Red mercury price changed over the years
When a man calling himself the Crocodile contacted Abu Omar over WhatsApp, the mobile-messaging app, he made it clear that he meant business. The alleged arms dealer was offering to sell him something rare and valuable: red mercury price, the chemical compound that inspires doomsday daydreams in nuclear-weapons experts.
To hear them tell it, when combined with conventional high explosives, the substance could give rise to a neutron bomb with enough power to flatten a city. Or it could be used to create an explosive so small that a terrorist would be able to carry it on board a commercial flight. Or – in a more speculative scenario – if the smuggled material was mixed with uranium, it could give rise to a nuclear weapon that could kill thousands of people with a single detonation.
The fanciful claims about the explosive properties of the red stuff gave the story traction. Terrorists and rogue states, the story went, might be seeking it for their own bombmaking operations. And so Russian intelligence services and criminal gangs set out to foil the efforts of those hoping to get their hands on it. The result was a brisk trade in the substance, even as smugglers were caught in sting operations by the authorities.
How has the red mercury price changed over the years?
But the legend of red mercury also took hold in a more general way. Amid global political upheavals, it became a part of the folklore that permeates a certain kind of culture, one in which superstitious beliefs collide with stubborn facts and improbable claims. It’s a comic-book universe in which the stubborn facts of science give way to unverified claims and fantasy, in which the quest for an ultimate weapon encroaches on the mystical realm of magic.
It is in this realm, a world where jinns (Arabic for supernatural beings) are summoned to bring about the apocalypse, and vintage sewing machines are sold for their ability to house magical ingredients, that the myth has found its firmest footing. It’s a realm where, as physicist Samuel T. Cohen once put it, “the stubborn facts of physics yield to the sly sleight of hand of the con artist.”
Despite its outlandishness, the story of the red mercury has proved remarkably resilient, and even gained some support from experts in counterproliferation. This is largely because the tale is plausible, if not entirely true. In the real world, however, there is no such thing as a neutron bomb and no viable use for the red mercury that’s been described. It is, in the end, just a legend.
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