Red mercury where can be found. red mercury

Thank God that there are no duties on lies! After all, where would we all be ruined!
D. Fonvizin

She is RM-20/20, she is Multifunctional catalyst or Compound-20/20- a non-existent substance, allegedly one of the latest military developments of the USSR. The most commercially successful of the fictional materials.

It was believed that this substance has, among other things, a high density (20 g / cm³), a freezing point of −150 ° C, toxicity at the level of KCN and radioactivity, it is used either in a “thermonuclear bomb detonator”, or in Gaussian guns, not that in "heavy duty military lasers."

There are several mercury-containing substances of a red hue: mercury oxide Hg O, cinnabar S, mercury pyroantimonate (oxystibate) Hg2Sb2O7. Neither the declared density at the level of osmium, nor radioactivity, nor any fantastic properties, these compounds possess. Unless pyroantimonate is distinguished by heat resistance: if other mercury salts decompose already at a temperature of about 300-350 ° C, then pyroantimonate can withstand heating up to 700 ° C without decomposition.

Part of the rumors about the density and radioactivity are due to cases when a heavy amalgam of platinum group metals and a radioactive amalgam of plutonium-239 were sold under the guise of RM-20/20. In one of the books, Dmitry Cherkasov claims that "red mercury" is a slang term for weapons-grade plutonium. In reality, a lot of different chemicals were sold under the name "red mercury", up to a mixture of ordinary mercury with crushed bricks and even water tinted with aniline. According to some reports, gold mixed with mercury, as well as other precious metals dissolved in mercury, were exported from the territory of the USSR under the guise of "red mercury". High-ranking government officials and organized criminal communities were involved in these illegal actions. There is also a version that all this is an invention of filmmakers and screenwriters.

There is also a “non-metallic” version about the origin of the term - drugs and other illegal drugs were sold under this name, as well as documentation of various defense technologies. Some people mistakenly think that colored alcohol in a window thermometer is red mercury.

Trade in red mercury

Since the early 1970s, there have been many attempts to sell a substance called "red mercury" around the world. In Russia, red mercury scams coincided with the early 1990s. These were a wide variety of substances, from amalgams of plutonium or platinum to a mixture of mercury with nail polish or bricks. Back in 1989, the CIA, Mossad and other foreign intelligence agencies tried to test purchases red mercury, but every now and then they ran into absolutely meaningless substances of red color based on mercury. Already in 1998, before the start of the carpet bombing of Iraq, Saddam Hussein announced that he was ready to pay 1 billion US dollars to anyone who would get at least a gram of this substance.

In March 1992, the general director of the Yekaterinburg concern "Promekologiya", an entomologist by specialty Oleg Sadykov, presented a document addressed to the President of the Russian Federation B.N. Yeltsin and Vice-President A.V. the opportunity to implement the largest programs of strategic importance for Russia without attracting state budget funds. Four months later, the President of Russia signed a document allowing the concern the right to sell and export from Russia "red mercury" in the amount of 10 tons. Sadykov stated the following:

Minatom and the Federal Nuclear Center have no idea what kind of experiments we conducted in the Urals. Back in 1989, in the BN-600 reactor, we irradiated mercury oxystibate powder with fast neutrons for five hundred hours, then we carried out many other complex processes.

In 1994, three bags of HgO were stolen from one of the factories in Barnaul, customers believed that this was the very “red mercury”.

On the bags it was written: Mercury oxide is red. Specifications"B" and something else, four digits, they reasoned that this is "red mercury", and "B" is the sign of "military".

Boris Pogorelov, special investigator important matters Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation

The last attempt to sell "red mercury" was thwarted in November 2008 on the outskirts of Ufa. Two swindlers were detained who were trying to sell a thermos with ordinary mercury under the guise of "red" for 5 million rubles. A criminal case was initiated under article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (fraud), since no other corpus delicti could be found. The scammers claimed that the substance they were offering was a consumable for the collider, which they managed to steal from one of the local defense factories, and was supposedly intended for sale to CERN.

When I already had to unsubscribe on this topic, there really were, for example, rare earth metals that are really valuable for the state

Yuri Skuratov

Additional facts

• Patent No. 2077159 is still held by Oleg Borisovich Sadykov.
• In all transactions there were only intermediaries.
• The king of Saudi Arabia did not even hide the fact that he firmly believes that Compound-20/20 completely cures cancer.

Application Threats

In 2001, Shamil Basayev announced the presence of "red mercury" and intentions to use it, but what he had in mind remained a mystery.

Here Basayev, the leader of world terrorism, got into a mess. So I open the newspaper and read: Basayev has nuclear weapons to fight the federals, including "red mercury". When I heard, I laughed: if he talks about red mercury, then he has nothing!
Alexander Gurov

In 2004 in Spain, an al-Qaeda leader reported that he had several pocket nuclear bombs based on red mercury. But this information also turned out to be fiction.

Possible disinformation

The nature of publications, books and other materials about the so-called red mercury does not exclude the possibility that the whole history of the emergence of the concept was just a fairly large-scale disinformation, apparently carried out by the special services in order to determine the circle of persons interested in the search for fissile materials (terrorists, etc.), without any risk of detecting channels for leaking secret information and diverting hostile intelligence services to a deliberately worthless object.

As Reagan gave rise to SDI, which we bought into, exhausted our entire economy, first Afghanistan, then SDI, this is one of the reasons for the collapse of our economy, so we played serious positions, this, of course, was a serious misinformation that returned to us like a boomerang.

Sergei Stepashin

Examples of implausible information

The test results exceeded all expectations. The effect was comparable only with the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb. Mercury antennas had fantastic parameters, they made it possible to receive signals from transmitters of arbitrarily low power at an arbitrarily large distance. The tests received signals from American mobile phones, TV broadcasts from London, listening devices in the residence of Fidel Castro, and many obscure signals were also received, presumably from distant galaxies.

…

Mercury antennas are used by the FSB services exclusively as receiving antennas for the purpose of espionage and the detection of stealth aircraft. It is these antennas that are used on UFOs to communicate with base ships (to communicate with their galaxies, methods are used that are more efficient than radio waves, but about them in the following articles). At present, several dozen mercury antennas have been manufactured.

…

Many, probably, paid attention to the white balls installed on the roofs of Moscow skyscrapers (the Hydroproject Institute, buildings along Kalininsky Prospekt).

In some of them (it is not known in which ones) mercury antennas are installed.

…

First of all, get rid of all metal objects that are equal to or a multiple of 3 cm (this is usually the resonant wavelength of mercury antennas). Remember that the better an object conducts electricity, the higher the temperature it will heat up with an electromagnetic pulse. The most dangerous items: gold watches, gold jewelry, silver cutlery. In second place in terms of danger are products made of copper and aluminum. Iron objects are less dangerous and plastic and other non-conductive materials are not at all dangerous.

