(Based on an interview)

Dr. Cohen is concerned that the Soviets have developed the technology for producing a cheap micro neutron bomb. Such a weapon would be the size of a baseball, with the destructive power of ten tons of TNT. It would emit a deadly pulse of penetrating neutron radiation for a radius of about one-third of a mile.

This technology has a dreadful potential for terrorism. A detonation in a metropolitan area could kill thousands of people. When detonated, neutron bombs generally produce a minimal blast and thermal effect, but they produce a substantial pulse of neutron radiation which penetrates hardened shelters and produces a destructive ionizing effect when it interacts with living tissue. In other words, such a weapon does not destroy buildings as much as it kills people.

Red Mercury

The key technological element necessary for making the micro neutron weapon is a substance called red mercury, which is a mercury antimony oxide. In 1968, the E.I. duPont de Nemours company produced a powdered red mercury compound. When this compound was irradiated and pressured into a gel, the density substantially increased. This provided the necessary precondition for producing the neutron explosion. Red mercury can be used to detonate a very small quantity of heavy hydrogen which would produce a massive pulse of deadly neutrons.

Recently, evidence has surfaced indicating the possibility of the development of such a micro neutron bomb. There is a lot of controversy as to whether or not this technology has really been developed.

Evidence suggests that red mercury is currently being manufactured in Russia and reportedly being sold at high prices on the international black market. Western governments are going out of their way to dismiss red mercury as a hoax. Western law enforcement officials claim they have confiscated substances passed off as red mercury which were nothing more than common mercury mixed with brick dust. In July of 1994, FBI Director Louis Freeh made the following statement regarding illegal black market sales of illicit nuclear materials: "Most were frauds where swindlers tried to sell harmless red mercury as more highly enriched radioactive material." Despite the denial of red mercury by Western governments, there are a growing number of weapon-hungry third world nations that are attempting to procure red mercury.

Historically, the Russians have been leaders in high-pressure technology which
is very relevant to the production of red
mercury.

In 1991, a Russian company called Promekologia, headed by Boris Yeltsin’s
ecological adviser, was granted a license to develop and exploit the country’s advances in weapons and energy. In February 1992, Yeltsin signed Secret Directive No. 75-RPS, which authorized the company to manufacture and sell red mercury in amounts up to ten tons per year.

According to Dr. Cohen, the Russians have been working on low-yield neutron devices since the early 1950s.

In 1993, Russian General Y. Negin claimed his country had developed a low-yield nuclear weapon "in which a doubling of yield is achieved with a hundredfold reduction of weight compared to existing weapons." A Russian official named Evgeny Kerolev said that red mercury is so potent that a "bomb the size of a grenade could
blow a ship out of the sea." Russian Minister of Atomic Energy, Victor Mikhailov, said:
"You can drop a couple hundred little bombs on foreign territory and the enemy is devastated."

In an article which appeared in the Russian newspaper, Pravda, Mikhailov said that these "little bombs" were micro neutron bombs designed to wipe out people while leaving buildings standing. Mikhailov did not admit that Russia had actually developed such a weapon but he did say that "such a weapon could appear by the year 2000."

Dr. Cohen says that in 1961 the U.S. tried to develop a low-yield pure fusion weapon at the Lawrence Livermore laboratories. The Los Alamos lab was involved in a similar
project back in the early 1970s but neither project produced a workable weapon. Such a weapon would be very inexpensive because it would not require uranium or plutonium. It would only require small amounts of tritium. Indications from some of Dr. Cohen’s old colleagues suggest that Los Alamos may have restarted pure-fusion research.

Dealing with this potential for nuclear terrorism should be one of this nation’s highest national priorities, but U.S. government officials and agencies deny the potential existence of the micro neutron bomb. The U.S. position of denying the technical feasibility of such a weapon could prove to be disastrous to our national security. This is not the first time that the government and the scientific community said a bomb was impossible to build. In the late 1940s they said the hydrogen bomb couldn’t be built, but shortly thereafter the Soviets deployed a hydrogen bomb.

Despite claims that a micro bomb is technically unfeasible, in 1993 Congress passed a bill banning research and development of micro bombs with yields less than five kiloton.