27. Investing in a Crazy Nazi Scientist’s Plans
In the spring of 1951, newspapers around the globe carried sensational news: the discovery of practical fusion power in Argentina. On March 24th of that year, Argentina’s president Juan Peron announced that his country had mastered “the controlled liberation of atomic energy“, not from uranium, but from hydrogen. He added that the discovery would prove “transcendental for the future life” of Argentina, and would bring it “a greatness which today we cannot imagine“.
Juan Peron went on to promise a future in which energy would be “sold in half-liter bottles like milk“. However, thermonuclear fusion was advanced technology that neither the US nor USSR had mastered at the time. So the idea that Argentina, then a rural country of fewer than 16 million people, had achieved what neither global superpower could was baffling. How had Argentina pulled off such a feat? The answer was: it had not.