NUCLEAR POLITICS IN COLD WAR ARGENTINA
David Sheinin
Trent University
and Beatriz Figallo
CONICET
The history of the Argentine nuclear sector is wonderfully contradictory – “wonderfully” because despite its problems and failures, it emerged as Argentina’s most important area of technological advancement in the Cold War period. Led through much of its history by senior admiralty officers, the Argentine National Energy Commission – the Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica or CNEA – was never a military bureaucracy. Often the focus of the military’s ambitions for industrial, scientific, and strategic development during the periods of military rule between 1966 and 1983, the nuclear sector remained remarkably free of military influence or intervention. Despite that several CNEA employees were the victims of military violence during the last dictatorship, Commission leadership refused to sack scientists for their political views and protected a number of their investigators from Dirty War violence. An important Argentine bureaucracy, the CNEA was unlike any other such structure in the professional longevity of its administrators, scientists, and technologists. Hundreds of CNEA members stayed in their positions and advanced through the ranks in spite of the jarring political changes that shook Argentina between 1960 and 1990.
The nuclear sector never realized its most important promise, to spearhead industrial prosperity, to provide Argentina’s energy needs inexpensively, and to become profitable. Even so, Argentina emerged after 1960 as a major center for nuclear research and a multi-billion dollar exporter of everything from cancer treatment machinery to experimental reactors, the most recent of which was sold to Australia in 2000. In addition, nuclear power became an important area of Argentine domestic and foreign policy concern. As such, it came to represent the country’s Cold War politics in a variety of ways. The Second World War and early Cold War tensions were the backdrop for Argentina’s first foray into nuclear power. An Argentine War Ministry decree (No. 22855-45) in 1945 blocked the export of uranium, signaling an early awareness of the strategic importance of nuclear power. A year later, Congress debated the nationalization of uranium mines. The president of the Asociación Física Argentina, Enrique Gaviola, proposed the establishment of a government-funded institute to spearhead nuclear research, outside the reach of the military. At the same time, General Manuel Savio, founder of Fabricaciones Militares, backed a military-controlled nuclear research program under the direction of the Ministerio de Guerra. These and other projects came to nought with the arrival of the Austrian physicist, Ronald Richter, in 1948.[1]
Richter came to Argentina with the German engineer Kurt Tank, contracted at the end of the war by the Instituto Aeronáutico de Córdoba to build an Argentine airplane. Within a week Richter had met with President Juan Perón and convinced the general to place the national nuclear program in his, Richter’s hands. Richter promised Perón controlled thermonuclear reactions through nuclear fusion. Until then, the only reactions achieved had been by nuclear fission. Perón gave Richter free reign and millions of dollars. The physicist installed himself and a small team of technicians on the isolated Isla Huemul in southern Argentina. He personally supervised all aspects of his program to build a nuclear reactor including the purchase of virtually every piece of equipment transported onto the island. While Perón may well have been interested in the possibility of building a nuclear weapon, he and subsequent Argentine leaders were always aware of the logistical, political, and strategic pitfalls nuclear weapons might bring. Despite that there was no evidence that Argentina’s nuclear program had a military component, the US government became suspicious of Argentine intentions and remained so for much of the Cold War. The suspicion came, in part, from Richter’s dramatic announcement in 1951 that he had succeeded in producing the reaction he promised. At a press conference organized on 24 March by a jubilant Perón, Richter insisted that he had created several controlled nuclear reactions. The announcement was stunning, coming before the development of the first hydrogen bomb.[2]
Perón did not pull the plug on Richter until 1952 when, in the absence of hard evidence of the Huemul reactions, other scientists convinced the president that Richter had, in fact, made no real progress. A report by a commission that investigated Richter’s activities concluded that two key factors accounted for Richter’s failure, beyond what many scientists believed was his probable incompetence. First, Richter was allowed to operate in secrecy and relative isolation, away from both the scrutiny and collaboration of other scientists and technicians. Second, because Richter was a theoretical physicist working on his own, he did not have the engineering or technical skills required to put his ideas into practice. This image of Richter as a mad scientist became the popular wisdom in the Argentine scientific community until the recent advances in nuclear fusion. Some now think that, at least in his theory and hypotheses, Richter’s ideas on fusion came ahead of his time and ahead of the technical expertise needed to put them into practice.[3]
Equipment from Huemul was salvaged and transported the few hundred feet to shore where it was placed in storage. The storage area in Bariloche became the CNEA’s first research site, as the commission emerged from the political ashes of Richter’s failed experiments. Burned once by his having played politics with the nuclear sector in his having sanctioned Richter’s secrecy, Perón accepted the advice of scientists who told him shortly after the CNEA’s founding in 1950 that Argentina simply could not have a successful nuclear program if the commission were treated like other bureaucracies. Perón, the scientists argued, would have to allow the nuclear sector to function without political intrusions. That dictum remained largely in effect through the 1980s and likely explains the persistence of Perón’s bust at the entrance of CNEA headquarters in Buenos Aires.