A good (almost 100%) effect is obtained by the use of absorbing devices made of ordinary mercury (it is a substance opposite in electrical properties).

Red mercury in popular culture

Red mercury is mentioned in one of the episodes of the television series "Poltergeist" and in many other detectives and action films, such as "Electronic Bugs", where a bandit from Russia tried to sell "red mercury". In 1995, the film "Caution! Red Mercury! (original title "Careful, red mercury", directed by Anatoly Ivanov), where many machinations with red mercury are filmed, but the action is transferred from the Russian Federation to Ukraine. In 2005 director Roy Battersby directed the film Red Mercury. In 2005, already in the UK, dir. Ed Moore filmed documentary with the similar title "What is red mercury?" (English) What is red mercury) about the same thing. In 2008, the program “Scams of the Century. Red Mercury. In 2007, Zombie Studios released Shadow Ops: Red Mercury (from the Commanded to Destroy series). Red mercury was also mentioned in the TV series X-files in 2000 and the TV series Wild in 2009.

In some "documentary" films of the time of perestroika, red mercury was described as a substance obtained with the help of an accelerator with a high content of neutrons in the nucleus, capable of reducing the critical mass of uranium-235 due to neutron radiation, which allegedly made it possible to make an "atomic bomb the size of a fountain pen." Perhaps this idea was borrowed from the science fiction novel Black Stars by V. Savchenko, which described the fantastic substance "neutrid", consisting of only neutrons (in the novel, "neutrid" was obtained from ordinary mercury, irradiating it with a neutron beam in an accelerator). In reality, such a substance can exist only for a fraction of a second.

Red mercury is also mentioned in the book by Felix Razumovsky “2012. The game doesn't matter"

In 2007, the novel "Red Mercury" by the former head of the Criminal Police, Andres Anvelt, was published in Estonian in Estonia. The novel immediately became a bestseller. Soon the novel was translated into Russian. In April 2010, the premiere of the film of the same name directed by Andres Puustusmaa took place. A separate chapter is devoted to red mercury in the documentary book Rusty Air by Alexander Koval, which also provides some documentary information about this mysterious liquid.

Red mercury, or RM-20/20, or a multifunctional catalyst, or Compound-20/20, is a non-existent substance, allegedly one of the latest military developments of the USSR. The most commercially successful of the fictional materials. It was believed that this substance has, among other things, a high density (20 g / cm³), a freezing point of −150 ° C, toxicity at the level of KCN and radioactivity, it is used either in a “thermonuclear bomb detonator”, or in Gaussian guns, not that in "heavy duty military lasers."

There are several red-colored mercury-containing substances: mercury oxide HgO, cinnabar HgS, mercury pyroantimonate (oxystibate) Hg2Sb2O7, iodides HgI2 and Hg2I2. Neither the declared density at the level of osmium, nor radioactivity, nor any fantastic properties, these compounds possess. Unless pyroantimonate is distinguished by heat resistance: if other mercury salts decompose already at a temperature of about 300-350 ° C, then pyroantimonate can withstand heating up to 700 ° C without decomposition.

In part, the rumors about density and radioactivity are due to cases when a heavy amalgam of platinum group metals (platinum group metals are not amalgamated) and a radioactive amalgam of plutonium-239 were sold under the guise of RM-20/20. In one of the books, Dmitry Cherkasov claims that "red mercury" is a slang term for weapons-grade plutonium. In reality, under the name "red mercury" a lot of different chemicals were sold, up to a mixture of ordinary mercury with crushed bricks and even water tinted with aniline. According to some reports, gold mixed with mercury, as well as other precious metals dissolved in mercury, were exported from the territory of the USSR under the guise of "red mercury". High-ranking government officials and organized criminal communities were involved in these illegal actions.

There is also a “non-metallic” version about the origin of the term - drugs and other illegal drugs were sold under this name, as well as documentation of various defense technologies. It may also be that all this is an invention of film directors and screenwriters.

The nature of publications, books and other materials about the so-called red mercury does not exclude the possibility that the entire history of the emergence of the concept was just a rather large-scale disinformation, apparently carried out by the USSR special services in order to determine the circle of people interested in searching for fissile materials (terrorists, etc.) , without any risk of detecting channels for leaking classified information and diverting hostile intelligence services to a deliberately worthless object.

“Just as Reagan gave birth to SDI, which we bought into, exhausted our entire economy, first Afghanistan, then SDI, this is one of the reasons for the collapse of our economy, so we played serious positions, this, of course, was a serious disinformation that returned to us like a boomerang .
Sergei Stepashin"

Examples of implausible information

The test results exceeded all expectations. The effect was comparable only to the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb. Mercury antennas had fantastic parameters, they made it possible to receive signals from transmitters of arbitrarily low power at an arbitrarily large distance. The tests received signals from American mobile phones, TV broadcasts from London, listening devices in the residence of Fidel Castro, and many obscure signals were also received, presumably from distant galaxies.
…
Mercury antennas are used by the FSB services exclusively as receiving antennas for the purpose of espionage and the detection of stealth aircraft. It is these antennas that are used on UFOs to communicate with base ships (to communicate with their galaxies, methods are used that are more efficient than radio waves, but about them in the following articles). At present, several dozen mercury antennas have been manufactured.
…
Many, probably, paid attention to the white balls installed on the roofs of Moscow skyscrapers (the Hydroproject Institute, buildings along Kalininsky Prospekt). In some of them (it is not known in which ones) mercury antennas are installed.
…
First of all, get rid of all metal objects that are equal to or a multiple of 3 cm (this is usually the resonant wavelength of mercury antennas). Remember that the better an object conducts electricity, the higher the temperature it will heat up with an electromagnetic pulse. The most dangerous items: gold watches, gold jewelry, silver cutlery. In second place in terms of danger are products made of copper and aluminum. Iron objects are less dangerous and plastic and other non-conductive materials are not at all dangerous.

A good (almost 100%) effect is obtained by the use of absorbing devices made of ordinary mercury (it is a substance opposite in electrical properties).

In 2001, Shamil Basayev announced the presence of "red mercury" and intentions to use it, but what he had in mind remained a mystery.

“Here Basayev, the leader of world terrorism, got into a mess. So I open a newspaper and read: Basayev has nuclear weapons, including “red mercury”, to fight the federals. When I heard, I laughed: if he talks about red mercury, then he has nothing! @ Gurov"

In 2004 in Spain, an al-Qaeda leader reported that he had several pocket nuclear bombs based on red mercury. But this information also turned out to be fiction.

Red mercury is considered to be the most commercially successful fictional material. In the early 90s, everyone from petty crooks to organized crime traded in dubious goods, calling them "red mercury". Mixtures of mercury with brick dust and other substances of red tint, mercury oxide, pyroantimonate, cinnabar and other mercury-containing substances were sold. Amalgams of gold, platinum, plutonium and other metals smuggled out of the territory of the Russian Federation were also sold under this name. Hence the price of $500 per gram was reached.

