What inspired such reckless aspirations?
What boosted Peron’s ego?
A partial answer might be that he was confident at the time that Argentina would be the first country to exploit atomic energy for industrial purposes.
For on Saturday, 24 March, 1951, on the eve of a conference of foreign ministers of pan-American states and the president announced to the press, “Argentina produces atomic energy” President Peron introduced Professor Ronald Richter to the press as the scientist responsible for the project, and later decorated him with the Peronista Medal.
The gist of Peron’s statement and shorn of its chauvinism and sanctimony, was that at an atomic energy plant on Huemul Island near San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentinian scientists had recently achieved the controlled liberation of atomic energy from thermonuclear reactions.
They had done this using processes analogous to those which provided the energy of the Sun.
The thermotron, as the apparatus was called, did not rely on the principle of the hydrogen bomb. Instead it utilised materials less costly and more readily obtainable.
Even in today’s nuclear age such a claim would be widely reported; three decades ago it was front-page news throughout the Western world. The British press did its homework.
Huemul turned out to be a small island in lake Nahuel Huapi, high on the slopes of the Patagonian Andes.
The surrounding district was a national park and the summer and winter playground of rich South Americans.
Ronald Richter, aged 42, was a little-known Austrian-born physicist, one of many German-speaking scientists and technicians who turned up in Argentina in the late 1940s.
Scientific correspondents of the UK press expressed surprise rather than incredulity at the Argentine claims.
This was because the scientific elite of the Athenaeum, on whom the correspondents relied, were well aware that research on controlled thermonuclear reactions was already being furtively pursued in a few British laboratories.
The scientists were hesitant to accept the claims of such a nonentity as Richter without corroboration. Reaction in the US was very different.
The press blustered; the claim was “impossible under the immutable laws of nature” and said the New York Times .
(such an outward display of scepticism towards foreign achievement was later to greet the news of Sputnik 1.) But behind the scenes the claims were taken more seriously.
The government of the US wasted little time in funding two secret thermonuclear research projects.
Labelled as Sherwood and Matterhorn and the projects were headed by Jim Tuck and Lyrnan Spitzer respectively.
In view of the distrust of British security then prevailing in the US in the aftermath of the Fuchs case and the transparency of these code-names is noteworthy.
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