If you were worried about suitcase nukes, you’ve got another thing coming.

Suitcase nukes have indeed existed and perhaps still do. Russian Security chief General Lebed was transferred to Siberia and likely “accidented” for his admission, on CBS’s 60 Minutes, that not only did they exist, but that about a hundred, give or take a dozen or two, were missing from the Soviet arsenal.

Sceptics have argued that suitcase nukes are impractical because as a consequence of their miniaturization, critical components suffer rapid degradation due to the radiation they are subjected to.

Enter the Lunchbox Nuke (”terrorist” size) or Pocket Nuke (”state-actor” size). The lunchbox- or pocket nuke is a full-fledged Hydrogen bomb, packing a punch sufficient to lay a sizeable chunk of Manhattan into rubble.

As soon as the classical thermonuclear bomb was invented, scientists have been searching for a way of circumventing the need for a fission-nuke trigger to the fusion-nuke part of the “hydrogen” bomb. The fissionable material in such bombs is a little bit of Lithium Deuteride and under influence of the neutrons produced by the fission trigger, Tritium is produced. The enormous temperature and pressure caused by the fission explosion then causes that Tritium to fuse with the Deuterium.

The need for a fission-nuke to fuse Tritium and Deuterium is the sole reason that fusion bombs need to be so big and heavy. Because a mere gram of Tritium-Deuterium can and will, when it fuses, do a hell of a lot more damage as seen on 9/11, if you discount the damage done to the Constitution. The only problem is: How to heat it up high enough and keep it under pressure long enough for a fusion reaction to occur.

The answer to this problem has been found in Russia and it is called Red Mercury, or Mercury-Antimony oxide (HgSbO, sometimes rumored to be Hg2Sb2O7). Red Mercury is the only Mercury compound that is a (thick, purple) liquid at room temperature. It is slightly radioactive and its half time is – according to who you believe – a few days to a year, but it is not a radioactive material unless it has been bombarded with neutrons.

Red Mercury starts out as an ordinary chemical compound. It is listed in the International Chemical Register as number 20720-76-7. When loaded with neutrons inside a nuclear reactor for a while, changes happen in the material. It’s still HgSbO, but its atoms have become unstable isotopes and lots of electrons have been knocked out of their shells. You could say that the substance has become “charged” by the radiation in the reactor. Red Mercury is not an explosive in the traditional sense, but a ballotechnic material. Ballotechnic compounds generate extreme temperatures and as a consequence, extreme pressure. Red Mercury can generate enough to initiate nuclear fusion. Even without the fusion stage, exploding Red Mercury looks the same as a conventional explosion: A handful of the substance can take out an aircraft carrier.

As to the fusion-part: A softball-size sphere of Red Mercury, when properly charged in a nuclear reactor and thereafter symetrically placed around a tiny bead of Tritium-Deuterium, constitutes a full-fledged thermo-nuclear fusion bomb with a destructive force on a par with “conventional” tactical nuclear warheads. The only good thing about it is that due to the half-time of the Red Mercury involved, its shelflife is likely much less than that of a Lebed-alleged suitcase nuke.

For those assuming that this is all conjecture or even fantasy: Samual Cohen, the inventor of the Neutron bomb (the Pope awarded him a medal for this “contribution to peace”) swears Red Mercury is real and that it keeps him awake at night. Senior-level Russian brass corroborate his assertions. Sam Cohen is not a kook. Sam Cohen is a genius and he was one of the boffins of the Manhattan Project. Sam Cohen helped France modernize their nukes. Sam Cohen is just about as far away from being a wacko conspiracy theorist as Paris Hilton is from getting a Nobel prize in Physics.

What is Red Mercury’s place in the “War on Terror”? Think about it. It’s no longer neccessary to have access to highly enriched Uranium or Plutonium to make a bomb. All you need is a chemistry set and a nuclear reactor. The War on Terror has never been about islamic extremists, it’s PNAC’s plan of grabbing the world’s remaining resources to keep the US strong and its potential adversaries weak. An Iraq or Iran with pocket-nukes does not fit in that picture. When the Americans invaded Baghdad, they found boxes full of offers for Red Mercury. The problem is not that you can, with great effort, make nukes from enriched reactor products but that you can, with little effort, make nukes by hanging a simple chemical into a reactor. This implies that no potential enemy of the United States is to be allowed to posess a working nuclear reactor.

This article shows pictures of a bottle of alleged Red Mercury found in Iraq. It does not seem likely that this is the “real thing”, because it was found in an abandoned dump, and the bottle doesn’t look like it contains something of enormous value.

In Sam Cohen’s book “Shame: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb”, (Xlibris, 2000) he writes about Red Mercury on page 445, in a chapter called “We Should be Terrified!”:

“Specifically, at issue here is an extremely small pure-fusion mini-neutron bomb, roughly the size of a baseball, which in all probability the Soviets designed years ago with the knowledge of Boris Yeltsin and the Russian Mafia and what used to be called the KGB have been smuggling the technology and even the bombs themselves to known terrorist states and others who feel the need for them – at a price, a big one.”