In 2008, several scammers on the outskirts of Ufa tried to sell a thermos with ordinary mercury for 5 million rubles, but were detained. They were issued an administrative fine for improper storage of mercury; no other joint venture was found in their actions.

In some "documentary" films of the time of Perestroika, red mercury was described as a substance obtained with the help of an accelerator with a high content of neutrons in the nucleus, capable of reducing the critical mass of uranium-235 due to neutron radiation, which allegedly made it possible to make an "atomic bomb the size of a fountain pen." Perhaps this idea was borrowed from the science fiction novel Black Stars by V. Savchenko, which described the fantastic substance “neutrid”, consisting of only neutrons (in the novel, “neutrid” was obtained from ordinary mercury, irradiating it with a neutron beam in an accelerator). In reality, such a substance can exist only for a fraction of a second.

Alchemy... It would seem that it has no place in the modern world. Well, what sane person would believe that through some manipulation you can get the purest gold from base metals? However, the essence of this "pseudo-science" is much more complicated than is commonly believed. Perhaps we are talking about forgotten knowledge that can radically change the world.

Even Democritus of Alexandria argued that there are two varieties of philosopher's stone - white and red. The latter was called the Red Lion, or philosophical mercury.

In the 16th century, the decipherer of ancient documents, Edward Kelly, managed to read a manuscript on the transmutation of metals, discovered in the tomb of a certain bishop, along with two glass beads, one of which contained a red and the other a white powder.

Kelly brought both powders to London to his friend, the alchemist John Dee. He added a red substance to the molten lead and, after simple manipulations, was able to present Kelly with a pound of pure gold.

In 1602, a professor from Freiburg (Switzerland) Wolfgang Dinheim met a man dressed in black who offered to demonstrate to him the possibilities of alchemy (Dinheim did not believe in alchemical miracles). The stranger handed the professor a small bag of yellow powder and ordered him to mix it with molten lead. After some time, the entire mass in the crucible turned into a gold ingot.

On September 27, 1666, a respectable middle-aged gentleman came to the French materialist philosopher Helvetius. He tried to convince Helvetius, who considered alchemy a pseudoscience, of the existence of philosophical mercury. According to him, the mysterious mercury was a salt capable of dissolving minerals. He left a piece of this mercury to Helvetius. With its help, a few days later, the researcher managed to turn lead into gold. The analysis showed that the resulting precious metal is of the highest standard!

The famous scientist Robert Boyle was also once visited by a stranger who brought some kind of powder with him. Throwing it into a crucible with various metals, he ordered the composition to be kept on fire for several hours. When the appointed time had passed, the entire contents of the crucible turned to gold.

An amazing fact, but it turns out that in Soviet times, magical red mercury was mined in our country in order to then be exported abroad. There is no doubt that those who carried out these transactions were well aware of its properties, since the cost of the substance was over half a million dollars per kilogram.

All information relating to red mercury has been carefully classified up to the present day. Academician Yu. Buslaev in 1992 answered a journalist's question that such a substance simply does not exist in nature. However, a number of documents referring to the export of mercury date back to approximately the same time. And here the contradictions begin.

In 1991, Professor of Physics at Moscow State University Brandt concluded that it was impossible to obtain a compound under the conditional name "red mercury" by any of the methods known to science. True, the scientist did not deny the theoretical possibility of creating the appropriate technology.

In March 1992, Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar received a report that the red mercury product does not exist in nature and cannot be obtained chemically. On the basis of this note, the President of Russia banned the issuance of licenses for the production and sale of mercury.

However, already in April, the management of one large concern reported that the enterprise had one centner of red mercury at its disposal. Debate began. In the end, an official statement by high-ranking officials who dealt with this issue followed: they say that transactions for the sale and purchase of a substance called red mercury are nothing more than a means of money laundering. That is, it turned out that entrepreneurs were selling and buying non-existent goods for huge sums!

But in March 1994, the then head of foreign intelligence, Yevgeny Primakov, filed a memorandum that contained information about the production of red mercury in the USSR, starting in 1968. It was in that year that this substance, which was a mercury salt of antimonous acid, was synthesized using a special accelerator with the participation of a radioactive isotope. Radiation contributed to the processing of raw materials.

Did any of the representatives of Soviet nomenclature science use recipes from ancient manuscripts? Or was red mercury obtained experimentally? It remains only to speculate ...

Margarita Troitsyna

Red mercury: black gold party

In 1991, I myself held it in my hands. A heavy metal container, about the size of a beer bottle, filled with a substance that was legendary.

ONE said that red mercury would make it possible to make a nuclear charge the size of an orange. Others hoped to use it to create new ultra-sensitive devices for targeting missiles and submarines. And still others, without any fuss, were going to boil gold from red mercury. Some people succeeded, but chemistry had nothing to do with it.

Fifteen years ago, 1 kg of red mercury cost $1 million.

TODAY, when I talk about that container, experts begin to smile and speculate what was there: mercury with nail polish? with port? with brick chips? They say: it's good that you don't offer to buy. Now, if someone says: “I will sell a kilo of red mercury,” he will immediately get in the face.

But just 15 years ago, red mercury was offered in tons, asking for fantastic amounts - hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars per kilogram.

“There were at least two aspects to the machinations with red mercury,” says a member of the State Duma Safety Committee, Dr. legal sciences Alexander Gurov, who headed the special commission in 1992 Supreme Council Russian Federation, which conducted its investigation on red mercury. The first aspect is economic. With the help of these fake deals, pump more money into Russia in time for privatization. Perhaps this is how the dirty money earned from the drug trade was also laundered and legally invested in factories, factories, and real estate. The second aspect is military-political. There was another version. Allegedly, the hype with red mercury was intended at the same time to compromise the USSR in the sense that it was no longer able to control its nuclear facilities. The Western media then shouted: “The Russians are selling a substance that is 10 times more powerful than gun plutonium!”

Moreover, Yeltsin did indeed sign the then secret order on the creation and distribution of 10 tons of red mercury. A representative of the commission of the Supreme Council went to the manufacturing plants to check how the order was being carried out. It turned out that these enterprises have always produced only ceramic tiles. And nothing has been heard of red mercury. Spies from forty intelligence agencies of the world then arrived in our country to search for information about this substance. As a result, the American authorities received a document with the following content: “Deals with red mercury are doubtful. It's more like a scam." Imagine my surprise when a year and a half ago Basayev declared that he possessed nuclear weapons, including red mercury. So, his scammers deceived him. Or maybe someone wanted to warm their hands on old coals - to scare the world with Russian nuclear terrorism.

I have been working on the KR riddle for a long time,” Gurov continues, “I wrote a book where, with the help of experts, I documented that there is no superheavy substance with special properties that make it possible to bring weapons to fundamentally new level, does not exist in nature.

