ISIS's Hunt For a Bogus Superweapon

schnell writes: The New York Times Magazine has a fascinating story about ISIS efforts to get their hands on a mysterious and powerful superweapon called Red Mercury. The problem is that by consensus among scientific authorities, Red Mercury doesn't exist. And yet that hasn't stopped the legend of Red Mercury, touted by sources from Nazi conspiracy theorists to former Manhattan Project scientists, as having magical properties. Middle East weapons traders have even spun elaborate stories for its properties (ranging from thermonuclear explosive properties to sexual enhancement) and origins and sources (from Soviet weapons labs to Roman graveyards). What can account for the enduring myth of Red Mercury — is it rampant scientific illiteracy, the power of urban legend and shared myth, or something else?

Comments

Re:Red Mercury = Wildly Batshit Insane

[PopeRatzo]

You know, there may be more to this story than meets the eye. The New York Times loves to monger for war. During the run-up to Iraq, they were some of the biggest cheerleaders for glorious victory over the axis of evil. Also, let's remember that the US gov't has this penchant for psy-ops that include ridicule of enemies, and for using the US media to spread them. During WWII, they tried to spread "Hitler only has one testicle" and during the Cold War, there were practically new rumors about Castro every week. The CIA even tried to him thallium salts, which would make his beard fall out. The thinking being that those stupid Cubans, seeing their leader's naked chin, would then overthrow the communists. Even today, we have "Hitler was gay" rumors floated in the media. It almost seems like our intelligence apparatus likes to spread misinformation even when it's no longer needed. Maybe just to stay in practice.

I'm not saying that people who are stupid enough to believe they are the harbingers of a worldwide caliphate are not also stupid enough to believe in "Red Mercury", but I just caution people that when it comes to warmongering, our government is not above using rumor and falsehood.

Remember George Bush's "yellowcake uranium"?

Re:Red Mercury = Wildly Batshit Insane

[labnet]

Whenever I travel and turn on CNN (as we don't get it at home), I feel like someone served up a meringue. It tastes sweet but has no real substance and certainly isn't good for you.
Take this for example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Its a video of Putin talking about ISIS. And I'm suddenly struck by what feels like raw honesty from a politician, not this fake pseudo speak we normally get from the MSM and western politics.

Re:red mercury

[R3d M3rcury]

...Slashdot ID...

Re: Islam's relationship to modern science

[rgbatduke]

This is the hardcore Salafi doctrine by which people like Daeesh operate by and it's theologically valid, though batshit insane.

HOWEVER, only about 70-80% of Muslims are Sunnis and of those maybe 10-15% are Salafis.

Oooo, let's do the arithmetic. There are roughly 1.6 billion Muslims (sources: multiple, although many would go as high as 1.9 billion and rising). Let's be conservative and go with 70% of the smaller number -- 0.7 x 1.6 = 1.12 billion are Sunnis. Of these (again, being conservative) 10% are Salafis. That means 112 million Muslims are Salafis! Or as many as 200 million, of one uses the higher end of that projection. Of the Salafis, roughly 10 million are estimated to be Salafi Jihadists. So sure, less than one percent, but the original numbers are so large that the actual numbers are still huge, if you view them as a potential army and recruiting ground for violent Jihad.

So what you are saying is that the Daeesh are a huge bunch of psychopathic assholes led by an eloquent sociopath from Baghdad, because while it is true that all Salafis, no matter how batshit insane the theology to which they subscribe, are not Daeesh Jihadists, they are at the very least a fertile ground for recruitment and have the potential to become a bandwagon several hundred million strong if ISIS appears to be succeeding, and it also strongly suggests that they aren't all foreign psychopathic assholes. There is a rather large pool of the domestic home-grown type.

All of which was true for Al-Queda as well, as it isn't just Salafi Jihadists. Jihad is comparatively ecumenical in Islam, and while it is not necessarily violent, it can easily become violent, often quite rapidly. There is a large disaffected population of young, volatile Muslims worldwide. In some, but not all, non-Muslim countries they feel highly marginalized. In many Muslim countries the governments are so corrupt that even though Muslims per se aren't marginalized, life is worse than it is under the foreign non-Muslim governments, marginalization or not. Then there is the antique Sunni vs Shia problem -- a division that perpetuates Muslim on Muslim violence and weakens Islam immeasurably as its adherents perpetually discover that the enemy of my enemy is a better friend, Muslim or not. Far too much of Islam is tribal culture still living in the 8th or 9th century, but dreaming of the 12th and 13th centuries when it was a, perhaps the, dominant world power. Young Muslims see this division and are easy meat for any charismatic religious leader who promises to end the rift and restore Islam to its "rightful" status as a, no, as the dominant world culture.

At the end of the day, though, there is the Quran. And the Quran is a stupendously violent document. It was a revolutionary document back when it was written, designed to generate an us vs them mentality and create a social and religious identity to support the establishment of a violently conquered tribal empire. It succeeded. Its memes are strong. This makes the followers of any sort of literalist interpretation of the Quran enormously dangerous to non-believers, because it quite literally makes converting or killing or enslaving them a holy duty, especially if they in any way interfere with or refuse to live under the religious laws of Islam, believer or not. This isn't really arguable -- one can just read the damn thing and see for yourself (but as usual with holy scriptures, nobody does, they just prefer to quote what somebody else says about them in a pious way). Being a liberal Muslim is even more difficult than it is to be a liberal Jew or Christian, and that really isn't easy if one reads, say Numbers 31 in the OT to see how God really feels about the Midianites and non-Jews in general, or reads Leviticus to see how he really feels about slavery and women. In all cases one has to sort of elide all of the passages that don't agree with what you want to believe is The Good, an