Nuclear politics in Cold War Argentina.

The history of the Argentine nuclear sector is wonderfully contradictory--"wonderfully" because despite its problems and failures, it emerged as Argentina's most important area of technological advancement in the Cold War period. Led through much of its history by senior admiralty officers, the Argentine National Energy Commission--the Comision Nacional de Energia Atomica or CNEA--was never a military bureaucracy. Often the focus of the military's ambitions for industrial, scientific, and strategic development during the periods of military rule between 1966 and 1983, the nuclear sector remained remarkably free of military influence or intervention. Despite that several CNEA employees were the victims of military violence during the last dictatorship, Commission leadership refused to sack scientists for their political views and protected a number of their investigators from Dirty War violence. An important Argentine bureaucracy, the CNEA was unlike any other such structure in the professional longevity of its administrators, scientists, and technologists. Hundreds of CNEA members stayed in their positions and advanced through the ranks in spite of the jarring political changes that shook Argentina between 1960 and 1990.

The nuclear sector never realized its most important promise, to spearhead industrial prosperity, to provide Argentina's energy needs inexpensively, and to become profitable. Even so, Argentina emerged after 1960 as a major center for nuclear research and a multi-billion dollar exporter of everything from cancer treatment machinery to experimental reactors, the most recent of which was sold to Australia in 2000. In addition, nuclear power became an important area of Argentine domestic and foreign policy concern. As such, it came to represent the country's Cold War politics in a variety of ways. The Second World War and early Cold War tensions were the backdrop for Argentina's first foray into nuclear power. An Argentine War Ministry decree (No. 22855-45) in 1945 blocked the export of uranium, signaling an early awareness of the strategic importance of nuclear power. A year later, Congress debated the nationalization of uranium mines. The president of the Asociacion Fisica Argentina, Enrique Gaviola, proposed the establishment of a government-funded institute to spearhead nuclear research, outside the reach of the military. At the same time, General Manuel Savio, founder of Fabricaciones Militares, backed a military-controlled nuclear research program under the direction of the Ministerio de Guerra. These and other projects came to nought with the arrival of the Austrian physicist, Ronald Richter, in 1948. (1)

Richter came to Argentina with the German engineer Kurt Tank, contracted at the end of the war by the Instituto Aeronautico de Cordoba to build an Argentine airplane. Within a week Richter had met with President Juan Peron and convinced the general to place the national nuclear program in his, Richter's hands. Richter promised Peron controlled thermonuclear reactions through nuclear fusion. Until then, the only reactions achieved had been by nuclear fission. Peron gave Richter free reign and millions of dollars. The physicist installed himself and a small team of technicians on the isolated Isla Huemul in southern Argentina. He personally supervised all aspects of his program to build a nuclear reactor including the purchase of virtually every piece of equipment transported onto the island. While Peron may well have been interested in the possibility of building a nuclear weapon, he and subsequent Argentine leaders were always aware of the logistical, political, and strategic pitfalls nuclear weapons might bring. Despite that there was no evidence that Argentina's nuclear program had a military component, the US government became suspicious of Argentine intentions and remained so for much of the Cold War. The suspicion came, in part, from Richter's dramatic announcement in 1951 that he had succeeded in producing the reaction he promised. At a press conference organized on 24 March by a jubilant Peron, Richter insisted that he had created several controlled nuclear reactions. The announcement was stunning, coming before the development of the first hydrogen bomb. (2)

Peron did not pull the plug on Richter until 1952 when, in the absence of hard evidence of the Huemul reactions, other scientists convinced the president that Richter had, in fact, made no real progress. A report by a commission that investigated Richter's activities concluded that two key factors accounted for Richter's failure, beyond what many scientists believed was his probable incompetence. First, Richter was allowed to operate in secrecy and relative isolation, away from both the scrutiny and collaboration of other scientists and technicians. Second, because Richter was a theoretical physicist working on his own, he did not have the engineering or technical skills required to put his ideas into practice. This image of Richter as a mad scientist became the popular wisdom in the Argentine scientific community until the recent advances in nuclear fusion. Some now think that, at least in his theory and hypotheses, Richter's ideas on fusion came ahead of his time and ahead of the technical expertise needed to put them into practice. (3)

Equipment from Huemul was salvaged and transported the few hundred feet to shore where it was placed in storage. The storage area in Bariloche became the CNEA's first research site, as the commission emerged from the political ashes of Richter's failed experiments. Burned once by his having played politics with the nuclear sector in his having sanctioned Richter's secrecy, Peron accepted the advice of scientists who told him shortly after the CNEA's founding in 1950 that Argentina simply could not have a successful nuclear program if the commission were treated like other bureaucracies. Peron, the scientists argued, would have to allow the nuclear sector to function without political intrusions. That dictum remained largely in effect through the 1980s and likely explains the persistence of Peron's bust at the entrance of CNEA headquarters in Buenos Aires.

Like Americans, Canadians, and many others during the 1950s, Argentines conceived of their early nuclear program in a broad Cold War context. Nuclear strength meant strategic power, whether or not the nuclear sector would have a military emphasis. Politicians, diplomats, business leaders and others attached notions of progress to nuclear development, reasoning that for Argentina to modernize, it would need an advanced atomic sector. Argentines viewed nuclear power as a means to confront traditional competitors Chile and Brazil, not necessarily militarily but strategically. A strong nuclear sector would also position Argentina for leadership in South America in a context of growing Cold War tensions. Many of these ideas came across in the magazine Mundo Atomico, a publication that flourished briefly under the tight press controls of the Peron regime. Launched in September 1950, the magazine first appeared shortly after the founding of the CNEA and folded in the aftermath of the coup d'etat that brought Peron down in 1955. The Argentine nuclear sector owes much to Peron's vision and insistence on the importance of nuclear power to Argentine development; Mundo Atomico broadcast a handful of the ideological tenets that linked peronismo to nuclear science. (4)

The mandate of the CNEA was ranging. The presidential decree that determined its early operations stipulated the Commission's roles in advising the president on nuclear policy; in developing scientists and researchers in nuclear fields; in the maintenance of strong relations with equivalent organizations in other countries; in searching for uranium and other minerals crucial to the nuclear sector; and in operating nuclear reactors. Early Cold War Argentina was marked by Peron's fractious relations with an intellectual and university community often at odds with his authoritarian tendencies. For that reason in part, Peron favored the development of a nuclear program outside of a university research institute. Mundo Atomico editorials made repeated reference to the creation of the CNEA in a context of what the magazine called the bankruptcy of university research and teaching. (5) The CNEA was meant by Peron to be an end-run around the universities. Mundo Atomico also highlighted Richter's work on Huemul as an international triumph that had allowed Argentina to leapfrog past the United States as the world leader in nuclear science. When Richter was unmasked in 1952, Mundo Atomico conveyed the government line that Argentina's nuclear program had been derailed but would be back on track again in the very near future.