Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [35]
The New York Times reported the claim on page 1: “The project is still in the early stages, but when Argentina is able to produce as much energy as deemed necessary, all will be used solely for industry, President Perón declared.” Not only was Perón willing to forswear his bomb-making ambitions, but he couldn’t resist tweaking the scientists in the United States and the USSR who were trying to turn fusion energy into weapons. “Foreign scientists will be interested to learn that while working on the thermonuclear reactor, the problems associated with the so called hydrogen bomb were studied in great detail, and we have been shocked to find that results published by the most reputed experts are far removed from reality,” Perón told a gaggle of Spanish-language reporters who had been summoned to a press conference at the Argentine presidential palace.
For such a dramatic claim, Perón provided very few details. The reactor used “a totally new way of obtaining atomic energy”—fusion. Experiments had been under way for some time and had yielded some very promising results, bringing matter to temperatures of “several million degrees.” This success led Perón to establish a pilot fusion energy plant to create “artificial suns on earth.” This plant was on a small island in a lake near the Chilean border: Huemul Island.
The director of the Huemul reactor was a German-speaking scientist named Ronald Richter, of whom little was known. After Perón finished speaking, Richter addressed the Spanish-speaking reporters through a translator. “What the Americans get when they explode a Hydrogen bomb, we in Argentina achieve in the laboratory and under control,” Richter said. “As of today, we know of a totally new way of obtaining atomic energy which does not use materials hitherto thought indispensable.” At the press conference and in a follow-up one the following day—no foreign press allowed—Richter spoke of controlled explosions of lithium and hydrogen and deuterium. And he claimed that he had achieved fusion at his mysterious lab on Huemul Island: “Yes, sir, for the very first time a thermonuclear reaction has been produced in a reactor.”
The statement promptly set off a firestorm. Many in the physics community quickly rejected the claim; scientists around the world scoffed at Richter. When American reporters asked David Lilienthal whether there was the “slightest chance” that Argentina had attained fusion, he answered, “Less than that.” A Brazilian scientist noted that “It is strange that the names of eminent physicists working at present in Argentina are not associated with the announced atomic project.” And when asked what material other than hydrogen Richter could be fusing, a former Manhattan Project physicist, Ralph Lapp, was quick with an answer. “I know what that other material is that the Argentines are using,” he told Time magazine. “It’s baloney.” (Time promptly dubbed Richter’s reactor the “Baloney bomb.”)
Perón bristled at the criticism. “I am not interested in what the United States or any other country in the world thinks,” he snarled, lashing out at the foreign politicians and newspapers who “lie consciously” and spread deception. “They have not yet told the first truth, while I have not yet told the first lie.”31 And even as some scientists ridiculed Perón’s claims, others began to chime in, supporting Richter’s assertions. The mystery of Huemul Island, a drama that would last for months, was getting deeper by the day. It was just beginning.
Richter’s claims marked the official beginning of a quest that had been in the planning stages for a long time—the quest to liberate the energy of fusion for the benefit of mankind.