A Tall Tail (2 page)

Jim nodded wisely. “Happy fun stuff. But you'd need a fuel to burn in it, right?”

“Yes! And we had just the stuff sitting on the shelf in the glove box, so to speak. Dimethylmercury.”

“Di—” That's when I figured out that they were pulling my leg.

Mercury is nasty stuff, but organic mercury compounds are even nastier, and dimethylmercury is one of the worst. It's not merely poisonous; it's about the strongest neurotoxin we've got. In fact, just about its only use is as a reference test for toxicity. It passes through latex, rubber, and plastics as if they aren't there and it can pass right through your skin as well, killing you slowly and painfully, like it killed Professor Wetterhahn in 1997. Chemical warfare suits won't save you. And unlike the happy fun nerve gases everyone knows about, Sarin and VX and so on, dimethylmercury
doesn't go away
. It hangs around for years, like long duration fallout from a nuclear weapon, only much, much nastier.

“That's nonsense. Nobody would use that stuff as rocket fuel! For one thing, the mercury would corrode any aluminum components in seconds, and for another, if you spilled even a couple of drops on the launch pad you'd have a permanent no-go zone! Why not just use liquid methane or something?”

But they were shaking their heads at me. “You want mercury because it's a heavy atom; you can make your fuel really dense and if you pump enough energy into a mercury ion to make it go really fast you get more momentum from your exhaust stream. That's the theory, anyway. We managed to talk the Navy and Air Force out of using the stuff decades ago, but figured, why not leak it to someone we don't like?” Jim explained. “Which is what NAIL SPIKE was about. Len?”

"Yes. That's where the guys in Langley came in. Now you've got to understand, this was after the Church Committee in the midseventies blew the lid off a lot of crazy stuff—Operation Acoustic Kitty, the Castro assassination attempts, the elephants-on-LSD thing. During the late 1970s the CIA was under the oversight of a suspicious congressional committee, who took most of their toys away from them. But they were still expected to do stuff to…
impair
…the Soviets' war-fighting capability. Stuff like providing covert funding for radical Islamic insurgents in Afghanistan, which was in danger of going communist. Or, well, trying to get them to poison themselves.

“Now, you probably know already that the Soviets were at least even with us in rocketry—possibly even a bit ahead of us on the liquid fuel side during the 1950s. So fooling them into playing with NAIL SPIKE was going to be a tall order. On the other hand, there's a special genius at Langley who came up with the bright idea of making the NAIL SPIKE leak look incomplete—of hinting that there was a secret missing stabilizer ingredient in the fuel. So we faked up a few dummy test firings on a stand at White Sands, and we made sure that all the paperwork crossed the desk of a known GRU mole in Los Alamos; ever since the whole Atom Bomb Spies fiasco we've kept a couple of Soviet spies on hand, wrapped in cotton wool, for just such a leak. It's much better to keep them in a box than to arrest them immediately; if you haul them in, the KGB will just send some more and you'll have to figure out who they are all over again.

“So. We leaked the design for the FOOF/dimethylmercury test motor to the Soviets, claiming it had an insanely high specific impulse—” the measure of a rocket's efficiency “—and was ideal for anti-shipping missiles because the fuel's extremely dense, so your missile can have a smaller frontal cross-section, which is good when you're pushing through dense air at sea level. And we made sure to salt the documents with references to a special additive that made it all stable and safe to handle. And then we sat back to wait for the exploding chemical plants to show up from orbit, and the reports of dissolving scientists and platoons of technicians dying in neurology units.”

It made a horrible kind of sense, for Cold War values of sense: not a
real
rocket motor, but a vile way of getting your enemy's best and brightest to kill themselves by trying to reverse-engineer an impossible nightmare. So I swallowed another mouthful of my drink and waited for Jim to nudge Len into continuing his horror story.

"Well, you've got to understand that this was 1979. The commies had just invaded Afghanistan, the Cold War was hotting up, the Iranians had taken our people hostage in the embassy in Tehran. So they had high hopes for NAIL SPIKE. But it seemed to sink without a trace.

“Then, two years later, we got wind that they'd taken the bait. In fact, there was an industrial research unit working on trying to reverse engineer the special additive! That evening in Langley there were high fives all round, I can tell you. We didn't know much about it, just that it was known as Atom City Number Nine, and it was somewhere in the Ukraine, not far from Kiev, and there was some kind of big engineering complex nearby.”

That rang a bell, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. I'd have googled Atom City Nine then and there, but my iPhone is locked to a British phone company, and the international data charges are horrible. So I just nodded thoughtfully and waited.

“It was 1985 before we learned just what had happened. It turns out that NAIL SPIKE had inadvertently crossed streams with something the Soviets were working on, unbeknownst to us.” Len paused dramatically, then spread his hands and announced: “Red mercury!”

“Don't be silly, red mercury doesn't exist. It's just a hoax used to bilk gullible westerners out of their money.” Secretly, I was saddened. The story had been going so well up to this point…

“Ah.” Jim tapped the side of his nose. “You're right, of course. Red mercury
does not exist
.” His tone was arch, knowing. “That's official.”

“Red mercury doesn't exist,” Len agreed, nodding emphatically. “You're right, it's a scam. But. Hmm. If it
did
exist, what might it be?” He raised a hand and began checking off digits. “It wouldn't be a ballotechnic explosive. It wouldn't be a room-temperature superconductor. It wouldn't be a dessert topping and a floor wax. It wouldn't be red. But.
But
. Suppose the Soviets had taken NAIL SPIKE at face value and began looking for the mysterious Ingredient X that was missing from the faked-up documents we leaked to them. Charlie, have you heard of induced gamma emission from nuclear isomers?”

“What, are we talking hafnium, now? I thought that was a bust, wasn't it?”

