"Red Mercury and The Strange Case of Delmart Vreeland"

“If you look too deeply into the abyss, the abyss will look into you.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

Last week this column discussed the testimony of a self-described U.S. Naval intelligence officer who was recently granted asylum by Canada. According to documents and testimony entered into evidence during his trial, Delmart Edward Vreeland predicted a major terrorist strike against the World Trade Center, naming Osama bin Laden as the perpetrator a full month before the Sept. 11 attacks. Vreeland also told journalists last October that the death of a Canadian Embassy official in Moscow, Marc Bastien, was not due to natural causes as initially reported in the Canadian press. Adding weight to Vreeland’s credibility, on Jan. 21, 2002, the Toronto Star reported the findings of the Quebec coroner that Bastien died “after drinking a mixture of alcohol and clopazine.”

Last week I interviewed Vreeland, who claims to possess official Russian documents stolen from Moscow that link the Kremlin to the Sept. 11 terrorist assault and to a planned Iraqi nuclear attack against U.S. cities using Russian red mercury fusion devices. After demonstrating an uncanny knowledge of events in Moscow and elsewhere, I felt that Vreeland’s story warranted closer scrutiny. Is he a deranged kook seeking publicity? Is red mercury a hoax?

Last Saturday I spoke with Sam Cohen, a U.S. nuclear weapons expert credited with inventing the neutron bomb. I asked Cohen how he would answer critics who ridicule the idea of red mercury fusion. According to Cohen, “These people don’t understand the laws of physics.” He further stated that red mercury “is a compound with tremendous energy density.” In all likelihood, Russia has successfully fabricated this compound using “ultra high pressure technology,” Cohen explained. “You knock all these electrons out so it’s not the same atom. It pulls a lot more energy per gram than any other explosive that I’ve ever heard of.”

Its explosive power is so great that red mercury can trigger a fusion reaction. “The Atomic Energy Commission denies red mercury,” Cohen said, “but they lie through their teeth. And they have to.” I asked Cohen if the secret of red mercury could be learned from captured samples. “I’m just guessing here,” he replied, “but I think it’s very difficult to tell [how it was made] from examining the substance itself.” (In other words, Russia might export red mercury to terrorist states or groups without fear of giving away the secret of its manufacture.)

I asked Cohen about Vreeland’s statement that a two-megaton device could be made using red mercury technology. Cohen said, “The answer is it’s possible, but not advisable.” Expressing doubts about the effectiveness of U.S. sensors set up to detect nuclear weapons smuggled by terrorists, Cohen asked why an enemy power couldn’t simply slip a “good old-fashioned fission bomb” into the U.S.? “If you wanted to do damage, a dirty bomb is better,” he explained. “Using red mercury is best accomplished at low yields. Although you could turn it into a [high yield] multiple stage device.”

I asked Cohen how small a two-megaton multi-stage red mercury device might be. Cohen replied that a red mercury fusion bomb “could be more miniaturized than fusion/fission nuclear warheads. It is void of fissile material. Due to explosive power per gram it has the potential to be very much lighter.” He added that, “We’ve produced [atomic] bombs from 50,000 pounds to 50 pounds.”

I asked Cohen if a country other than Russia might have red mercury technology. “Oh yes,” he responded, adding, “I think Iraq did get red mercury.” According to Cohen’s contacts in the nuclear weapons community, U.N. inspectors have found evidence of red mercury transactions between Iraq and Russia.

Those who want to dismiss Cohen’s testimony do so at their own peril. In his Dec. 27 1993 National Review article on red mercury, Cohen stated: “In a pure-fusion weapon … the weight of the nuclear material required may be as low as a thousandth of that required in a fission weapon.” Cohen also stated that red mercury warheads “could be clandestinely tested underground.”

None of this absolutely confirms the testimony of Delmart Edward Vreeland regarding a Russian-Iraqi connection to Sept. 11 and future red mercury terrorism against U.S. cities. Cohen’s expert opinion merely tells us that Vreeland’s claims are not altogether outlandish. Setting aside the question of red mercury, the real test of Vreeland’s credibility will come in the weeks and months ahead. Adding to the mystery surrounding this story, I received a phone call last week from an official of a national political party (U.S.) involved in the Vreeland case. The official in question had personally met Vreeland and said there was a nasty bullet wound on the side of Vreeland’s face, which occurred when the Russian mafia put a gun in Vreeland’s mouth and pulled the trigger. This official also confirmed that Vreeland’s military record had been altered and falsified and that Vreeland’s case was rated as a secret intelligence matter in Washington.

