Peron's Atom

Peron's Atom

Juan Peron called his newsmen in last week for a very special announcement. With elaborate ostentation, members of the foreign press corps were barred. What he had to say, Peron explained, was only for his own people. His news: Argentine scientists, using only relatively cheap Argentine materials, had on Feb. 16 produced "controlled liberation of atomic energy," i.e., an atomic explosion.

"The new Argentina," explained Peron, had decided that it was not "worth the trouble to copy nuclear fission." Instead, "contrary to what was done in foreign experiments, Argentine technicians worked on the basis of thermonuclear reactions, which are identical with those whereby the sun releases atomic energy." The successful experiment had been conducted at the government atomic plant on Huemul Island, in the Andean lake of Nahuel Huapi, some 900 miles southwest of Buenos Aires. It required neither uranium nor plutonium. "With the seriousness and veracity which is my custom," Peron assured his people that his cut-rate atomic energy would be used "solely for power plants, smelters and other industrial establishments."

Made in Argentina. At the President's side was Dr. Ronald Richter, a plump, Austrian-born physicist (German University of Prague), who has been associated with Argentina's atomic program ever since it was begun all of nine months ago. Through an air force interpreter, the doctor announced in rich Austrian German: "What we have accomplished is strictly Argentine--it is infinitely superior to the system used in the U.S. . . . For some time now, Argentina has known the secret of the hydrogen bomb [but] I have always found a refusal on General Peron's part to make use of this secret."

Later, Dr. Richter answered a few questions. Just what kind of explosion had he achieved? "I control the explosion," Richter replied loftily. "I can make it increase or diminish at my desire." Could the explosion be heard at any distance? Well, said the doctor, that would depend on whether there was a storm at the time. Had it been heard at San Carlos de Bariloche 6 1/2 miles away? No.

Words & Baloney. While no one would deny that the Argentines might have produced some sort of laboratory-scale nuclear reaction, non-Argentine scientists were skeptical. "This is an interesting series of words," said an AEC physicist, "but it means nothing to me." Said Dr. Ralph E. Lapp, onetime chief of the Office of Naval Research: "I know what that other material is that the Argentines are using. It's baloney." Snapped Juan Peron: "I am not interested in what the U.S. or any other country thinks."

But Peron had cunningly timed his announcement to explode just as the foreign ministers of all 21 Latin American countries gathered in Washington in conference. If it did not convince them that there might be more than one atomic power in the hemisphere, it at least distracted them from the subject of the forced closing of La Prensa by Dictator Peron. As the delegates settled down this week to hammer out a hemisphere defense policy against Communist aggression, they kept one ear cocked for more offstage noises from Juan Peron.

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