Like Americans, Canadians, and many others during the 1950s, Argentines conceived of their early nuclear program in a broad Cold War context. Nuclear strength meant strategic power, whether or not the nuclear sector would have a military emphasis. Politicians, diplomats, business leaders and others attached notions of progress to nuclear development, reasoning that for Argentina to modernize, it would need an advanced atomic sector. Argentines viewed nuclear power as a means to confront traditional competitors Chile and Brazil, not necessarily militarily but strategically. A strong nuclear sector would also position Argentina for leadership in South America in a context of growing Cold War tensions. Many of these ideas came across in the magazine Mundo Atómico, a publication that flourished briefly under the tight press controls of the Perón regime. Launched in September 1950, the magazine first appeared shortly after the founding of the CNEA and folded in the aftermath of the coup d’état that brought Perón down in 1955. The Argentine nuclear sector owes much to Perón’s vision and insistence on the importance of nuclear power to Argentine development; Mundo Atómico broadcast a handful of the ideological tenets that linked peronismo to nuclear science.[4]
The mandate of the CNEA was ranging. The presidential decree that determined its early operations stipulated the Commission’s roles in advising the president on nuclear policy; in developing scientists and researchers in nuclear fields; in the maintenance of strong relations with equivalent organizations in other countries; in searching for uranium and other minerals crucial to the nuclear sector; and in operating nuclear reactors. Early Cold War Argentina was marked by Perón’s fractious relations with an intellectual and university community often at odds with his authoritarian tendencies. For that reason in part, Perón favored the development of a nuclear program outside of a university research institute. Mundo Atómico editorials made repeated reference to the creation of the CNEA in a context of what the magazine called the bankruptcy of university research and teaching.[5] The CNEA was meant by Perón to be an end-run around the universities. Mundo Atómico also highlighted Richter’s work on Huemul as an international triumph that had allowed Argentina to leapfrog past the United States as the world leader in nuclear science. When Richter was unmasked in 1952, Mundo Atómico conveyed the government line that Argentina’s nuclear program had been derailed but would be back on track again in the very near future.