“... There is only a certain modification of mercury oxide at a price of $ 30 per kilogram, which chemists really call red mercury. Apparently, the catchy name caught the eye of a talented PR man - and a grandiose scam began to gain momentum. In the early 90s, it was a time of troubles, - says Nikolai Shingarev, director of the Center for Information and Exhibition Activities federal agency on atomic energy. - Then everyone was traded exclusively in wagons. Remember the popular anecdote: “Two businessmen meet. One says to the other: "Buy a carload of chocolate for a million." - "I agree. I take it." Disperse: one went to look for chocolate, the other - a million. So it was with this mercury. Under it, loans were taken, and as a result, the money disappeared, and the goods turned out to be empty.”

“Somehow, this very mercury was brought to my friend for research,” says the deputy CEO NPO "Khimavtomatika" Alexander Popov. - After the analysis, I ask him: “Did you even find mercury there?” “No,” he says. - It's generally some kind of strange mixture ... "Later, when the Supreme Council of the Russian Federation conducted its investigation, the Russian Academy of Sciences also did not detect supersubstance in the samples offered to it. The fact is that red mercury was made from anything - for example, from organic compounds, so that it was difficult to determine what kind of animal. Amateurs considered red mercury to be a kind of strategic commodity that could only be obtained by criminal means, from factories that supposedly produce it. "Is there red mercury?" - "There is". - "Come on a kilo." - Give me a million bucks. The dealer gives, hoping to sell, say, in the US for three million. And they will do an analysis over the hillock and immediately send it to the mother ... "

In the early 90s, Russia lost 5 trillion. gold rubles

ACCORDING TO THE ESTIMATIONS OF SOME EXPERTS, DURING THE WWII Russia lost 2 trillion. 700 million gold rubles. And in the early 90s, when our country was being plundered, it was 5 trillion. gold rubles.

In 1991 Oleg Sadykov, general director of the Ekaterinburg concern Promekologiya, swore to me in an interview that he was turning over two hundred billion and selling a new strategic product - red mercury. The same figures were once reported to Boris Yeltsin by Messrs. Burbulis and Rutskoi, seeking broad powers for Sadykov. Gennady Eduardovich and Alexander Vladimirovich flatly refused to give a comment to AiF in order to explain their persistence in this delicate matter.

Former Prosecutor General Yuri Skuratov: “In 1992, the prosecutor's office had a version that the legend of red mercury was launched in order to get access to budget funds through Burbulis by the start of privatization. I confirm that it followed from the materials of the criminal case that there really is no red mercury. Another thing is how this myth was used to cover up the smuggling of real strategic raw materials. Consider the then confusion of the secret services, open borders, etc. Dozens of trains disappeared without a trace. In the end, the prosecutor's office decided to dismiss the case for lack of corpus delicti. This means that not a single gram of this mysterious substance was found operationally. That is, wagons allegedly with red mercury went to the West, someone received huge money for them - and the case had to be closed, since one cannot be judged for theft of something that does not exist! The investigation never gave an answer as to who launched this disinformation.”

Whoever the true authors of the red mercury legend were - intelligence agencies, criminal groups, corrupt officials - the fiction turned out to be successful and paid off in full. And if the ghost of red mercury, albeit under a different name, suddenly reappears, it will be a sure sign - someone again needed a lot of money for a new stage of privatization. He, by the way, is not far off.

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“Whose fingers are in red mercury?”, “Red mercury will flow to the West in exchange for large sums of dollars”, “Mysteries of red mercury: a billion dollars is unknown for what”, “Radioactive trail from Irkutsk to Milan” - such headlines filled in 1991 strips of both domestic newspapers and reputable Western publications.

Czech special services at the airport in Ostrava on August 29, 1991 unsuccessfully tried to detect 60 kilograms of "liquid red mercury from the USSR." Around the same time, Swiss and Italian police arrested four smugglers who allegedly found two kilograms of red mercury in their luggage. Not only journalists, but also special services rushed along this trail.

True or scam?

The main version of the use of red mercury was its participation as a component in the production of a miniature atomic bomb. Naturally, such a danger could not pass by the attention of the special services, including the KGB of the USSR and the GRU of the Ministry of Defense.

At the Leningrad Institute of Imitation Technologies, mercury pyroantimonate was synthesized - a red substance that was similar in everything to that very red mercury. It remained to find out - can red mercury really be considered a strategic material suitable for the production of nuclear charges? And in general - does it exist?

In the case of pyroantimonate, only once was it possible to reach a real consumer. And then his interests were represented by intermediaries. Apparently, the buyer really did not want to "shine" in front of Interpol and the IAEA, which also showed interest in red mercury.

According to one version, foreign intelligence services deliberately started a fuss in order to identify possible smuggling channels, intermediaries and buyers of components for creating nuclear weapons. Or, with the help of a mythical product, they tried to pump money out of the budgets of countries dreaming of creating their own nuclear potential.

Vice-President Alexander Rutskoi sternly promised to deal with swindlers selling red mercury. According to him, under her guise, some criminal structures tried to take uranium or plutonium out of the CIS. There was also a version that, under the patronage of some high-ranking Soviet officials, gold dissolved in mercury was exported to the West.

But the British newspaper Independent wrote directly that red mercury is a brilliant scam, the meaning of which is to get money out of thin air. Over time, however, the truth came to light.

genius trap

The assistant to the government of the Republic of Ichkeria, self-proclaimed by Dzhokhar Dudayev (a former laboratory assistant at one of the Grozny research institutes), told the following in a narrow circle. According to him, having met in Moscow with the same swindler, who has extensive connections in research institutes, they began to think: what can be sold to foreigners? At first, the crazy decision was made to design ... a miniature plutonium bomb. True, at the same time the inventors became known to the KGB officers of the USSR, but so far they have not been arrested.

Then the scammers came up with the idea of ​​selling red mercury salts made in the laboratory of one of the Moscow research institutes as "an important component in the production of nuclear weapons." And the secret services organized a "leak" for them, which made it possible to establish contacts with customers. This helped to trace the real routes of smuggling of hazardous materials.

Western intelligence agencies were alarmed after the threat of the Spanish branch of Al-Qaeda to carry out a terrorist attack using a miniature atomic bomb made on the basis of red mercury. But in Russia, after a similar statement made by the terrorist Shamil Basayev, they only laughed.

After all, red mercury, or "component RM-20/20", was a bluff born within the walls of the GRU and the KGB! At one time, the Soviet Union "bought" the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or, as it was called, " star Wars". Enormous human reserves and funds were involved in creating countermeasure systems until it became clear that SDI was a bluff!

And then, as a retaliatory strike, the YaM-20/20 was born, with a crazy certificate like “a substance obtained using an accelerator with a high content of neutrons in the nucleus, capable of reducing the critical mass of uranium-235 due to neutron radiation, which makes it possible making a miniature atomic bomb. The goal was twofold: firstly, to force the Western intelligence services to develop the mythical red mercury. And secondly, to try to trace the actions of possible terrorists who pecked at this bait. Here, swindlers came in very handy, offering at fabulous prices publicly available red mercury oxides and even ... crushed bricks.

