Peron's fusion flameout
An Impostor Took Him For A Costly Ride
Juan Peron could not resist. A persuasive Austrian refugee had offered Argentina a chance to add the cachet of atomic energy to the low-tech glamour of the tango and Evita, the first lady. Peron, a populist strongman intent on building a modern "new Argentina," seized the offer. And on March 24, 1951, he called reporters to the Pink House, the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, to tell them his gamble had succeeded.
Not only did Argentina now have the power of the atom, he said, but it had trumped the Americans and Soviets. Instead of fission, the principle of atomic bombs and reactors, Argentina's scientists had pursued thermonuclear fusion. Fusion powers the sun and the hydrogen bomb, which the superpowers were racing to develop, but this was fusion tamed in a laboratory--a nearly limitless energy source for electricity and industry. At a secret site in the Andes, said Peron, "that objective, almost unattainable, was reached." The news broke on the front pages of the New York Times and other major newspapers.
The world gasped, then shook its head. It was right to. No atoms had fused--only two men's ambitions, Peron's and those of Ronald Richter, the obscure, half-mad immigrant he had sponsored. When Argentina's own physicists exposed the fraud over a year later, the treasury had been drained of 62 million pesos (more than $100 million now). But if the money didn't buy fusion, it did buy Argentina a lesson in the value of sober science. It also spurred the United States to pursue the same wondrous energy source--so far without success.
According to Mario Mariscotti, an Argentine physicist who published a definitive account of the affair in 1985, an aircraft engineer recruited by Peron from the ashes of Nazi Germany brought Richter to the president's attention. Richter had Peron's ear within a week of his arrival from Europe in 1948. Using a powerful electric arc, Richter declared, he could create miniature suns on Earth, coaxing light atoms like hydrogen to fuse into heavier ones. A little due diligence might have dissuaded Peron: Richter had published no scientific papers, and he had scant research experience beyond a few months of work on explosives in Berlin during the war. Nor did Peron consult Argentina's own scientists. Many were his political opponents, and in any case, says Mariscotti, "Peron was not humble enough to look for advice." Project Huemul, named for its remote island site, was soon underway.
Mad science. Richter's behavior unsettled officials. He quarreled with his equipment supplier and forced his construction crew to tear down a 40-foot-high concrete "reactor" on a whim. But just as doubts began to surge, he reported "net positive results." On Feb. 16, 1951, as hydrogen was fed into an arc, he claimed that a dramatic temperature spike had taken place and the Geiger counters had crackled with radioactivity--signs, said Richter, of fusion reactions. A month later, Peron announced the success to the world.
But little else came from the island except orders for more equipment. By the fall, Evita herself was said to be skeptical. The following year, the new head of Argentina's National Atomic Energy Commission--set up to support the Huemul Project--paid a visit.
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