Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [37]
said that Dr. Ronald Richter, the former Austrian scientist, was arrested after technical experts of the Argentine army had discovered that Richter “was not sufficiently advanced as a physicist” to achieve the atomic release Perón had claimed. Three experts informed Perón that Richter, in their opinion, was nothing more than a “colossal bluff.”
It wasn’t true, but it amplified the claims of fraud that surrounded Richter. Also in May, the Austrian physicist Hans Thirring published an article that asked whether Richter’s scheme was “a swindle.” The answer consisted of the following possibilities:
a. Perón has fallen victim to a crank suffering from self-delusion 50%
b. Perón has been taken in by a sly swindler 40%
c. With the aid of Richter, Perón is attempting to bluff the world 9%
d. Richter’s assertions are true 1%
Richter lashed back the next month—in the paranoid and combative style of the professional crank. “The reactor operation crew and I are deeply sorry for Herr Thirring, because he revealed himself to be a typical text book professor with a strong scientific inferiority complex, probably supported by political hatred,” he wrote. And of the reports that he had been arrested in secret? “It must really have been the deepest degree of secrecy because I only know of it through the newspapers,” Richter sneered. “I am not impressed by these well-known methods of psychological warfare.” His research would continue unabated, and he would likely have a thermonuclear reactor “in full-scale operation in about ten months or so.”
The rumors of Richter’s arrest, at least, were false, and work continued at Huemul, apparently on schedule. In October, Richter announced that a large-scale experiment had been successful. By December, he was bragging that he “would be able to make convincing new demonstrations within three months.” The Associated Press reported Richter’s claim that he was in negotiations with a “highly industrialized foreign country” to trade his nuclear secrets for money and raw materials. He added that foreign skeptics “soon would have to eat their words.”
Instead, Richter was the one who would get his comeuppance. Three months later, he failed to produce his “convincing new demonstrations,” and he became the butt of jokes in Argentina. Detractors, seeing Richter in a café with a bandage on his hand, commented snidely that the good doctor had been wounded when one of his atomic bombs exploded in his hands. In the lab, Richter’s behavior was becoming increasingly bizarre. He requested pumps to inject gunpowder into the reactor. In April 1952, Pedro Iraolagoitia, a Peronist navy pilot, visited Huemul to inspect the plant. He was shocked when Richter deliberately blew up a tank of nitrogen and hydrogen, blowing the door to the lab clean off. Weirder still, right after he triggered the explosion, Richter scuttled over to his instruments and on a piece of paper spewed out by one piece of equipment, he wrote “atomic energy.” Iraolagoitia figured that Richter was insane. Soon he had convinced Perón to launch an investigation into the Huemul project, and a group of scientists and politicians visited the island in September 1952.
The visit was a fiasco. Richter showed the scientists his fusion reactions. In the reactor chamber, vivid red lithium and hydrogen flames spewed forth; the dials of the Geiger counters fluttered. The scientists weren’t impressed. Neither were the gamma-ray detectors that the physicists brought with them. Unlike Richter’s Geiger counters, the gamma-ray detectors showed