The riddle of Ka-Er

red mercury

Red mercury is the last century. Now green mercury (GrH) is relevant. Critical mass ~2.59 kg. The cost of 100 g is approximately 200,000 euros. Signal lots appeared on the black market at the end of last year.

Dim, 15.02.2006 19:07:27

Just yesterday I was offered 3 liters of spotted mercury for 666 rubles. I'm just on vacation, and I didn't become a terrorist connoisseur.

Grib, 02/16/2006 04:57:57 PM

I was told that Musulmanes, as polygamists, used this product as a stimulant of male potency.

George, 05/12/2009 11:26:10 PM

Comments on the Internet to the article by D. Adam "What is red mercury?" (Guardian, 09/30/2004) (author's spelling)

In the "dashing 90s" there were much more sellers in the country than the usual chain "manufacturer - wholesaler - retail - buyer" could accommodate. The country was literally flooded with intermediaries. A modest research assistant with a meager salary, for example, could ask you if you need a carload of gingerbread or a shipment of aluminum ingots. Not that he had this car, but what "pigs" were, he, perhaps, did not even know for sure. Most likely, these goods were offered to him by someone else, to another - by a third, and so on ...

But wagons and ingots are bulky things, there is a lot of fuss with them, and “the elk is very small”, there is not enough money for all intermediaries. Now, if the product were more compact, and moreover, rare and fantastically expensive. And how many such goods were in Russia? Few, and almost all of them "grew" in the military-industrial complex. Red mercury, for example.

Searched but didn't find

On August 29, 1991, at 0:30 am, an An-24 landed at the Ostrava airport without warning, from which masked men with weapons jumped out. They arrested the airport staff, began to search the premises and the territory of the airport. The unsuccessful search continued until ten o'clock in the morning.

Soon, the Minister of the Interior of Czechoslovakia, Jan Langosh, publicly announced that his special services had carried out a large-scale operation, the purpose of which was to seize illegal cargo radioactive substance with a total value of approximately $20 million. According to him, this substance was presumably liquid red mercury, which was allegedly illegally taken out of the USSR. However, it was not possible to detect the cargo. The minister explained the failure of the operation, among other things, by the fact that the attackers, obviously, were warned about the action and had time to change their plans.

Since then, rumors about the removal from Russia of a certain mysterious substance called "red mercury" have not subsided. In January 1992, TASS reported that four foreigners were detained in Milan while trying to sell 2 kg of red mercury of Soviet origin. According to the documents confiscated from them, the mercury was taken out of Irkutsk. The Russian government denied reports of the sale of radioactive substances abroad, but the head of the administration of the Irkutsk region, Yuri Nozhikov, said that "red mercury" was indeed exported from Irkutsk. However, Nozhikov could trace her path only to Moscow, where her trace was lost. In turn, mercury was allegedly delivered to the Irkutsk region from “one mailbox» in Altai.

In 1992, a uniform "mercury fever" began in the country. Everyone wanted to sell a wonderful substance. Contracts were concluded (mainly intermediary ones), licenses, benefits, and loans were obtained. The fact that in the specifications the formula for "red mercury" was written in different ways did not bother anyone. After all, it was a huge amount!

In April of that year, a British newspaper The Independent published an article on the promotion of "a mysterious substance called 'red mercury'" from the territory of the former Soviet Union to the world market. The newspaper wrote that in the last two years, and especially after the collapse of the USSR, proposals for the sale of "red mercury" appear throughout Western Europe. The network of distributors stretches almost across the entire continent - from the former Soviet Union to Italy, across the Bulgarian-Romanian border, through customs warehouses in Switzerland, the underground world of Vienna, agents in Denmark and Hungary. In 1993, the British television company BBC showed a documentary about the technology for producing "red mercury". It was about the fact that this substance is used for the manufacture of miniature atomic bombs and guidance systems for nuclear missiles.

In Russia, both intermediaries and sellers of the product were also regularly caught. But most often it turned out that ordinary mercury was being sold - either tinted or placed in red ampoules. Or just a substance that looks like mercury... In 1993, the Omsk police made an official statement in the media about the first detention in Russia of 4 kg of red mercury. In Omsk, at the time of sale to two Balts, a powder called "mercury oxide red", containing 98.7% of mercury, was seized from two Kazakh brothers. The state price of the product was 195 thousand rubles per kilogram. The Balts intended to sell this powder to the West at $10,000 per kilogram. An examination of the powder labeled "mercury oxide red" showed that the policemen hurried to trumpet victory and mistook for "red mercury" ordinary cinnabar, acceptable for the production of counterfeit money or for icon painting.

However, the journalists did not seem to doubt the very fact of the existence of "red mercury". But at the same time, no one knew exactly what kind of substance it was, where it was used and who produced it. Strictly speaking, it was not known for sure whether it existed at all.

In the black markets of Europe, the opinion has developed that the so-called "red mercury" is one of the necessary components of certain types of Soviet nuclear warheads. However, it has been suggested that the "red mercury" scam may have been just a sophisticated swindle, dictated by the desire to save countries wishing to acquire their own nuclear weapons from excess cash. It was also not ruled out that the intelligence services deliberately staged the spread of the so-called "red mercury" in order to protect potential buyers from the opportunity to acquire truly nuclear materials from the former Soviet Union. Another version was that Russia itself fueled the so-called "red mercury" proliferation network in order to confirm the West's worst fears about the reality of nuclear proliferation and thus obtain additional assistance.

Universal solvent

Ordinary mercury is a liquid metal element with a density of 13.6 g / cm 3, translated from Greek - “water silver”.

It dissolves other metals and forms compounds and alloys with them, which are called amalgams. In specialized reference books, you can find a substance called "Mercury II red oxide" (HgO, TU 6-09-3927-75). This is a long and well-known substance used in industry. The phrase "red mercury" is not an exact chemical term, does not belong to professional jargon, and is not mentioned in the well-known Aldrich and Atomergic Chemicals catalogs, as well as chemical encyclopedias, such as the McCraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Chemistry. Such a substance is not on the lists of the International Nuclear Energy Agency (IAEA), it is not found in the literature on the dissemination of military technologies.

Nevertheless, they wrote different things about the "red mercury". Some assured that "red mercury" is nothing more than a salt of mercuric acid or a mercury salt of antimony acid. They called the formula - Sb 2 O 7 Hg 2 or Hg 2 Sb 2 O 7. The last compound (mercury perantimonate) was first synthesized back in the 1960s. Since it did not find practical application for many years and only specialists knew about it, it was not included in popular reference books. This substance was obtained in small quantities (several tens of grams) in one of the laboratories of the Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as in the Russian Scientific Center "Kurchatov Institute" as part of routine research on high-temperature superconductors. At room temperature, it is a crystalline solid (powder) with a density of 9.0 g/cm 3 . The color depends on the starting mercuric oxide: yellow oxide results in a light brown powder, while red gives a reddish-brown color. The main properties of this substance correspond to fundamental chemical concepts and are within the boundaries of regularities. But some experts admitted that Hg 2 Sb 2 O 7 could be a basic compound for the synthesis of new substances.

