"Red Mercury and The Strange Case of Delmart Vreeland"

Financial Sense ^ | 04 01 02 | JR Nyquist

[Brett66]

Okay, I reread the article and I believe he's making the claim that this high explosive can catalyze a thermonuclear reaction more efficiently than the standard explosives on a nuclear device. He seems to be saying that it's possible to bypass the fission stage of a thermonuclear device altogether and substitute red mercury for the plutonium. The claim that it only requires 1000th of the material of a thermonuclear device seems spurious, especially if it lacks a fission stage. The articles rather vague, which inspires suspicion.

I really don't know why he creates this red mercury bogey-man. Standard nuclear technology can create a backpack nuclear device -or Atomic Demolition Munition that could be smuggled into the heart of any major city and take out a large portion of it.

[Brett66]

The standard problems of nuclear weapon design still exist though. It would be extremely difficult to get enough nuclear material to create a weapon with it and if you do get the material it would have a shelf life of about six months before it would have to be recharged.

[lavaroise]

A chemical explosive that initiates thermonuclear fusion. ROFLMAO!!

They did it with TNT in the 60s. All you need to do is compress the Deuterium into Tritium or Helium. To do that you need high enough temperatures and pressures that can be replicated with chemical explosions.

[lavaroise]

True that an Uranium or Plutonium detonator charge is probably more powerful than any chemical explosion per weight out there. This is a good point.

[d4now]

Your comments please:

Follow-up Report:Red Mercury and The Strange Case of Delmart Vreeland"

[Brett66]

Already posted here:

Red Mercury and The Strange Case of Delmart Vreeland

[d4now]

sorry...duh - is about all I can say.

I will now return to the corner. Anybody seen my hat?

[NukeMan]

I have sometimes thought the 'red mercury' story was a deliberate creation of a certain three-letter agency within the US. It allows them to track would-be terrorists and proliferation efforts by nasty regimes. If a certain group or state expresses interest in purchasing red mercury, it is a signal to watch that group more closely, and it also yields information as to their sophistication in nuclear weapons physics....

OTOH, it is hard to believe we could be smart enough to think up a sting like this. I just don't know.

[Physicist]

REd mercury hot fusion is much more plausible than cold fusion that many believe in at FR. Why?

Because we know enough about cold fusion to debunk it, whereas we know nothing about Red Mercury, so we ascribe to it whatever properties we as individuals think plausible.

While I expect that there is a substance called "Red Mercury" that the Russians have used in the making of nuclear weapons, I doubt that such a magic explosive exists as described. Our spies in Moscow were not completely incompetent throughout the entire cold war. If such a thing existed, we'd probably have obtained knowledge of it, and would be employing it in our conventional ordnance. A super chemical explosive has implications that go far beyond improved nuclear weapons.

[RightWhale]

To start a thermonuclear [fusion] reaction requires a great deal of compression and high temperature such as a fission explosion can provide. No chemical explosive is of that order of magnitude, not by a factor of a million. It is the difference between the electromagnetic forces [electron binding] and the nuclear binding force [proton binding.] The mercury nucleus is fairly stable, so uranium or plutonium is used in fission devices such as the compression device that packs the deuterium-tritium core enough to start the fusion process.

Magnetic confinement and laser heating are used in fission municipal power generation devices, still experimental and not particularly explosive; also not particularly portable.

[NukeMan]

I agree. See my post #19. Just a few bombs of this alleged stuff (minus any fission or fusion components), and the Taliban Afghan mountain bunker problem would have disappeared.

"When facts are few, speculation is apt to follow individual psychology." Carl Jung.

Truer words were never spoken!

[Plummz]

Well, looking at Vreeland's manic letter (there are graphic files of a picture around), I would not be surprised if the man has been medicated. OTOH, it is evident that he works for the Navy and was framed on bogus charges, so there is something to this story. There have been plenty indications that many people/agencies/governments knew this was coming. I believe it is too simple to say, as Nyquist does, that "Moscow did it," or as Ruppert, "CIA did it," or as Raimondo seems to imply, "Israel did it," or as some posters, "Iraq did it." It seems evident to me that an international faction coordinated/allowed 9/11 to go down.

[Right Wing Professor]

You can't 'knock the electrons out of a compound' - at least, not a significant number of them. To do so would create Coulombic repulsion forces that would tear any ordinary material apart.

Let's say you had a mole of 'Red Mercury', and you wanted to remove 0.1 mole of electrons from it. That's only a tiny fraction of the electrons. 0.1 mole of electrons is about 10000 Coulombs. The capacitance of the lump of red mercury will be small. Let's be very generous and say it's a microfarad. The potential on the piece of red mercury would be 10000/10^-6 = 10 billion volts.

[NorseWood]

bump

[2sheep]

Bump

[Tailgunner Joe]

bttt

[Senator Pardek]

The "Real" Delmart Vreeland