The Argentine nuclear program also owed its success to the military emphasis on industrial development as essential to economic independence; on economic independence as vital to national security; and on nuclear power as a cornerstone of industrial growth. These sentiments were particularly strong within Argentina’s officer corps in a context of strong Cold War military cooperation between arch-rival Brazil and the United States, which the Argentines feared. Mundo Atómico also presented this ideological cornerstone of the Argentine nuclear program as did a variety of other publications. Writing in 1963, Comodoro Fernando E. Barrera Oro argued that “otro de los aspectos fundamentales que contempla la Logística Nacional es el industrial…. Este es uno de los factores preponderantes de la economía pero desde el punto de vista logístico-técnico, su importancia relativa es mayor aún y merece considerárselo por separado….”[6] He went on to tie national defense to industrial growth. The longstanding association of naval officers with CNEA had a parallel in other countries. Like naval officers in the United States and France, for example, Argentine naval officers believed in a strategic panacea based on the nuclear propulsion of warships and submarines. According to Captain Fernando A. Milia, “en lo que a los buques respecta, la propulsión atómica significa la liberación de una larga servidumbre.”[7]
Just as Argentine naval officers shared their vision of nuclear propulsion with their American equivalents, after 1950 Argentina also positioned itself as a Cold War ally of the United States in some aspects of it nuclear policies. At international disarmament meetings, Argentine diplomats became increasingly critical of the Soviet Union. Moreover, Argentina’s first experimental reactor was built with US financial aid and from a model the US government made available to foreign countries. But the Argentines opposed the Eisenhower administration when it launched a US government policy to limit international access to nuclear weapons and nuclear technology. US policy never changed over the Cold War and Argentina remained at odds with Washington on this point through the 1980s, even while supporting successive US diplomatic stands toward the Soviet Union through the early part of that decade.[8]
Under the leadership of the CNEA, the Argentine nuclear sector diversified significantly during the 1950s, opening a variety of new research avenues and providing opportunities for Argentines to establish important new contacts with nuclear scientists and bureaucrats in other countries. In 1955, for example, the CNEA charged the physicist Jorge A. Sábato with the creation of a Metallurgy Department. By early 1962, the department had become an international research leader. That year it offered the Primer Curso Panamericano de Metalurgia, an early example of the sort of training of foreign scientists the Argentine nuclear sector would make a priority in its operations. In 1967, the Organization of American States issued the “Declaración de los Presidentes de América” which made reference to the creation of the Programa Regional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico. The program was charged with establishing a multinational metallurgy program for Latin America to be led by the Metallurgy section of the CNEA.[9]
In 1958, Argentina made the first of many technology transfer sales abroad. The CNEA sold know-how in the manufacture of reactor combustibles to Degussa-Leybold AG, a German firm. That know-how derived from work Argentines had done on their Argonaut experimental reactor, developed in the Argonne National Laboratory in the United States. The American design served as the model for the construction of the first reactor in Argentina, the RA-1, inaugurated in 1958. The development of combustibles technologies in Argentina was one of many crucial successes for the nuclear sector. Radioisotopes and radiopharmaceutical products represented another category of Argentine research and technology transfer overseas. In 1962, the CNEA began routinely selling isotopes to Paraguay, Chile, and Holland among many other countries. Cobalt-60 for cancer treatment was a third area of developing research expertise in Argentina, and represented a key area of nuclear exports for three decades thereafter.[10]
With the 1966 coup d’état that ushered in the Onganía regime, Argentina hardened each of the lines of its nuclear policies. In the United Nations and in other fora, anti-Soviet diplomacy and support for US positions on nuclear weaponry escalated. But Argentina toughened its stand against international controls on poor nations’ access to nuclear materials and development of nuclear weapons. Though this stand contradicted Washington’s efforts to control Third World access to nuclear technologies, the US stand was itself confused and Argentina’s policy should be viewed in this context. First, nuclear physicists in the US and elsewhere were never convinced that the government was correct in linking access to nuclear technology and information, in Argentina and other countries, with the potential for a nuclear weapons program. We learned later that the information needed to build a bomb could not be controlled. What tended to be limited in the US effort to control access to nuclear knowledge was non-military nuclear sector development in other countries. Second, while the Americans opposed nuclear weapons in Latin America, the US backed the anti-communist militarism of dictatorial regimes. For Argentine and Brazilian military authorities, national security doctrine anti-communism, internal repression of dissent, conventional weapons strength, and the right to develop an independent nuclear program were closely linked. The US position was that the first three of these aspects of Argentine and Brazilian policy were defensible. The potential for nuclear weapons, through the dissemination of nuclear technology and information, was not acceptable. Argentina and Brazil accepted the tenets of national security doctrine, but rejected limitations on nuclear technologies and on their right to develop a nuclear sector as they saw fit.[11]