There were also those who believed that under the name "red mercury" several chemical compounds are known that differ in production technology. Mercury gold amalgam and highly radioactive caesium-137 were also mentioned. Intended applications range from the military to medicine and Agriculture: radar equipment, electronic guidance systems for missiles, torpedoes, laser technology, uranium mining, diamond and gold mining, the manufacture of explosives, the production of semiconductors and special grades of paper for printing money, and even the fight against agricultural pests and infectious and venereal diseases. They also wrote that "red mercury" was used in the embalming of the Egyptian pharaohs and in alchemical practice.

One of the unique properties attributed to "red mercury" is its high density (20.2 g/cm3). Its only deposit in the world was allegedly located in the USSR, "somewhere in the north": there, under very high pressure in tectonic faults, mercury could combine with antimony.

The cost of the mysterious substance ranged from $200,000 to $1 million per kilogram.

Chemists and alchemists

Some Soviet firms even allegedly carried out orders from foreign firms for the manufacture of "red mercury". Among them, the press mentioned the Far Eastern Intersectoral NPO "Dal-vent", VO "Licensingtorg" (Moscow), Hi-Tech International (Moscow), Concern "Promekologiya" (Yekaterinburg), Concern "Molybdenum" (Moscow), Concern "Ecoprom" (Moscow), MNPP "Binom" (Yekaterinburg), NPO "Symbol" (Sverdlovsk region). The newspapers wrote that such enterprises included, for example, the St. Petersburg Soviet-American JV Alkor Technologies Incorporated, established in February 1990. The joint venture allegedly came close to making liquid "red mercury" from a formula commissioned by two Swiss and one Swedish intermediary firms. The formula, like the names of the intermediaries, was a trade secret. In 1991, for the legal production and sale of "red mercury", the joint venture, the Committee for External Relations of the St. Petersburg Mayor's Office and Scientific Ventures Group (USA), which specialized in financing venture companies, established a closed joint stock company.

After the Ostrava incident, the leadership of the joint venture gathered for consultation analysts from the closed St. Petersburg research institutes of physics and chemistry. The consultants offered two versions of the increased demand for liquid "red mercury" abroad. Version one: foreign developers have managed to discover a completely new area of ​​​​application of "red mercury" in electronic communications, as well as in radar equipment. Second: under the guise of exporting "red mercury" from the USSR, another radioactive substance similar in parameters can be illegally transported. Thus, according to a number of parameters, "red mercury" corresponds to uranium, and thus, can be used for smuggling operations in which uranium is transported across the border under the guise of "red mercury". This version is supported by the following fact: all intermediaries offered different companies the same cargo transportation scheme - a specially equipped customer aircraft, a sealed lead container, and for customs analysis only an ampoule with a sample of the substance in the container. With this method of transportation, it is theoretically possible that “red mercury” was presented in the ampoule for customs inspection - as a sample of officially declared cargo, and illegal uranium was in the container.

“What a commission, creator…”

It cannot be said that the government did not react in any way to the noise in the press. Already in 1992, a special commission was set up to investigate the problem of "red mercury" headed by Mikhail Bazhanov, chairman of the Committee for Conversion Affairs under the President of Russia. Bazhanov accused a number of people from President Yeltsin's inner circle of financial fraud related to the "red mercury" case. According to him, he was in possession of documents testifying to their at least indirect involvement in this case.

Bazhanov believed that "red mercury" is a real or imaginary mercury compound that has become the subject of increased interest of the press and government agencies, including the secret services of many countries, including Russia, the world's largest, although far from the only producer of primary mercury. He assured that not a single reliable case of examination of a substance was known, at least conditionally corresponding to the amount of information about "red mercury". Its producers were not found either. The only indisputable fact in this story is the intense interdepartmental and commercial correspondence around the product.

The conclusions of the commission headed by Bazhanov were as follows. In 1991-1992, a number of people from the inner circle of the President of Russia, as well as heads of some ministries, signed big number requests from various state and non-state firms for quotas for the sale of "red mercury" as a strategic product. Bazhanov showed a folder with photocopies of these documents, read excerpts from some of them, and also showed a document with a visa of one very important person from the Russian state structures. As a rule, inquiries were about a product described as "antimony mercury salt, liquid fraction". All organizations referred to the presence of both suppliers and buyers of this product, and copies of contracts were sometimes attached to requests.

Bazhanov had the results of examinations and conclusions signed by the first persons (or their deputies) of the Ministry of Atomic Energy and the Ministry of Industry of Russia, the Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Russian Scientific Center "Kurchatov Institute". In these documents, the descriptions of "red mercury" were declared contrary to the basics of chemistry, and the possibility of producing a mercury product in Russia and the CIS, the fields of application of which would be similar to those attributed to "red mercury", was denied.

These data, as well as information obtained during conversations with specialists and experts from the Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Security of Russia, as well as the inability of any of the applicants for quotas for "red mercury" to name and show the manufacturer or holder of the product, were given to Bazhanov, according to him words, sufficient grounds to declare this product non-existent. Bazhanov and Russian Security Minister Viktor Barannikov repeatedly informed Yegor Gaidar and members of the government about their position, but without visible results.

On this basis, Bazhanov concluded that "we are talking about the personal interests of corrupt groups, where everyone is tied up." He suggested fraud in the following way. A contract was concluded, which, of course, was not fulfilled, and the previously agreed colossal penalty in rubles (several hundred thousand dollars per kilogram of product, with an application of 10 tons (there were such) - several hundred billion rubles) was credited to the buyer's account in the CIS. At the same time, the corresponding amount in dollars was transferred to the supplier's account abroad, that is, the conversion of rubles took place, the dream of all Russian financiers of that time. Bazhanov saw the final point of the scam in the use of these funds to seize property during the corporatization campaign.

Mikhail Bazhanov repeatedly tried to get his point of view on the problem of "red mercury" to the president. Together with Viktor Barannikov, he sent his report and a draft presidential decree to the president, accompanying the package of documents with a request for a meeting, but there was no reaction. The documents were returned to the authors.

Mercury master

The most successful of the applicants for the rights to trade in the ill-fated chemical turned out to be Oleg Sadykov, the president of the previously completely unknown Yekaterinburg concern Promekologiya. It was he who managed to achieve the signing by the President of Russia of the secret government order No. 75 of February 21, 1992 "On the Promekologiya Concern" and obtaining monopoly rights to export "red mercury". (The order was considered secret, but a little over a year later its text was printed by the Pravda newspaper.)

