Huemul was selected as the site partly because of its abundant water supply. But there was another major reason both Richter and Perón were keen to keep the project secret: Perón had fallen out with many senior figures in the Argentinian scientific community, such as the world-renowned astrophysicist Ramón Enrique Gaviola. Both Perón and Richter were keen that the Huemul Project, as it became known, should be conducted without external interference.

Perón placed all his faith in Richter, who set about the project with absolute authority. He filled warehouses with expensive equipment, such as a four-metre-high copper coil that weighed 50 tonnes.

In the first two years the project produced no energy and managed to sour what little relationship Perón had with the scientific establishment. But in March 1951 the president announced that fusion had been accomplished. The news was splashed on front pages across the world, but the scientific world was incredulous. Two months later, CJ Bakker, a highly regarded Dutch nuclear physicist, visited Huemul but was provided with no scientific proof. Rumours from within the Argentinian military described Richter's scheme as a "colossal bluff ". Hans Thirring, the director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Vienna, wrote in a journal that "it is a 50 per cent probability that Perón is giving credit to the ravings of a fantasist; a 40 per cent probability that the president has been the victim of a huge scam; and a nine per cent chance that Richter is telling the truth."

Perón became concerned that the money he'd spent (about £190 million) had been wasted. To establish the truth, he set up a board that was unable to find a shred of evidence for any scientific merit in Richter's work -- the temperature reached in the experiments was far too low to produce a thermonuclear reaction. Richter didn't even attain nuclear fission; according to one account, all he managed was a hydrogen burn in an electric arc, which he bombarded with lithium particles, thus causing an explosion so massive it cracked the concrete structure.

Huemul was abandoned and some of the buildings were blown up. In 1955 a provisional military government took over from Perón. The new administration began to investigate corruption under the dictator's regime. Richter was arrested and questioned, but was eventually released. He died in Buenos Aires in 1991.

Argentina's atomic reputation was restored in the following decades by two research institutions founded, and still growing, near the site of Richter's debacle. One is the Centro Atómico Bariloche, which houses a nuclear reactor built in the 80s; the second is the Instituto Balseiro, a research institute for physics and nuclear engineering. Sixty years after Richter's colossal technological fail, Argentina now exports atomic technology to countries such as Australia and the Netherlands.

The country also managed to claw back something from its investment in Huemul: Richter's lab machinery went on to form the core of the technological structure of both the Centro Atómico Bariloche and the Instituto Balseiro. In 1951, while on his buying spree for the project, Richter ordered a particle accelerator from Philips in the Netherlands. For decades, it was the only one in use in South America.

Now Invap, a public company born as an offshoot of the Instituto Balseiro, is manufacturing satellites for Nasa and is responsible for the first reactor built in Bariloche. Unwittingly, Richter sowed the seeds of high tech on the pampas.

Update 28/2/14: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Ronald Richter worked on the German atom-bomb project under the theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg. 



    Marco Kunkel
    Dec 6th 2011

    Norman Broadberry
    Dec 21st 2011

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