Two things, however, are disturbing about the Vreeland case. In terms of media coverage, citizen-reporter Michael C. Ruppert has emerged to become Vreeland’s leading advocate. But the sinister use to which Ruppert puts Vreeland’s testimony must be called into question. While Vreeland clearly indicated to me that Sept. 11 was a Russian-supported Iraqi-Al Qaeda operation, Ruppert’s articles argue that Sept. 11 was a U.S. or CIA operation. In addition, Ruppert is a person who has been warmly embraced by leading figures in Moscow, where he has been invited to speak and fraternize. Snuggling up to Vreeland, allegedly dictating Vreeland’s choice of legal representation in the United States, Ruppert willingly ignores the fact that Vreeland’s information points to Kremlin foreknowledge and connivance in the events of Sept. 11 – not to U.S. connivance.

There is a second point regarding Vreeland’s story that must not be set aside. It has to do with the possible use of mind control drugs in relation to this case. Vreeland claims that while spying in Moscow, he teamed up with Canadian Embassy official Marc Bastien, who was found dead on Dec. 12, 2000, six days after Vreeland was arrested in Canada. According to Canadian officials, the drug found in Bastien’s body at the time of death was clopazine mixed with alcohol. Clopazine is an anti-psychotic chemical that can be used to remedy drug-induced schizophrenia. Those familiar with Russia’s security services know that psychotropic drugs have been used against key witnesses to induce mental illness, confusion, illogical thinking and memory loss. In April 1953 CIA director Allen W. Dulles told his colleagues that Russia had “developed brain perversion techniques, some of which are so subtle and so abhorrent to our way of life that we have recoiled from facing up to them.”

Did Bastien and Vreeland successfully penetrate Kremlin security and steal classified Russian documents? Were they subsequently caught and drugged by the Russian security services in Moscow? Was the clopazine found in Bastien’s body by the Quebec coroner part of a failed attempt by Canadian officials to reverse the effects of brain poisoning by an unknown Russian psychotropic agent? Furthermore, if Bastien was poisoned with a mind-altering drug (to induce schizophrenia), was Vreeland similarly poisoned in the first week of December 2000?

Given that a Moscow-friendly muckraker like Mike Ruppert has snuggled up to Vreeland, we should not be surprised if Vreeland’s secrets are twisted to signify the opposite of what they in fact indicate. We should also fear for Vreeland’s safety and his sanity given the known methods of the Russian security services and associated mafia organizations. I have already learned of more than one attempt on Vreeland’s life. Now that his name has appeared in the newspapers, now that a political organization in the U.S. is prepared to take up his cause, wouldn’t it be logical to discredit him via drug-induced schizophrenia?

According to an article http://www.thefinalphase.com/DouglassBehavior.htm by national security expert Joseph D. Douglass, Jr., with the title “Influencing Behavior and Mental Processes in Covert Operations,” Russia has freely used mind control drugs against Western targets in the past. Douglass says that the one-time Chief of Staff to the Czech Minister of Defense, defector Jan Sejna, “knew of over a dozen families of mind control drugs that were actually being used against diplomats, banking and business executives, religious leaders, politicians, political leaders, military units, academicians, and even Presidents and Prime Ministers."

Sejna said that mind-altering drugs were used against the clergy in communist Czechoslovakia during the 1960s. “After two years,” noted Sejna, “there were no more reactionary clerics in Czechoslovakia.” By inducing suicide, insanity or collaboration (i.e., with “friendship drugs”) the anti-communist clergy ceased to make trouble for the regime. In this context, Douglass wrote of “pills used to drive the target insane,” and that is exactly the sort of treatment the Russians might reserve for a cornered U.S. spy with vital information about Kremlin involvement in Sept. 11.

