US investigating whether nukes in country

"I suppose you're one who hasn't looked beyond your nose to wonder if the Bush DoJ is looking at the Clinton crimes."

Now katze, I don't have to wonder, I just took their own words that they have publicly stated in various articles, posted right here on FR, some on this thread, many from "conservative" sources, in regards to various scandals that they are "moving on" and aren't interested in punishing criminality and upholding the law. I have posted such links, but I don't want to be repetitive.

"Whatever. If you think you can convince me (or most others) to turn against the Bushes, I must tell you that isn't possible at the moment. First things first, 1)war 2)prosecute Clinton and then we can look at what you claim about the Bushes"

katze, you're safe. He's god. So, I would not try to convince you or anyone to turn against Bush. But I'll make you a bet. 1) the war on terrorism never ends and more of our God-given rights will disappear daily. 2) They will never prosecute Clinton, or any of his mobsters for anything. 3) Like Clinton, Nothing will come of any Bush corruption, prior, now, or hereafter. So you're safe. Carry on.

CIA - Chronology of Nuclear Smuggling Incidents
January 17, 1994 - A Palestinian in Dubai, UAE has offered to sell three kilograms of reportedly Russian-origin red mercury to a Lebanese-American businessman, according to US diplomatic reporting."

A Palestinian in Dubai, UAE has offered to sell three kilograms of reportedly Russian-origin red mercury to a Lebanese-American businessman, according to US diplomatic reporting.

Tiny Neutron Bomb Claim

Citing Russian scientists, a British documentary claimed that Russia has designed a neutron bomb the size of a baseball, which does not require plutonium to operate. Rather, the weapon is alleged to use the material known as 'red mercury' to initiate the nuclear explosion. Development and use of 'red mercury' in this fashion is said to be a discovery which eluded US nuclear weapon scientist for forty years.

Reference: 940414.023
Channel Four TV (UK)
Tuesday April 12, 1994

Journal of Counterterrorism and Security International : The Magazine for Law Enforcement, Government, and the Military
http://www.iacsp.com/

The Journal of Counterterrorism and Security International is published by The International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals (IACSP). With offices in the United States of America, South Africa, South America, The United Kingdom, and Australia, the IACSP is the only professional organization with a strong and growing membership base of security professionals actively working to combat World-Wide terrorism. It's flagship publication, The Journal of Counterterrorism & Security International, is the most credible source of terrorism information in print today. Quoted by major news sources including members of congress, C-SPAN, Radio, Television and Newspaper journalists The Journal is always on the cutting edge of analysis and reporting. Sample articles include:

Dangerous Times for Corporate Security
High-Tech Terror: The New Threat From Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapon
Kidnappings For Profit: Colombia's Newest Cottage Industry
Red Mercury
Sri Lanka's Counterterrorism Commandos
Suicide Bombers: What Makes Them Tick?

Red mercury may be bomb detonator

In October 1991, in an apartment in a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden, a written agreement of sale of two kilos of "red mercury" at a price of US$800,000 was found.

Katze wrote in reply #137:

"Our current Pres Bush is a hero to me--is that ok with you"

You do not need my approval for your opinion just like I do not need your approval for my opinion that Bush Senior is a traitor. See, you and Poohbah still think that someone has to have the approval of someone else to express their opinions in this country.

I have not made my mind up yet about GW Bush actions about 9/11 after 9/11 until I see more facts. Bush's blocking the FBI investigation of BIn Laden family activities in the US before 9/11 and his nomination of Mueller and Ashcroft were not heroic acts to me.

GW Bush's position on unilateral nuclear disarmament, his having Third Way and Communitarianism members on his White House staff, his sharing operational details of US missile defense with Russia, and his willingness to sell out Israel with his giving the PLO a state and control over Christian Holy sites in Jersualem(9/11 speech to have been given by Powell to UN) makes him a very bad President to me. I did not ever vote for Clinton and I did not vote for Gore in 2000, but I did vote for President.

We shall see if GW Bush like his father commits acts of treason while President. I pray that he does not.

Quit it, you're scaring me.

UB, I appreciate all the work you do.

Now, do you feel better? I'll tell you one more time, you can't convert me.

STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE R. JAMES WOOLSEY, DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE in the House of Representatives - Monday, June 27, 1994
"There are, however, numerous cases in which low-enriched uranium, medical and other radioactive isotopes, and scam materials, notably 'red mercury' and osmium, have been offered for sale on the black market. Press reports routinely assert that Russian organized crime groups are intimately involved in some of these activities."

One senior official said in 1996 that in the last 10 years, Iraq had received over 200 offers of everything from red mercury to fissile material to complete nuclear weapons. He insisted that Iraq had turned down every offer.

THE SEARCH FOR RED MERCURY

Archive

Cohen, Sam. "The Coming Neutron Bomb Threat." Wall Street Journal, 15 May 1996, A14. Possible use of nuclear fusion byproduct by terrorists.

Edwards, Rob. "Cherry Red and Very Dangerous." New Scientist, 29 April 1995, 4-5. Discusses the dangers of "red mercury," a powerful chemical explosive.

Seifritz, W. "Spekulationen um Rotes Quecksilber RM 20/20." [Speculations about Red Mercury RM 20/20] ATW, Atomwirtschaft, Atomtechnik (August-September 1994), 585- 88.

"Black Holes of Red Mercury." Moscow News, 13 August 1993, 11.

Badolato, Edward V. and Dale Andrade. "Red Mercury: Hoax or the Ultimate Terrorist Weapon?" Counterterrorism and Security (Spring 1996), 18-20.

"Red Mercury: Is There a Pure-fusion Bomb for Sale?" International Defense Review (June 1994), 79-81.

NETHERLANDS: REAL "RED MERCURY" ON THE MARKET & NO BUYERS
On 7 September in the Dutch daily "NRC Handelsblad", a page-long article, described how a Rotterdam company (the name of which was not mentioned for security reasons) has 100 to 200 kilos of so-called "red mercury" (HG2SB2O7, mercury-antimony- oxide) for sale, probably the largest quantity available in the world. The article discusses the controversy over the material, with positions and sources, and describes the market and the "strange" company, a subsidiary of the former Soviet state-controlled export company Molibden based in Moscow. Last year, after the Dutch company advertised the product in "Metal Bulletin," a Channel Four Dutch film crew tried in vain to get access to it. It has apparently still not been sold. The company's director has shown the shipment to reporter Karel Knip and claimed to have received it from Russia in 1992. He even gave a sample to the journalist, who had it examined. The Reactor Institute of Delft University believes that it is indeed "the real stuff."

according to the Energy Department's own figures, the country's nuclear facilities have lost track of more than 5,000 pounds—two and a half tons—of plutonium. At Rocky Flats alone, officials acknowledge, some 2,400 pounds of plutonium is unaccounted for, though the plant's overall security rating today is "satisfactory."

We shall see if GW Bush like his father commits acts of treason while President. I pray that he does not.

142 posted on 12/26/01 8:54 PM Pacific by OKCSubmariner

Uh oh, you failed to say, "in my OPINION". And, yes I don't need your approval, and yes, I feel sure you'll find fault with GW Bush. But, it matters none, since it is only your OPINION, right?

Typical liberal goon statement. You don't know anything about the details of the subject, so just call people names.

144 posted on 12/26/01 8:59 PM Pacific by ratcat

Sure beats repeatedly accusing former Pres Bush of treason; then backing off, when confronted, to say, "it is my OPINION".

"while he and Cheney were on Cipro three weeks before the Congress knew anything about it)and the stated inability to protect Congress (by the SS/FBI)"

uh huh, yes, yada yada

Thank you for your sage advice.

Sorry I'm late getting back to you. It was on A&E's City Confidential. Dr Rebecca "somebody"; I taped it and will watch tomorrow.

I do not need to always say in my opinion just to satisfy your demands since what I wrote was in a reply and was not advertised as anything else.

I guess we are going to have to hold Poobah's poor little hand to gently guide him into understanding things obvious to other people, namely that replies are opinions.

Ah, Paddie, because I am feeling generous this morning, I will patiently explain something to you: if you say "Bush committed treason by giving the neutron bomb to the Chinese," that is NOT an opinion--that is a claim of fact. If you make a claim of fact here on FR, be prepared to back it up.

Maybe Poohbah is confused when he reads someone write about firmly held opinions since he seems so accustomed in dealing with Clinton who never had a firmly held belief or opinon (except not to have a belief or opinion-everything was relative to his expediency for the moment).

