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.
In his laboratory, Richter was ready with a demonstration. According to Mariscotti, he urged his visitor to lie on the floor for safety, fired up the arc, and opened the hydrogen valves. The blast tore off the lab door. The official was no scientist, but he suspected he had witnessed nothing more than an ordinary explosion--hydrogen, after all, is highly combustible. He hurried back to Buenos Aires to begin the delicate job of talking Peron into investigating his protege.
Final exam. Finally, in September, 1952, a delegation of scientists stepped onto the dock in Huemul. Richter staged a more elaborate demonstration for them. This time, he added lithium to the hydrogen, perhaps because it turned the flames a lurid red. A loudspeaker emitted a shriek, and the instrument needles danced. But the scientists' own instruments showed that Richter's Geiger counters were being thrown off by the arc's electric field, and there was no trace of the radiation that nuclear reactions would produce. No wonder: Temperatures in the arc were just a few thousand degrees, far short of the tens of millions needed for fusion.
Their report was unequivocal and damning. Richter was removed from his island. His massive labs crumbled, and he lived out his days quietly in the Buenos Aires suburbs.
But Mariscotti recalls that, interviewed nearly 30 years later, Richter was "without any doubt at all" that he knew the secret of controlled fusion. He seemed willing to lie about his progress and stage bogus experiments to keep his project going, but Mariscotti thinks he truly believed he could succeed. Another Argentine physicist, Daniel Bes, agrees that Richter wanted more than just to line his pockets. "He led a rather poor life afterward," Bes notes. "If he had commanded for himself a percentage of what was spent [on the project], he would have been very rich."
Since then, the same hopes of scientific glory and limitless energy have driven legions of genuine scientists around the world, Richter's unlikely heirs. In a 1988 interview, Lyman Spitzer, a Princeton University physicist who led the pioneering U.S. fusion effort, traced it all to that day in 1951. "Dad phoned me and said, `I see from the New York Times that the Argentines have beaten you to the punch.' . . . I was very surprised and, frankly, rather skeptical." But Spitzer said the news inspired him to think about how it might really be done. He came up with a basic concept for a fusion reactor that scientists are pursuing to this day.
This story appears in the August 26, 2002 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.