Chemical  security

'Red mercury': why does the myth persist?

Rumours about the substance have also been given traction by global geopolitics. In the late 1980s, as communist regimes collapsed across Eastern Europe, there was uncertainty as to what was happening to their stockpiles of nuclear material.

At the time, Mark Hibbs was a journalist investigating alarming rumours that a previously unknown nuclear material, created in Soviet laboratories, was being offered for sale by shady individuals. Its name? Red mercury, of course.

Mark, now a senior fellow the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a US foreign policy think tank, says that the atmosphere of uncertainty at the time contributed to the whispers.

"The Soviet Union was a place that over a number of decades secretly accumulated nuclear inventories across a massive territory," he says. "It wasn't clear to us at the time that all those materials - as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate - would remain under lock and key."

This version of the red mercury story was different from the one about the all-healing elixir buried with the pharaohs. Soviet red mercury was said to be destructive, capable of causing a tremendous nuclear explosion with quantities no larger than a baseball.