Nuclear isomers are isotopes of some heavier elements that can exist for prolonged periods in an unstable high-energy state. Hafnium got a lot of airtime a few years ago because of a theory that you could use it to store gamma radiation and then trigger its release by hitting a block of the metal with gamma rays—making it a kind of nuclear battery, with an energy density millions of times higher than any chemical battery could achieve.

“We're not talking hafnium,” said Len, “we're talking mercury. Specifically, we're talking red mercury. Which doesn't exist. But if it did, it might be a metastable nuclear isomer of mercury that had been irradiated in a reactor for months, and that could be stimulated to discharge all its absorbed energy in a matter of milliseconds by hitting it with hard X-rays.”

“You're shitting me!”

“I'm afraid not.” Len shook his head. “Red mercury
does not exist
because if it did it would have a half-life of about sixty-two minutes, and we couldn't do with having that sort of stuff floating around. That's why everyone's harshing on Iran right now, by the way. We could care less if they want to build civil nuclear reactors or A-bombs, but red mercury is another matter.”

“Stop right there. You're telling me that the Soviets accidentally invented a working nuclear isomer battery? Because they were trying to work out what the missing Ingredient X in NAIL SPIKE was?”

Jim Benford looked abruptly sober. “Yup, that's about the size of it. The reactor complex at Atom City Nine was tasked with manufacturing the stuff, and the early lab tests proved that if your dimethylmercury was in the excited state and you triggered its gamma emission in the middle of a rocket exhaust stream you could get it moving a
lot
faster than you could achieve with a chemical rocket, or even nuclear thermal, or anything much short of a working fusion rocket. Sure, it's a devil's brew, but who wouldn't say no to a specific impulse on the order of twelve thousand?”

“Even though the oxidizer explodes if you look at it funny and the fuel is a corrosive radioactive neurotoxin with a half-life of an hour?”

“Absolutely.” Len sighed and drained his cocktail. “We'd expected them to make a mess of some warships by trying to put it in an anti-shipping missile. But we hadn't reckoned on the red mercury angle. It was nearly the worst own goal the CIA ever scored. They just about handed the solar system to the Soviet Union, on a plate!”

Somber expressions all round. I felt compelled to take the bait. “So what happened?” I asked.

“Well.” Len looked furtive. “It took all four of the big reactors at the complex, running for months on end, to irradiate enough red mercury—in the form of dimethylmercury suitable for fueling a NAIL SPIKE engine—for a single launch, burning maybe ten tons of the stuff. So we gather they built a single stage rocket, quite small, probably derived from SS–20 tankage and avionics, and stacked an instrument pod on top of it. The launch pad had to be close to the reactor complex to facilitate fueling, and they only needed half a cryogenic tanker car of FOOF for the rocket. By basing it on an SS–20 missile they could use a mobile launcher, and by testing it somewhere well away from their main test ranges they could maintain a security cordon around the real secret stuff—the nuclear isomer.

“For a first flight, well, they didn't want any risk of their special package falling into the wrong hands. So they gave it a simple guidance package and a bunch of batteries to power the radio transmitter. The flight profile was straight up and out—it was going to burn out at well over escape velocity, and hopefully send back some holiday snaps from Pluto on its way out of the solar system.

“So on April 26, 1986, the Pripyat team began the countdown, piped most of the dimethyl red mercury straight out of the reactor core where they'd been irradiating it in special dummy fuel rods and into the rocket. Then they lit the blue touch paper.”

“Wait—”
Pripyat
. Now I got it. I decided to string them along: “This reactor couldn't possibly have been at a place called Chernobyl, could it? What happened?”

“We're not sure. It wasn't the reactor operators conducting an unauthorized experiment: That was a cover story. We
think
what happened, well, they launched from about two kilometers north of the reactor complex. And, you know, it should have gone fine, apart from permanently poisoning a patch of forest nobody cared much about, within the perimeter of a nuclear exclusion zone. But we think that on the way up they had some sort of guidance problem—not surprising giving the radiation flux coming from the rocket's exhaust. The exhaust stream directly pointed at the roof of the B reactor where the second batch of red mercury was being irradiated at the time. And, you know? What's basically a metal halide plasma torch with added gamma radiation
really
doesn't play well with the roof of a reactor building. Sure, the containment over a western reactor would have blocked it, but the RBMK reactors the Soviets built at Pripyat didn't have containment domes. The ‘uncontrolled power surge' that hit the B reactor was probably its load of red mercury lighting off,
after
the rocket exhaust cooked through the roof.”

“Right. So you're telling me that the Chernobyl accident was the result of the red mercury in the reactor spontaneously dumping all its stored energy when it was tickled by the exhaust radiation from the NAIL SPIKE launch?” I shook my head. “That's the craziest thing I've heard all weekend! Great story, though.”

“It's not a tall tale!” Jim looked perturbed by my skepticism. “This really happened, I swear. It's the real reason for the Chernobyl exclusion zone—it's covered in radioactive dimethylmercury fallout. And—” he had the decency to look abashed “—it's why we're still messing around with prototype nuclear-thermal rockets instead of exploring Mars on foot. Dammit.”

“But NAIL SPIKE was a one-off, wasn't it?” I persisted, humoring him. “Nobody would be crazy enough to risk a second Chernobyl, would they? By trying to repeat the same poisoned intelligence scam, I mean. By, oh, declassifying the original papers that were leaked to the Soviet spies, in hopes that someone will pick it up like a used copy of
The Anarchist Cookbook
? The ‘look ma, no hands' version?”

Len sighed. “You may think that.” He caught my eye and shook his head very slightly. “But if I were you I'd take it no further.”

And indeed I
did
keep thinking that, for another few months.

But it's interesting how everyone gets so very upset about those North Korean rocket launches that keep blowing up, isn't it?