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.
This Week, Pg. 4New Scientist
April 29, 1995
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.
Rest assured I'm not trying to include you in "your dogfight". I asked your opinion, since you displayed interest in the thread.
Since I know little, except what I've been reading here about "red mercury", I can't express opinions about that. I asked for proof that former Pres Bush committed treason, and learned it is only opinion; now I find it a cheap, baseless and unfounded shot.
With that, I'll leave the red merc discussion to Poohbah, who seems more than knowledgable and capable to discuss, if he can find someone else with those qualities.
First, the basic description supplied by Sam Cohen is of a substance that violates basic physics. The biggest issue is that this substance apparently can undergo some sort of chemical reaction that releases an intense amount of heat, but that reaction does NOT increase its entropy. Mother Nature doesn't let you DO that--because otherwise, Red Mercury would be the fuel for a perpetual motion machine. If it IS such a fuel, then it's too damn valuable to blow up in neutron bombs.
Next, when you look at the details of "red mercury," it gets interesting. Supposedly, it's mercury antimony oxide. It generates energy levels associated with nuclear reactions from a simple chemical reaction--and nobody ever bothers to explain HOW it does this. This is kind of important, because chemical reactions are FAR less energetic than nuclear reactions. To give you an idea of how much more energy is involved in a nuclear reaction, take a laboratory beaker full of sugar and pour in some hydrochloric acid. You will end up with a black, gunky mess (essentially pure carbon) and enough heat that you can't hold the beaker without using tongs or thermally insulated gloves. Now, if you were to somehow fuse a significant fraction of the hydrogen in the sugar into helium in one instant, the following would happen:
Finally, this stuff is AMAZINGLY cheap--no more than $400,000 a kilo, and it will set off a thermonuclear burn with just a blasting cap. No need for complicated design work, just stick in your tritium and your lithium deuteride, and BINGO! You just became a superpower. What's that, ma'am? You don't have tritium, and you don't have any lithium deuteride? NO PROBLEM! This stuff gets so doggone hot, you don't NEED the usual fusion fuel materials. Set off enough of it and it will ignite oxygen and nitrogen--good ol' air, or at least a significant minority component of the air in the Los Angeles Basin--into a fusion reaction of amazing yield. Nukes would be VERY cheap...and every terrorist in the world would be able to afford this stuff, and keep it on the shelf next to their $400 EMP bomb they built with parts from Radio Schlock and plans downloaded from the Internet.
It would be cheap at $1,000,000 a kilo.
It would still be very competitive with "ordinary" nukes at $10,000,000 a kilo.
If it actually existed.
But, HEY...if I had a line on where to get red mercury, I sure wouldn't use it in a bomb...I'd use it to fuel a powerplant in California, and not have to pay for fuel, EVER.