OK... I had to do at least one "fun" blog this week, and T.M. sent this article along, and I couldn't resist. And it's appropriate that the article is based on a report from those always-byzantine-never-to-be-trusted-Russians and their evil-super-genius-criminal-mastermind-martial-arts-expert-who-is-behind-all-conspiracies-of-all-the-ages Dr. Fu Manchu Vladimir Putin.

So what has Mr. Putin and his evil minions and lackeys been up to lately? Why, they now claim that all that red mercury scare that was the favored Nuclear Nightmare of the 1990s, and which occasionally resurfaces in a variety of contexts (most recently as the "culprit" behind those strange bridge fires in Atlanta a few years ago) was really simply a "code" for Lithium-6. But, as you might imagine, there's a bit more to this story than meets the eye. Here's the article, which, you'll note, is really the abstract to an article:

'Red Mercury' is Lithium-6, Russian Weaponsmiths Say

And here's the problematical part:

The name 'red mercury' is a code word used in the USSR nuclear weapons program since the 1950s to describe enriched lithium-6.

Well, that's not really the only problematical part. There's also this:

Lithium-6 has two nuclear weapons uses: as a reactor target for production of tritium, and in the form of lithium-6 deuteride as a thermonuclear weapon material. The most common production process uses large amounts of mercury as chemical agents. The code name originated because mercuric impurities contaminate the lithium- 6 during production, giving it a red color. 'Red mercury' has been identified by many European media reports as 'any of several simple mercuric compounds and tinctures offered for sale by Russian and European agents,' but none of these had any nuclear value. The uses for lithium-6 are consistent with claims about the uses of 'red mercury.' The USSR built a large complex in the early days of their nuclear weapon program to produce and stockpile lithium- 6. Some was also supplied to China in the 1950s. Russian and Western officials have both stated that no lithium-6 from Russian or Chinese inventories has been diverted since the disintegration of the USSR. (Emphasis added)

Well, what's so problematical about that? To answer that question, we'll have to take a short trip around Harvey's Barn. In 2009 I published my book The Nazi International, in which I review the post-World War Two nuclear fusion research of Dr. Ronald Richter, which he was ostensibly conducting for Argentinian dictator Juan Peron. In 1951, Peron gave a press conference where he introduced Dr. Richter, and then made the extraordinary claim that Argentina had discovered the secret to the hydrogen bomb. The world's press denounced Richter as a fraud, and so vociferous was the press response that Peron appointed a young Argentine nuclear physicist, Dr. Jose Balseiro, to head a commission to investigate Richter's claims. Richter was indeed claiming to do the impossible - at least, by the lights at the time. He was claiming to obtain fusion reactions in a compound of lithium-6 (the rest of the compound was unspecified, but may have involved mercury) under extreme rotation and stress, and at temperatures far below that the standard thermonuclear chemistry of the period thought possible. In effect, Richter was making cold fusion claims some decades before Pons and Fleischman would do so.

Dr. Balseiro filed his report, basically pointing all this out, Richter was denounced as a fraud and placed under house arrest by Peron, and that was that.

Until the USA's infamous Castle-Bravo h-bomb test, which ran away to a reaction of about 15 megatons's yield, after a pre-detonation calculation of "only" 7-8 megatons. As I pointed out in The Nazi International, suddenly people in the USA became interested - very secretly interested - in Richter and his work again, and the US Air Force dispatched people to interview him. Meanwhile, the "cover story" of Castle Bravo was put out: the American thermonuclear bomb engineers had not factored in that the lithium-6 would burn in the reaction.

Woops.

Except, that Richter had made this prior claim, and now, the Russians are also implying that they too knew lithium-6 would burn in a thermonuclear reaction as early as the 1950s. Which means either the American story about Castle Bravo's engineers being incompetent is probably yet another one of those narratives that has to be questioned, because it implies they fully knew and concocted a nonsensical explanation for it. And now we're learning that mercury was used as a chemical agent in some unknown process involving the lithium-6.

It's the presence of Richter in this mix that makes me wonder, once again, if there is not some truth in the red mercury legend, particularly in this current incarnation; it makes me wonder if some mercury "salted" with lithium-6-deuteride and then put into plasma form might not, in fact, under the right conditions, do what was always claimed for "red mercury": detonate with enormous "quasi-nuclear" force.

Finally, most importantly, if this latest admission from Russia is to be believed, then it means one very important thing: the substance called "red mercury" was, and is, real.

See you on the flip side...