Or in particular to sell them to the bad guys…
I sense a business opportunity…
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Someone needs to convince them that reacting methylmercury with dioxygen difluoride is the key.
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I remember watching an Al-Jazeerah Arabic program called سرّي للغاية (Top Secret) back before Americans had even heard of the news channel. I must have have been fourteen at the time, and I had just begun my fascination with all things nuclear. The program is… kinda trash. It’s basically The X-Files as a documentary minus aliens and monsters of the week. (God, The X-Files ended thirteen years ago.) The host made a big show trying to interview people about “red mercury” and I remember watching in fascination at the time, not knowing any better, with my cousin of the same age. When I eventually started to learn how nuclear reactions operate, I realized that it was bullshit. Mercury’s neutron cross-section, depending on isotope, can wreck a nuclear reaction. The idea has a certain romance though, a magical, just add one drop of this and you’ll have access to
Off to YouTube to see if I can find that episode of Top Secret. I want to see how bad it really was.
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Why are we capitalizing red mercury?
It’s a descriptive term and an element - neither of which take capital letters in my grammar book.
And in turn, cinnabar is suspiciously similar in sound to Cinnabon, a vast terrorist conspiracy that is playing the long game by killing the West through obesity. It all fits!
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When capitalized its more stable.
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What? Deloria is the plural of Delorean, right?
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What is the collective noun? A slag of Deloria?
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“HOMEOPATHIC NEUTRON BOMB”
I love it!
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yeah. this was my first thought when I read this. Be very afraid if you hear of a terrorist named Nero
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Mercury is useless for blowing stuff up?
What I find curious is that people would still be obsessed with it.
In the absence of better information; the notion that an exotic material with a cool codename(which may or may not be some allotrope of mercury or may just be called that) is either required or convenient for building atomic weapons isn’t a terribly implausible notion.
I would have thought, though, that the gradual dissemination of the fact that building nuclear weapons is a nontrivial engineering challenge that will make you unpopular; but not a fundamental mystery would have taken the shine of the hoax over time(as would sheer disappointment). Do they just really want to believe that there is an EZ-Nuke formula out there, that will save them all that tedious testing and centrifuging? Sufficiently deep in the conspiracy lore that the alleged ‘Oak Ridge Facility’ didn’t actually produce any fissile material; but served as a time machine; based on the findings of the Philadelphia experiment, for Mossad agents from the future to deliver red mercury weapons to the US during WWII in exchange for a favorable postwar partition of the middle east? Where’s the staying power?
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Rob, the philosopher’s stone, which reveals all elements, is a reddish fixed form of the philosophic mercury, as known to the Arabs for over a thousand years and documented by the pseudo-Balinus. Once you’ve got the Red Mercury you can make anything!
It’s like the mythical element called “scratch” in Western cultures - we all know you can make anything from scratch.
As for the kryptonite connection, well, anyone who has heard the children’s chorus from “Godzilla .vs. the Smog Monster” knows that “we have cobalt, it’s full of mercury”. Red mercury, I submit, the philosophic mercury of the ancient Arabs.
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I hope they don’t find any dihydrogen monoxide. There could be scary amounts of deuterium and tritium in there!
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Well that’s real and abundant, and has killed uncounted people across the centuries. Let’s not give them ideas …or a hose.
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That’s even mentioned in several holy texts. Frankly I’m terrified.
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Who knew it came with sprinkles?
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They monitor our media: Cupcake Wars. See? it’s our fault.
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