When Argentina Announced a Revolutionary Breakthrough in Energy Technology
For a moment in the mid-twentieth century – a brief moment as it turned out – Argentina was about to become the world’s greatest energy giant. Or at least, that was what many people were led to believe. In the spring of 1951, newspapers around the world 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. Peron added that the discovery would prove “transcendental for the future life” of Argentina, and would bring it “a greatness which today we cannot imagine“.
The Argentinian president 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 the 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 baffled many. How had Argentina pulled off such a feat? The answer was: it had not. Juan Peron had trusted a crank named Ronald Richter, and predictably, the placement of trust in a crank backfired.