The mystery of the red mercury

A mystery. Ayad Anwar Wali may have lost their lives because of a substance that no one knows anything, the red mercury. In the video of his execution, Wali admits, or is forced to admit that he had received an offer of 10 million dollars from the Turkish secret services and $ 30 million from those Israelis to provide certain quantities of uranium and mercury red.

The problem is that nobody knows exactly what is red mercury. It says it can be used to build nuclear bombs. Could be an explosive able to trigger the initial process of fusion, a powerful explosive per se, a form of mercury based on antimony and mercury oxide which is obtained within a nuclear reactor. Or it could be a code name, formula, behind which hide the traffic of other toxic or lethal.

The name recalls alchemical terms, it is mentioned for example in a text of the sixteenth century, the Rosarium Philosophorum in a deliberately hermetic element as amended by the fire and should be treated with caution before placing it in the still. In fact, an element that can trigger major changes. Perhaps it is because of these similarities that ancient still you chose a name so evocative to associate it with things just as dangerous as nuclear weapons. The fact is that, even today, when we talk about red mercury is not science.



According to one theory, the red mercury could be a very powerful conventional explosive. Enough to be used to build small bombs can release two megatons of energy, which is the double of the one released by the explosion of one million tons of TNT. According to this theory, then, the red mercury could be used to produce weapons of mass destruction.

If you were an element to build an atomic bomb, the explosive may be able to trigger the fission process, which in turn triggers nuclear fusion. But according to some, including the inventor of the neutron bomb Samuel Cohen, also an explosion of red mercury could be so powerful as to trigger the fusion reaction itself.

On the nature of red mercury, there are also other theories: some say would be the result of experiments that took place in secret laboratories of the Soviet Union, for others just a form of uranium or plutonium of very high quality which is code-named by arms dealers with this ancient alchemical name.