Apparently, Prasolov`s letter did not have the desired effect, because in January 1992 the state licensing authority received another letter about Alkor – this time from the St. Petersburg KVS. The letter, signed by Putin`s deputy, Anatoly Karasev, called on the agency to grant Alkor a license to export red mercury. He further claimed that the reason this is not widely known is that elements within the US power structure deliberately keep it “secret” because of the appalling impact of such a weapon on nuclear proliferation. Since a red mercury bomb would not require fissile material, current methods of arms control would make it impossible to protect against its widespread proliferation. Instead of trying to do so, they simply pretend that it does not exist while privately acknowledging its existence. Cohen also claimed that President Boris Yeltsin, when he took office, secretly allowed red mercury to be sold on the international market, and that fake versions of it were sometimes offered to gullible buyers. [16] The asking price for red mercury ranged from $100,000 to $300,000 per kilogram. Sometimes the material was irradiated or shipped in containers with radioactive symbols, perhaps to convince potential buyers of its strategic value. But the samples seized by police contained only mercury(II) oxide, mercury(II) iodide or mercury mixed with red dye – virtually no material of interest to weapons manufacturers. [1] This measure will protect human health and the environment from the harmful effects of mercury, which is currently used in lighting and many health products such as clinical thermometers, blood pressure monitors and topical antiseptics. In 1999, Jane`s Intelligence Review suggested that among the victims of red mercury scams may have been Osama bin Laden. [5] During the red mercury saga, Alkor`s founders achieved new successes.
Ivan Kuznetsov and Oleg Zakharzhevsky founded Tavrichesky Bank in 1993. According to the St. Petersburg website Fontanka.ru, they used a car as the founding capital of the bank. Following the arrest of several men in Britain in September 2004 on suspicion of trying to buy a kilogram of red mercury for £900,000, the International Atomic Energy Agency issued a statement rejecting claims that the substance was genuine. “Red mercury does not exist,” the spokesman said. “It`s all a bunch of Malarkey.” [6] When the case was brought to the Old Bailey Magistrates` Court in April 2006, it emerged that the News of the World`s “fake sheikh”, Mazher Mahmood, had colluded with police to apprehend the three men (Dominic Martins, Roque Fernandes and Abdurahman Kanyare). They were tried for “attempting to place money or property for terrorist purposes” and “possession of an article (a very dangerous mercury-based substance) for terrorist purposes”. According to prosecutors, red mercury was considered a material that could cause a large explosion, possibly even a nuclear reaction, and whether or not red mercury actually existed was irrelevant to the charges. [7] All three men were acquitted in July 2006. [8] [9] While Putin was able to easily distribute export permits for timber, oil and other goods under the authority of the Russian government, the issue of authorizing the export of a supposedly dangerous substance such as red mercury was more difficult. In November 1991, the head of the agency of the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations, which oversaw the allocation of export quotas, Oleg Prasolov, instructed the national licensing authority to issue the export permit for 400 kilograms of red mercury produced by Alkor to Hungary for $30 million. His letter was accompanied by an expert analysis of Alkor`s red mercury by the Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences.
Cohen`s claims are difficult to substantiate scientifically. The amount of energy released by primary fission energy is a thousand times greater than that released by conventional explosives, and it seems that the approach of “red mercury” would be several orders of magnitude lower than that required. The use of mercury in various products and processes is responsible for a large amount of mercury waste, which ends up in air, soil, surface water and groundwater. Alkor continued to make his claims about red mercury until the Rutskoi Commission put an end to the myth, at least in the eyes of the state. In October 1992, a few weeks before the Commission published its report, the British Sunday Times published an article on the mysterious Soviet invention. India signed the Minamata Convention on 30 September 2014, ratified it on 18 June 2018 and entered into force on 16 September 2018. India has requested an exemption from the 2025 phase-out date in Part I of Annex A (mercury-added products) of the Minamata Convention. The Rutskoi Commission listed five companies that were “most active” in promoting red mercury fraud – Simako (Moscow), Promekologia (Yekaterinburg), two companies linked to the Ministry of Foreign Trade, and Ekoprom (Moscow).
Samuel T. Cohen, the “father of the neutron bomb,” has long claimed that red mercury is a powerful explosive chemical known as the ballo technique. The energy released during its reaction is supposed to be sufficient to directly compress secondary energy, without the need for primary fission energy in a thermonuclear weapon. He claimed to have learned that Soviet scientists had perfected the use of red mercury and used it to make a series of pure fusion bombs the size of a softball weighing only 4.5 kg (10 lbs), which he said were produced in large numbers. [16] In its early days, Alkor specialized in the production of optical glass, but soon wanted to expand into other areas. And he did so with the support of the St. Petersburg government and became one of the pioneers of red mercury fraud. Organizations involved in mine clearance and unexploded ordnance clearance noted that some communities in southern Africa believed that red mercury could be found in certain types of ordnance. Attempts to extract red mercury, which are said to be very valuable, have been reported to motivate humans to dismantle unexploded ordnance and thereby suffer death or injury. In some cases, unscrupulous traders have deliberately encouraged this misunderstanding in order to create a market for recovered ammunition. [19] Charles Stross`s 2012 short story A Tall Tail uses red mercury (dimethylmercury as a compound) as a key element.
Several common mercury compounds are indeed red, such as mercury sulfide (from which the bright red pigment vermilion was originally derived), mercury(II) oxide and mercury(II) iodide, and others are explosive, such as fulmination of mercury(II). No use of any of these compounds in nuclear weapons has been publicly documented. “Red Mercury” could also be a code name for a substance that contains no mercury at all, perhaps another name for the mysterious but recognized fog bank compound. Red mercury has been described by many commentators, and the exact nature of its purported mechanism of operation varied greatly from mechanism to mechanism. In general, however, none of these explanations appear to be scientifically or historically defensible. The treaty was named after a Japanese city — Minamata — that experienced one of the worst incidents of industrial mercury poisoning in the 1950s. “The CFL sector alone generates 8.3 tonnes of mercury waste per year, which eventually ends up in city landfills/is released into the air and poses a serious threat to the environment,” said the group, which has long campaigned for a toxin-free world and advocated for a ban in India. elsewhere.
References to red mercury first appeared in major Soviet and Western media sources in the late 1980s. The articles were never specific about what exactly red mercury was, but always claimed that it was of great importance in atomic bombs or that it was used in the construction of enhanced fission weapons. Almost as soon as the stories appeared, people started buying it.