It leaves us in the “wilderness of mirrors.” In this wilderness, facts can be spun in a variety of ways. My research indicates that America’s enemies are plotting her downfall, and they are quite capable and serious in their endeavor. Whatever the truth about Delmart Edward Vreeland, his story suggests that a great game is being played in secret and he is the victim of this game.

Okay, I reread the article and I believe he's making the claim that this high explosive can catalyze a thermonuclear reaction more efficiently than the standard explosives on a nuclear device. He seems to be saying that it's possible to bypass the fission stage of a thermonuclear device altogether and substitute red mercury for the plutonium. The claim that it only requires 1000th of the material of a thermonuclear device seems spurious, especially if it lacks a fission stage. The articles rather vague, which inspires suspicion.

I really don't know why he creates this red mercury bogey-man. Standard nuclear technology can create a backpack nuclear device -or Atomic Demolition Munition that could be smuggled into the heart of any major city and take out a large portion of it.

The standard problems of nuclear weapon design still exist though. It would be extremely difficult to get enough nuclear material to create a weapon with it and if you do get the material it would have a shelf life of about six months before it would have to be recharged.

A chemical explosive that initiates thermonuclear fusion. ROFLMAO!!

They did it with TNT in the 60s. All you need to do is compress the Deuterium into Tritium or Helium. To do that you need high enough temperatures and pressures that can be replicated with chemical explosions.

I have sometimes thought the 'red mercury' story was a deliberate creation of a certain three-letter agency within the US. It allows them to track would-be terrorists and proliferation efforts by nasty regimes. If a certain group or state expresses interest in purchasing red mercury, it is a signal to watch that group more closely, and it also yields information as to their sophistication in nuclear weapons physics....

OTOH, it is hard to believe we could be smart enough to think up a sting like this. I just don't know.

REd mercury hot fusion is much more plausible than cold fusion that many believe in at FR. Why?

Because we know enough about cold fusion to debunk it, whereas we know nothing about Red Mercury, so we ascribe to it whatever properties we as individuals think plausible.

While I expect that there is a substance called "Red Mercury" that the Russians have used in the making of nuclear weapons, I doubt that such a magic explosive exists as described. Our spies in Moscow were not completely incompetent throughout the entire cold war. If such a thing existed, we'd probably have obtained knowledge of it, and would be employing it in our conventional ordnance. A super chemical explosive has implications that go far beyond improved nuclear weapons.

To start a thermonuclear [fusion] reaction requires a great deal of compression and high temperature such as a fission explosion can provide. No chemical explosive is of that order of magnitude, not by a factor of a million. It is the difference between the electromagnetic forces [electron binding] and the nuclear binding force [proton binding.] The mercury nucleus is fairly stable, so uranium or plutonium is used in fission devices such as the compression device that packs the deuterium-tritium core enough to start the fusion process.

Magnetic confinement and laser heating are used in fission municipal power generation devices, still experimental and not particularly explosive; also not particularly portable.

I agree. See my post #19. Just a few bombs of this alleged stuff (minus any fission or fusion components), and the Taliban Afghan mountain bunker problem would have disappeared.

"When facts are few, speculation is apt to follow individual psychology." Carl Jung.

Truer words were never spoken!

Well, looking at Vreeland's manic letter (there are graphic files of a picture around), I would not be surprised if the man has been medicated. OTOH, it is evident that he works for the Navy and was framed on bogus charges, so there is something to this story. There have been plenty indications that many people/agencies/governments knew this was coming. I believe it is too simple to say, as Nyquist does, that "Moscow did it," or as Ruppert, "CIA did it," or as Raimondo seems to imply, "Israel did it," or as some posters, "Iraq did it." It seems evident to me that an international faction coordinated/allowed 9/11 to go down.

You can't 'knock the electrons out of a compound' - at least, not a significant number of them. To do so would create Coulombic repulsion forces that would tear any ordinary material apart.

Let's say you had a mole of 'Red Mercury', and you wanted to remove 0.1 mole of electrons from it. That's only a tiny fraction of the electrons. 0.1 mole of electrons is about 10000 Coulombs. The capacitance of the lump of red mercury will be small. Let's be very generous and say it's a microfarad. The potential on the piece of red mercury would be 10000/10^-6 = 10 billion volts.

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