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I remember finding a link to this story on here months ago and loved it but I can't seem to find it again.

It was a relatively short story from what I remember and was available online.

The story was told in the perspective of a rocket scientist at a convention telling a story to a journalist.

The story revolved around him and the CIA coming up with the most dangerous design for a rocket imaginable and intentionally leaking it to the soviet union in the hopes that they would waste money, kill scientists in accidents and just slow down their space program in general

The rocket used a special chemical that I think was called "red hydrogen" that could only be made in a nuclear reactor and was so unstable it only lasted a hour or so.

I think the soviets ended up somehow building the rocket in the end and used the Chernobyl reactor for the red hydrogen. But the rocket failed, crashed and resulted in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

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    Marked as a duplicate. This is not a censure or an indication of a bad question, merely that we have had this answer before and story-id policy is that they be marked as duplicates. You can still receive points for upvotes (and indeed I personally think it sometimes drives votes due to the link) but no more answers will be accepted.
    – FuzzyBoots
    Commented Aug 14 at 13:32

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This is "A Tall Tail" (2012) by Charles Stross, first published at Tor.com. You can read it online.

The secret "Ingredient X" is red mercury, not red hydrogen, but otherwise this is an exact match:

“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?”

And the site:

“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?”

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  • This is the one! Thanks
    – ChellCPlus
    Commented Aug 14 at 12:58
  • Funnily enough the USA did experiment with using regular mercury (and dimethyl mercury, which is way, way more dangerous and toxic) as additives in the fuel, before eventually deciding the danger compared to benefit made it too unwieldy. John D. Clark's Ignition discusses it.
    – kenod
    Commented Aug 14 at 13:16
  • Also, given that this answer is accepted, it should probably get marked as a duplicate of scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/286360/…
    – kenod
    Commented Aug 14 at 13:18

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