Element of Surprise

Red mercury doesn’t exist. That hasn’t stopped ISIS scouring the globe for it.

In 2015, Chris Chivers received a startling email. It was from ISIS, the terrorist group currently running amok in the middle east, and they wanted to show him something.

As a reporter for the New York Times, Chivers was used to terrorists contacting him whenever they wanted some free press (a gift he rarely granted). But this message was different. It contained a photo of a strange-looking substance, roughly the shape of a swim-lane buoy. Confused, Chivers asked the sender what he was looking at. The response nearly knocked him off his seat: “Red mercury.”

Chivers had heard a lot about red mercury over the years, though this was the first time someone had ever claimed to possess some. The substance was extraordinarily rare, ludicrously expensive and, if the rumours were to be believed, one of the most dangerous chemicals in existence. In the right hands it could be used as a shortcut to making a nuclear bomb – exactly the kind of thing you didn’t want an apocalyptic cult to have in its arsenal. However, Chivers knew something else about red mercury that the terrorists apparently didn’t: the elusive chemical doesn’t actually exist.

No one knows for certain who started the red mercury hoax or why, but most versions of the conspiracy theory go something like this: during the last days of the Cold War, the Soviets worked out how to create a super-dangerous chemical by taking small amounts of radioactive materials and combining them with mercury. To keep it from the Americans, the Kremlin hid small amounts of the stuff in TV sets and, as the USSR began to crumble, exported them to the Arab world – right under the noses of the authorities.

Ever since then, wannabe terrorists have scoured the second-hand market for old Russian TVs, while charlatans have made a killing selling regular mercury mixed with lipstick to anyone looking for a doomsday device. (The compound was originally dubbed ‘red’ because it came from communist Russia, but as the myth devolved with each retelling, the substance eventually became red itself, which explains why arms dealers in Syria are sometimes found carrying lipstick.)

That’s the more plausible story, at any rate. According to ISIS, though, red mercury has been around for thousands of years, and you can find it in old Roman graveyards, if you know which crypts to loot. Obviously, none of this actually checks out. According to non-proliferation experts, red mercury was simply dreamt up – by America, or the USSR, or both – to waste the time of terrorists like ISIS. Job well done, it would seem.

ISIS aren’t the only ones to have misunderstood mercury’s strange properties over the years. In ancient China it was believed that drinking the stuff could prolong life, when it in fact usually results in the opposite (loose teeth, psychosis and, eventually, death). Later, in the Middle Ages, alchemists became transfixed with the metallic liquid, which they thought transcended the regular categories assigned to physical objects.

Eventually, hard-working chemists got to the bottom of why mercury behaves so oddly. For one, it’s an element, meaning that unlike most stuff we encounter every day, it can’t be broken down into smaller units. Moreover, mercury’s atoms aren’t very friendly: they prefer the company of other mercury atoms, and limit their contact with the world by bunching up into quivering spheres – something to which anyone old enough to have dropped a mercury thermometer on the ground as a sick child can attest.

Still, even as scientists furthered their understanding of the alluring metal, eventually adding it to the periodic table under the symbol Hg (for the Latin hydrargyrum), the world continued to misunderstand it. When Lewis and Clark set out to explore America in the early 19th century, they took a whole lot of mercury with them to ward off exotic diseases. Modern archaeologists now think they may have suffered a similar fate to the ancient Chinese: mercury deposits now litter the western plains, signalling places where the explorers likely spent many long, painful hours on the latrine.

Even today, gold miners in Peru continue to use mercury to purify the precious metal – and large swathes of the country are contaminated as a result. Mercury really is dangerous, it turns out. Thankfully, just not in the way ISIS think.

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Published in Smith Journal vol. 19 as ‘Random Element’, a recurring section exploring stories based on the periodic table.