remember who had sent him the document, nor
could he decipher whose illegible signature it
bears. But he thinks the document is likely to
be one of the many requests that he used to
receive for mercury products. He says that he
probably passed it on to his company’s sister
plant at Cato Ridge in Natal, South Africa,
where mercury compounds were manufactured
until a few years ago.
But Dolich told New Scientist that nothing
could have come of the request because Thor,
which runs chemicals businesses in seven
countries from its headquarters in Margate,
Kent, had never been involved in the
manufacture of red mercury.
Page | 5
The document also contains a handwritten note
saying “Herewith all we have on red mercury”
and signed “Alan”. Dolich thinks this is likely
to be Alan Kidger, Thor’s Johannesburg-based
sales director who was mysteriously murdered
in November 1991. South African police
investigators believe that Kidger’s murder
could be linked to a clandestine trade in red
mercury, although the company denies this.
Barnaby regards the specifications in the
documents as scientifically credible, although
they are not always easy to understand. They
are similar to others he has seen from Russia,
Germany and Austria and reinforce his view
that there is a significant international trade in
red mercury. In association with two other
senior scientists from Italy and the US, whom
he declined to name, he is now actively trying
to acquire a small sample of red mercury so
that its alleged properties can be properly
tested in a laboratory.
Page | 6
Barnaby’s group has talked to four unnamed
scientists in Russia. Barnaby says all four
provided detailed information about red
mercury. As a result Barnaby has concluded
that it is a polymer with a gel-like consistency
in which mercury and antimony have been
bound together after irradiation for up to 20
days in a nuclear reactor.
He says that mercury antimony oxide is
produced in “relatively large quantities” at a
chemicals factory in Yekaterinburg. Red
mercury itself, he claims, was first produced in
1965 in a cyclotron at the nuclear research
centre at Dubna, near Moscow, and is now
made at “a number” of Russian military
centres, including Krasnoyarsk in Siberia and
Penza, 500 kilometres southeast of Moscow.
One Russian scientist estimates that Russia
produces about 60 kilograms of red mercury a
year.
Page | 7
Barnaby argues that the gel, as well as having
possible uses in fission weapons, could yield
enough chemical energy when compressed to
fuse tritium atoms and produce a
thermonuclear explosion. The gel may already
be incorporated in Russian neutron weapons,
such as the M-1975 240-millimetre mortar, he
says.
If this is true, red mercury would be a
remarkable material which could have dramatic
implications for energy production as well as
weapons technology. But its existence is
doubted, not just by the British, US and
German governments (This Week, 6 June
1992), but also by independent critics. Two of
the most notable are Joseph Rotblat, emeritus
professor of physics at the University of
London, and Ted Taylor, a leading bomb
designer at the US nuclear weapons laboratory
at Los Alamos in New Mexico in the 1950s.
Page | 8
Taylor points out that the only conceivable way
to obtain the high levels of chemical energy
claimed for red mercury would be to dislodge
the inner electrons of mercury and antimony.
But he argues that it is difficult to see how this
could produce a substance that was stable long
enough to be used as an explosive. “I would
bet that it does not exist,” he says.
Despite his scepticism, Taylor believes that the
potential implications of red mercury are so
significant that it ought to be investigated. The
discovery of a material that could release
hundreds or thousands of times more chemical
energy than TNT could be “more important
than nuclear fission”, he says. It could
revolutionise space travel as well as making
possible a fearsome new category of nuclear
fusion weapons. “I hope it’s all wrong, but
maybe I’m slipping into wishful thinking,” he
says. He agrees with Barnaby and Cohen that
trade in tritium ought to be subject to the same
safeguards as plutonium and highly enriched Page | 9

uranium, the essential ingredients of fission

bombs.
Cohen, however, claims that red mercury is
one of a new class of highly explosive
materials under secret investigation by nuclear
weapons scientists in the US. He quotes a
memorandum which he received recently from
Sandia National Laboratories, the nuclear
weapons engineering centre in New Mexico,
which describes such materials as
“ballotechnic”. According to the memo, this
means that “under certain conditions” the
chemical energy obtained “can be greater than
with high explosives”.
Bob Graham, a senior researcher at Sandia,
says that he coined the term “ballotechnics” to
describe devices which produce heat following
exposure to shock. But he insists that it has no
connection with red mercury, which he does
not believe exists. “Graham is not free to speak
openly about this,” counters Cohen. “I Page | 10

am.” (see Diagram)