Concern "Promecologia" was established in September 1991 as a voluntary association of several legal entities with an authorized capital of 1.05 million rubles. The number of employees was about 600 people. The main areas of activity included the development of clean energy based on alternative technologies and energy sources, a comprehensive examination of projects and programs, as well as fundamental research in the field of ecology.

According to Bazhanov, the decree "On the concern" Promekologiya "" was signed with the assistance of the so-called "Sverdlovsk group" surrounded by Boris Yeltsin (Gennady Burbulis and company). According to him, the history of this document is such that "it could cost the president the process of impeachment." However, Bazhanov emphasized that Yeltsin himself "stands above all this."

According to one version, Burbulis introduced Yeltsin and Sadykov. According to other sources, Sadykov was the author of the environmental section of Yeltsin's election program. Later, he himself wrote a letter to the President of Russia with a request to allocate a quota for the sale of "red mercury" abroad, promising to spend the proceeds on environmental programs. Attached to the letter was a draft decree on the Promekologiya concern and a draft letter to Eduard Rossel, chairman of the executive committee of the Sverdlovsk Regional Council of People's Deputies, about assistance.

According to Sadykov, the concern "Promekologiya" had a patent of the Russian Federation No. 2077159 "Method for the production of the liquid phase of mercury pyroantimonate by neutron-activated polymerization." He assured that "red mercury" is a code name for a whole group of artificial mercury derivatives of nanometal polymers, nanocomposites and other nanomaterials.

The concern allegedly carried out scientific work on its own, without attracting budgetary funds, observing all the requirements for the protection of military and state secrets. The concern had its own laboratories, workshops, mini-mining and processing plants, smelters, and its own experimental production of electrical equipment. The main areas of activity included the development of environmentally friendly energy based on alternative technologies and energy sources, a comprehensive examination of projects and programs, fundamental research in the field of ecology. In the contracts, the goods went under the name "multifunctional catalyst (MFC)". By the way, according to Sadykov, “red mercury” is not red at all, but dark cherry. And in some contracts it was described even more interestingly - the color of Red Burgund, the consistency of honey.

Sadykov said that after the signing of Yeltsin's decree, the concern worked under Yeltsin's personal control. The curator of the concern from the presidential administration was at first the personal assistant to the president, Gennady Kharin. And everything was fine while he was alive. After him, General Alexander Rutskoi became curator for a short time.

One suitcase out of eleven

“I learned to break through the fence not with my head, but with my fist and expand the resulting space,” Rutskoi liked to repeat. The general asked for a week to get up to speed. “And a week later he called me,” Sadykov said. He wasn't alone in the office. There were ten or twelve people present. And Rutskoi immediately, from the threshold, said that he wanted to head the concern and become president of Promekologiya. I said it's impossible."

In the spring of 1993, a loud scandal thundered: Vice-President Alexander Rutskoi, speaking in parliament, said that he had 11 suitcases of compromising evidence on senior officials. One of the suitcases contained documents relating to "red mercury".

After Rutskoi's speech, the Interdepartmental Commission of the Security Council on Combating Crime and Corruption, Regarding Abuses in Conducting Financial Transactions and Transactions with "Red Mercury", was created, headed by Alexander Gurov. The General Prosecutor's Office of Russia began to study the documents received from the commission. As a result of the investigation, a criminal case was initiated on the facts of the production and sale of the so-called "red mercury".

As follows from the statement of the prosecutor's office, interrogations of Gennady Burbulis, the heads of the Promekologiya concern and other employees of the presidential administration of Russia, as well as government officials who made decisions on financial transactions and transactions with "red mercury" were to be interrogated.

The prosecutors summoned the heads of the Promekologiya concern, as well as high-ranking officials who made decisions on financial transactions and transactions with "red mercury" for questioning. One can only guess what they talked about for tight closed door. But the analysis of samples from the first 5 kg of “red mercury” exported by the Promekologiya concern showed that this is a mixture of liquid metallic mercury with a purity of 99.9998% and powdered mercury oxide with a total content of metal impurities at the level of 0.005%. The material was radiation safe. The criminal case initiated against Sadykov by the prosecutor's office was terminated due to the absence of corpus delicti in the actions of the chairman of the Promekologiya concern.

Compromising Rutskoi was not useful. The case was closed.

"The Mystery of Red Mercury"

But Rutskoi handed over the compromising evidence on the “red mercury” to Alexander Gurov (now a member of the United Russia party and the State Duma Committee on Security). He used them in his book The Red Mercury Mystery (1995).

“The machinations with red mercury had at least two aspects,” he told the correspondent of the Argumenty i Fakty newspaper Valery Buldakov. - The first aspect is economic. With the help of these fake deals, more money was pumped into Russia in time for privatization. Perhaps this is how the dirty money earned from the drug trade was also laundered and legally invested in factories, factories, and real estate. The second aspect is military-political. There was another version. Allegedly, the hype with red mercury was intended at the same time to compromise the USSR in the sense that it was no longer able to control its nuclear facilities. The Western media then shouted: “The Russians are selling a substance that is ten times more powerful than gunplutonium in terms of combat power!”

Gurov assured that a representative of the commission of the Supreme Council went to the manufacturing plants to check how the order was being carried out. It turned out that these enterprises have always produced only ceramic tiles. And about the "red mercury" did not hear anything. “Spies from forty intelligence agencies of the world then arrived in our country to search for information about this substance,” he said. - As a result, the American authorities received a document with the following content: “Deals with red mercury are doubtful. It's more like a scam."

The author of "The Secret of Red Mercury" came to the conclusion that there is no superheavy substance with special properties that allow bringing weapons to a fundamentally new level in nature. “... There is only a certain modification of mercury oxide at a price of $30 per kg, which chemists really call red mercury. Apparently, the catchy name caught the eye of a talented PR man - and a grandiose scam began to gain momentum. Other experts agreed with him. “In the early 1990s, it was a troubled time,” said Nikolai Shingarev, director of the Center for Information and Exhibition Activities of the Federal Atomic Energy Agency. - Then everyone was traded exclusively in wagons. Remember the popular anecdote: “Two businessmen meet. One says to the other: "Buy a carload of chocolate for a million." - "I agree. I take it." Disperse: one went to look for chocolate, the other - a million. So it was with this mercury. Under it, loans were taken, and as a result, the money disappeared, and the goods turned out to be empty.

