he hunt for the ultimate weapon began in January 2014, when Abu Omar, a smuggler who fills shopping lists for the Islamic State, met a jihadist commander in Tal Abyad, a Syrian town near the Turkish border. The Islamic State had raised its black flag over Tal Abyad several days before, and the commander, a former cigarette vendor known as Timsah, Arabic for ‘‘crocodile,’’ was the area’s new security chief. The Crocodile had an order to place, which he said he had received from his bosses in Mosul, a city in northwestern Iraq that the Islamic State would later overrun.
Abu Omar, a Syrian whose wispy beard hinted at his jihadist sympathies, was young, wiry and adaptive. Since war erupted in Syria in 2011, he had taken many noms de guerre — including Abu Omar — and found a niche for himself as a freelance informant and trader for hire in the extremist underground. By the time he met the Crocodile, he said, he had become a valuable link in the Islamic State’s local supply chain. Working from Sanliurfa, a Turkish city north of the group’s operational hub in Raqqa, Syria, he purchased and delivered many of the common items the martial statelet required: flak jackets, walkie-talkies, mobile phones, medical instruments, satellite antennas, SIM cards and the like. Once, he said, he rounded up 1,500 silver rings with flat faces upon which the world’s most prominent terrorist organization could stamp its logo. Another time, a French jihadist hired him to find a Turkish domestic cat; Syrian cats, it seemed, were not the friendly sort.War materiel or fancy; business was business. The Islamic State had needs, it paid to have them met and moving goods across the border was not especially risky. The smugglers used the same well-established routes by which they had helped foreign fighters reach Syria for at least three years. Turkish border authorities did not have to be eluded, Abu Omar said. They had been co-opted. ‘‘It is easy,’’ he boasted. ‘‘We bought the soldiers.’’
This time, however, the Crocodile had an unusual request: The Islamic State, he said, was shopping for red mercury. Abu Omar knew what this meant. Red mercury — precious and rare, exceptionally dangerous and exorbitantly expensive, its properties unmatched by any compound known to science — was the stuff of doomsday daydreams. According to well-traveled tales of its potency, when detonated in combination with conventional high explosives, red mercury could create the city-flattening blast of a nuclear bomb. In another application, a famous nuclear scientist once suggested it could be used as a component in a neutron bomb small enough to fit in a sandwich-size paper bag.
Abu Omar understood the implications. The Islamic State was seeking a weapon that could do more than strike fear in its enemies. It sought a weapon that could kill its enemies wholesale, instantly changing the character of the war. Imagine a mushroom cloud rising over the fronts of Syria and Iraq. Imagine the jihadists’ foes scattered and ruined, the caliphate expanding and secure.
Imagine the price the Islamic State would pay.
Abu Omar thought he might have a lead. He had a cousin in Syria who told him about red mercury that other jihadists had seized from a corrupt rebel group. Maybe he could arrange a sale. And so soon Abu Omar set out, off for the front lines outside Latakia, a Syrian government stronghold, in pursuit of the gullible man’s shortcut to a nuclear bomb.
To approach the subject of red mercury is to journey into a comic-book universe, a zone where the stubborn facts of science give way to unverifiable claims, fantasy and outright magic, and where villains pursuing the dark promise of a mysterious weapon could be rushing headlong to the end of the world. This is all the more remarkable given the broad agreement among nonproliferation specialists that red mercury, at least as a chemical compound with explosive pop, does not exist.
Legends of red mercury’s powers began circulating by late in the Cold War. But their breakout period came after the Soviet Union’s demise, when disarray and penury settled over the Kremlin’s arms programs. As declining security fueled worries of illicit trafficking, red mercury embedded itself in the lexicon of the freewheeling black-market arms bazaar. Aided by credulous news reports, it became an arms trafficker’s marvelous elixir, a substance that could do almost anything a shady client might need: guide missiles, shield objects from radar, equip a rogue underdog state or terrorist group with weapons rivaling those of a superpower. It was priced accordingly, at hundreds of thousands of dollars a kilogram. With time, the asking price would soar.
