32. When Argentina Was Heralded as a Global Energy Giant
Headlines in newspapers around the world announced sensational news in the spring of 1951: 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“.
Peron went on to promise a future in which energy would be “sold in half-liter bottles like milk“. Some were puzzled, however: thermonuclear fusion was advanced technology that neither the US nor USSR had mastered. So how could Argentina, then a rural country of fewer than 16 million people, achieve what neither global superpower could? The answer was: it could not.