An inside story of hi-tech nukes
Central to it all is the red mercury controversy. Is it really the world's biggest ever hoax, a view western governments are anxious to promote, or is it, as the book argues, a new technology to build fusion nuclear weapons unpublicised in the West which the former Soviet Union perfected and South Africa improved upon?
The writers have long backgrounds as investigative journalists. The premium that red mercury enjoys on the black circuit, $500,000 a kg, owes largely to the fact that it is possible to build nuclear weapons of much smaller size and weight using it. For instance, Saddam Hussain could make an atomic bomb the size of a grapefruit that could blow a ship out of the sea. There are first-hand reports of the South African army having tiny bulb-shaped nuclear weapons that could be fired from rifles and which they purportedly used in the war with Angola. An advantage of these weapons is their 'clean' aspect—they leave no residual radioactivity. One could even walk into the blast zone five minutes after the explosion.
In '94, 16 scientists of the South African nuclear establishment threatened to reveal inside information unless they were given increased redundancy benefits. They called themselves 'South Africa's nuclear casualties'. Let's hope the casualties don't proliferate