Au contraire, Paddie me lad, I have many a firmly held opinion. My firmly-held opinion of YOU is that you are a BS artist. You claim to be a nuclear engineer, having worked on Trident subs and having been approached to work on SDI (before being blacklisted for being a true patriot), but you can't even bring yourself to acknowledge the large inconsistencies between known laws of physics and the legend of "red mercury." You merely hide behind Sam Cohen, as if he has some variation of papal infallibility on the issue. You expect me to believe that you somehow made it through a high-speed, low-drag education in physics without ever encountering the words "enthalpy," "work," or "entropy."

In short, my personal OPINION of you, Paddie boy, is supported by the evidence at hand.

You provide a litany of links about "red mercury." But nowhere do you or any of your links explain how this substance does what it's alleged to do (set off a thermonuclear reaction using only chemical energy).

OK, that's pretty wierd that Woolsey should mention "red mercury." in testimony if it is a fraud. Still, he makes mantion of it in connection with radiological "junk," not fissile material or anything that would enhance a nuclear bomb. I suspect "red mercury" is radwaste Russian scam artists are trying to sell as if it were really valuable.

LOL!!!

Calling me a liberal is fightin words, boy. I just get tired of conspiracy freaks making accusations THAT HAVE NOT BASIS IN REALITY.

Okay, then I'm just gonna advertise for you that you stated it was an OPINION.

So, do you think former Pres Bush committed treason? You might at least give an opinion on that.

I'm not informed enough on that topic to have an opinion. And to be quite blunt, I have no time nor desire to research it in order to form an opinion. You guys can leave me out of your dogfight. I'm not here to take sides; I'm here to gather information. The only reason you even know I'm here is because I was looking for information and couldn't resist addressing a few of the replies, one of which was the argument, "If they had nukes they would have already used them." To blindly assume that radical Islamic terrorists employ traditional strategic military strategy is misguided and dangerous. (OPINION.)

I don't know if UBL's suicide bombers have access to radiological/nuclear devices or not. All I know is that I have nervous little, old ladies and unprepared first responders asking me questions that I may find answers to on this thread. (And I guaran-dang-tee you they aren't asking about former President Bush and his alleged treasonous activities.)

Although I'm well aware that the actual physical damage from any radiological/nuke device would be relatively limited, try telling that to the people who are unlucky enough to live in that vicinity. And think about this next question long and hard: Would you guys like me to tell the first responders in your vicinity that they don't need to bother preparing for radiation poisoning effects and sequelae because "if UBL had them he would have already used them?" I'll just tell them to completely ignore the End-of-the-World thinking displayed by the modern-day extremist Islamic terrorists -- that spirit of apocalyptic nihilism that would make them destroy entire cities so they can hasten their upcoming orgy with their beloved virgins.

"Prepare? Bah, humbug! Just because they want to die for Allah doesn't mean they're willing to take us with them!"

Hopefully, from the limited amount I'm saying here, you can understand I'm looking at the entire WMD issue from a completely different angle and viewpoint as most of you. There's a certain urgency here that you may not understand, and I'm not willing to say enough to explain it. I find the dogfights fun to watch, but it's distracting. (Yes, yes, it's my own dang fault for entering the discussion in the first place, but if people wouldn't say such stupid things I wouldn't have to reply, now would I? .......... Spoken like a true Clintonian. ;-)

Now, stop distracting me and tell me where I can find factual data on mercury antimony oxide and that report of the Palestinian allegedly smuggling nuclear material into Israel. :) Uncle Bill is posting some very useful information on this (Thanks, Uncle Bill!) What I need is solid information that addresses the "Red-mercury-is-dangerous vs. Red-mercury-is-bogus" argument.

Here's more, in case anyone besides me is interested. Educated, unemotional, and unbiased opinions on this article are invited and welcomed. I need documented facts that I can use to formulate educated responses -- responses that neither gloss over the possibilities with denial nor create undue and unnecessary anxiety.

Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.

New Scientist
April 29, 1995
This Week, Pg. 4

Cherry red and very dangerous
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 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 organised society." He claims that it could be used to make a baseball-sized neutron bomb capable of killing everyone within about 600 metres of the explosion.

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 revolutionise 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 (Hg2Sb2O7) 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 am.