Former Prosecutor General Yuri Skuratov said: “In 1992, the prosecutor's office had a version that the legend about“ red mercury ”was launched in order to get access to budget funds through Burbulis by the beginning of privatization. I confirm that it followed from the materials of the criminal case that in reality there is no “red mercury”. Another thing is how this myth was used to cover up the smuggling of real strategic raw materials. Consider the then confusion of the secret services, open borders, etc. Dozens of trains disappeared without a trace. In the end, the prosecutor's office decided to dismiss the case for lack of corpus delicti. This means that not a single gram of this mysterious substance was found operationally. That is, wagons allegedly with “red mercury” went to the West, someone received huge money for them, and the case had to be closed, since one cannot be judged for theft of something that does not exist! The investigation never gave an answer as to who launched this disinformation.”

mercury pumping

However, the sellers of "red mercury" did not let up, and the hype in the press around her did not subside. In April 2000, a man was detained at the railway station in Ussuriysk, offering to buy red powder from him. He passed off his product as "red mercury". In May 2001, bags of mercury oxide were found in a businessman's country house in a village in the Sverdlovsk region. In autumn 2001, the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia with reference to news agency Adnkronos reported that Osama bin Laden may have several radio-controlled " nuclear suitcases", lost by the KGB in Germany during cold war. And these suitcases contain, among other things, "red mercury" ...

In December 2001 in the newspaper Le Temps published an article by Sylvain Besson "Red mercury - headache secret services." Referring to the weekly Sonntags Blick, the newspaper wrote that a politician from Friborg, Bernard Rohrbasser, in 1992 acted as a guarantor of a deal worth 200 million francs, the subject of which was the sale of "red mercury" to Saudi Arabia. At the disposal of the newspaper Le Temps there was supposedly evidence that a large number of such transactions were organized in Switzerland during the same period. The subject of the transactions was mainly the very hard rare metal osmium-187, with low radioactivity and bad smell. An entrepreneur from Tichin said that he traveled "repeatedly" to Russia and Kazakhstan to purchase substances such as "red mercury". But in vain: “We received offers from people who worked at nuclear enterprises. But we never found anything serious.” Another Swiss intermediary told the correspondent Le Temps who once traveled to Saudi Arabia to sell a strange substance purchased from merchants from Eastern Europe. “It was a very heavy red metal. I undertook to take this product to Saudi Arabia, where there were buyers, in the role of which the Saudi Arabian intelligence services acted. They researched this product but it wasn't what they were looking for. That was the end of the matter." The newspaper concluded that in most cases, smugglers sold anything in the hope of deceiving naive buyers. "Red Mercury" turned out to be a hoax, and sellers from Eastern Europe who sold it turned out to be scammers.

And on September 30, 2004 in the newspaper Guardian David Adam published an article "What is red mercury?". According to the author, the only thing we can be sure of, - the newspaper wrote, - is that it's just a bike. Rumors that Soviet nuclear physicists created a mysterious explosive with unimaginable destructive power have been circulating since the 1970s, but despite a number of official investigations and subsequent denials, this story does not want to die. In the mid-2000s, this almost mystical connection resurfaced when the agency News of the World claimed to have thwarted a terrorist plot to acquire "red mercury" as material for a "dirty" bomb. “No one would dream of acquiring this substance for a dirty bomb,” the newspaper quoted nuclear physicist Frank Barnaby, who worked at a nuclear weapons factory in Aldermaston, Berkshire, England, in the 1950s. - It does not give the terrorist any important advantages in comparison with ordinary explosives or, if a "dirty" bomb is needed, with a source of radioactivity. Spending a lot of money on red mercury is completely pointless.” The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was of the same opinion. "Red mercury doesn't exist," his public relations representative said. "It's all mura."

It would seem that in the history of "red mercury" one could put an end to it. But... In May 2007, five swindlers were detained in Krasnoyarsk, who were trying to sell 2 kg of ordinary mercury for $4 million. To be convincing, they placed the mercury in a glass flask with a burgundy film. In June 2007, a fraudster was detained in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, who asked for 1 million rubles for 7.5 kg of ordinary mercury. In November 2007, a certain Alexander Dremin, a fake general of the FSB, was detained in Moscow. Documents with a description of "red mercury" were found with him. In November 2008, sellers of "red mercury" were detained in Ufa, trying to pass off a completely different substance as red mercury. They offered their goods for 5 million rubles.

If "red mercury" does not exist in nature, then it is more or less clear who, how and for what purpose used this myth. If this substance does not exist in nature, then everything that has been and is being created around it is one grandiose fraud, a scam on a global scale. What if it does exist? An interesting point of view was expressed in the program Our Version (2001). The operation with "red mercury" was developed by very smart people. They understood that since such a substance did not exist, any criminal case against the dealers or manufacturers would be dropped. They weren't wrong. However, another version was also expressed in the program: under the guise of deals with the mythical Ka-Er, “dirty money” was accumulated in Russia, for example, from drug trafficking, which were then invested in privatization. They bought factories, newspapers, ships. And, as we all now understand, the “red mercury” scam fully justified itself.

However, even today, someone is pinning hopes on her. So, on the Internet you can find the article "The Secret of" Red Mercury "", the authors of which, Doctor of Technical Sciences Alexei Khesin and Doctor of Philosophy, Professor and Academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and Academician of the Academy of National Security and Law Enforcement Problems Vladimir Vavilov, are trying to "open the veil of secrecy over the unique universal inhibitor-catalyst of technological processes, which is one of the elements of the scientific and technological basis of Russia's security, to prevent further fabrications and various kinds of speculation on the topic of the so-called "red mercury".

In their opinion, the epic "Red Mercury" is far from being "a performance against the backdrop of the Kremlin wall in five acts with a prologue and an epilogue", but a real, breakthrough scientific and technological direction that can provide Russia with zones of excellence on the stage of environmental, scientific and technical international markets goods and services. The main directions of the planned activity had specific fundamental groundwork in the field of scientific research and technological platform. One of the interdisciplinary branches of research by 1991 received the thematic code "red mercury". In the process of chemical-physical, radiological, biomedical research, the creation of a universal technological platform, fundamentally new approaches to existing technological processes, has been outlined.

The platform was based on the idea of ​​creating a catalytic substance with universal properties. After a long search and numerous experiments, it was possible to create such a drug. The versatility of the use of the resulting chemical preparation and its modifications for various purposes and tasks has actually formed a new scientific direction called "red mercury" technology. By the way, the authors of the article point out that the name "red mercury" was not chosen by chance, it has historical roots. Known catalysts for biochemical and chemical processes that ensure the transformation of matter and the extension of human life, in ancient times were called "philosopher's stone", "sulfir" and "red mercury". One of these catalysts was also the “Makropulus remedy”, used to overcome the aging process of the human body: ““Red Mercury” is a universal inhibitor-catalyst capable of solving a wide variety of problems in the field of human needs. The possibilities of using "red mercury" technologies cover almost all spheres of human activity, ranging from oil production, restoration of depleted mineral deposits, return of agricultural land to circulation, reclamation of landfills for solid domestic waste, cleanup of territories contaminated with radionuclides, obtaining biological "smart" drugs in medicine, restoration of the biota of the waters of the seas and oceans to obtain environmentally friendly fuel for new energy sources.

And all this, perhaps, would have sounded quite convincing (at least for a non-specialist), if not for everything that has been going on around this “product” for 20 years now ... So what is it - a conscientious scientific work or another attempt to cash in on the "universal solvent"?

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