As often happens with durable urban legends, the red-mercury meme found just enough public support to assure an unextinguishable life. Chief among its proponents was Samuel T. Cohen, the American physicist and Manhattan Project veteran often called the father of the neutron bomb, who before his death in 2010 spoke vividly of the perils of nuclear terrorism and what he said was poor government preparation for such attacks. Cohen joined the red-mercury bandwagon as it gathered momentum in the early 1990s, staking a lonely position by asserting that the substance could be used to build nuclear weapons of exceptionally small size.
In one edition of his autobiography, he claimed red mercury was manufactured by ‘‘mixing special nuclear materials in very small amounts into the ordinary compound and then inserting the mixture
into a nuclear reactor or bombarding it with a particle-accelerator beam.’’ The result, he said, ‘‘is a remarkable nonexploding high explosive’’ that, when detonated, becomes ‘‘extremely hot, which allows pressures and temperatures to be built up that are capable of igniting the heavy hydrogen and producing a pure-fusion mini neutron bomb.’’ Here was a proliferation threat of an order never before seen.
The establishment largely dismissed him. ‘‘If he did ever reveal evidence, I never saw it,’’ said Peter D. Zimmerman, a nuclear physicist who served as chief scientific adviser for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency at the time. He added, ‘‘I would have seen it, at that point in history.’’ Jeffrey Lewis, a nonproliferation analyst at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif., put matters less delicately, saying Cohen followed a classic formula for conspiracy theories, mixing ‘‘nonscientific mumbo jumbo’’ with allegations that governments were withholding the truth. ‘‘I could never figure out where Sam Cohen the physicist ended and Sam Cohen the polemicist began,’’ he said.
Russian news organizations in the 1990s nevertheless relayed claims of red mercury’s destructive potential at face value, and foreign news outlets occasionally repeated them, boosting the material’s credibility and mystique. Britain’s Channel 4 elevated the material’s profile with two documentaries — ‘‘Trail of Red Mercury’’ and ‘‘Pocket Neutron’’ — that presented, according to their producers, ‘‘startling evidence that Russian scientists have designed a miniature neutron bomb using a mysterious compound called red mercury.’’ Cohen held a news conference after one broadcast to say it confirmed his fears.
Outside this circle of the faithful, red mercury faced doubters. The substance was almost everything but scientifically verifiable. It was not even reasonably explicable. ‘‘Over all it doesn’t make much sense,’’ an engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory wrote to a supervisor in 1994. It was also devilishly elusive, turning up in tales of smuggling mafias but never quite finding its way to a law-enforcement body or nuclear agency for proper frisking. When hopeful sellers were caught, substance in hand, it reliably turned out to be something else, sometimes a placebo of chuckle-worthy simplicity: ordinary mercury mixed with dye. The shadowy weaponeer’s little helper, it was the unobtainium of the post-Soviet world.
Among specialists who investigated the claims, the doubts hardened to an unequivocal verdict: Red mercury was a lure, the central prop of a confidence game designed to fleece ignorant buyers. ‘‘Take a bogus material, give it an enigmatic name, exaggerate its physical properties and intended uses, mix in some human greed and intrigue, and voilà: one half-baked scam,’’ the Department of Energy’s Critical Technologies Newsletter declared. In 1998, 15 authors from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which helps maintain the American nuclear-weapons stockpile, published an article in The Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry that called red mercury ‘‘a relatively notorious nuclear hoax.’’ In 1999, Jane’s Intelligence Review suggested that the scam’s victims may have included Osama bin Laden, whose Qaeda purchasing agents were ‘‘nuclear novices.’’ The most accommodating theory held that red mercury might have been a Soviet code name for something else — maybe lithium-6, a controlled material with an actual use in nuclear weapons — and traffickers repurposed the label for whatever nuclear detritus they were trying to move.
A true believer of the legends might interject that official skepticism in public did not preclude another discussion playing out on classified channels. But when WikiLeaks published American diplomatic cables in 2010 and 2011, snippets of the internal red-mercury dialogue were consistent with the public statements. In 2006, according to one cable, Sri Lanka notified the American Embassy in Colombo of concerns that the Tamil Tigers, a secessionist militant group, had tried to procure the substance. ‘‘Red Mercury is a well-known scam material,’’ a State Department nonproliferation official told the embassy. ‘‘There is nothing to be concerned about.’’