Despite that nuclear explosions for peaceful ends had been indirectly limited by earlier international agreements, such restrictions were not made explicit until the Tratado para la Proscripción de las Armas Nucleares en América Latina (or Tratado de Tlatelolco, Mexico 1967) and the separately negotiated Nuclear Non Proliferation Agreement (Geneva 1968). Argentina had been a key promoter of Article V of the Antartic Treaty that prohibited explosions of any sort in Antartica. In August 1963, when the Treaty of Moscow for the Partial Prohibition of Nuclear Testing was opened for country signatures, Argentina was among the first to sign (though, in the end, the only nuclear power that did not ratify the agreement for more than twenty years). The Treaty blocked nuclear arms testing under a wide range of conditions.[12] While Mexico joined the United States in pressing hard for the Tlatelolco, the two most advanced nuclear powers in the region, Brazil and Argentina, opposed the accord as a serious impediment to their maintaining an active nuclear program. Treaty negotiations lasted three years and could not reconcile Brazilian and Argentine ambitions with the Mexican-led consensus in Latin America against nuclear explosions of any sort. One provision of the treaty allowed for nuclear explosions with peaceful ends. But that section was written ambiguously and opened the door to a politicization of the topic that Argentines could not accept. The treaty conference president and Mexican delegate, Alfonso García Robles, immediately insisted that nuclear explosions toward peaceful ends were possible only in theory. The United States and the other principal nuclear powers took a similar position arguing that “peaceful explosions” could not, for all intents and purposes, be distinguished from explosions for military ends. Argentine officials insisted on the clear distinction between the two types of explosions, rejecting Tlatelolco for its perceived threat to the Argentine nuclear program. For the Argentine negotiator Ambassador, Luis Santiago Sanz, “para ser arma nuclear, el artefacto nuclear debía estar destinado a fines bélicos… el destino era el factor básico para diferenciarlo de cualquier otro objeto.”[13]
In Geneva, during the simultaneous negotiations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement, Argentine officials were even more explicit in their rejection of what they perceived as international efforts to limit the free functioning of Argentina’s peaceful national nuclear program. According to the chief Argentine negotiator, José María Ruda, “mi delegación considera que, a nuestro entender, el proyecto de tratado limita las facultades de los Estados no nucleares en toda una línea de investigación con relación a explosiones con fines pacíficos.”[14]
The election of Peronist Héctor Cámpora to the presidency and the subsequent return of Juan Perón to Argentina in the early 1970s reconfigured Argentine politics and foreign relations. Argentina joined the non-aligned movement. Political leaders, diplomats, and CNEA officials saw this shift as an important opportunity for the country to develop its international leadership in the nuclear sector by cultivating ties with new allies in the developing world. Tensions with the United States and other wealthy nations over access to information and materials were exacerbated in 1974 after India exploded its first atomic device. Both the United States and Canada clamped down on cooperative nuclear exchanges with Argentina and other countries perceived as risks. For the Argentines, the Canadian clampdown was particularly important. Early in the Cold War, the Canadian government had decided to develop its CANDU, heavy water reactor that relied on non-enriched uranium. That decision was tied specifically to achieving what independence the Canadians could from US control of expensive uranium enrichment facilities. In 1974, construction began on Argentina’s second commercial nuclear generator, Embalse. The decision earlier in the decade to contract with Atomic Energy of Canada for the reactor was taken for reasons similar to the Canadian choice for a heavy water program a generation before. By directing their nuclear program toward a non-enriched uranium system, the Argentines hoped to avoid US influence and achieve a degree of independence. That objective was undermined by Canada’s decision after the Indian explosion to revoke sections of the agreement to build Embalse that had highlighted the transfer of technology and information.[15]
At the same time, Argentine authorities maintained a strong opposition to the Tlatelolco Treaty and staunchly defended the rights of countries to carry out nuclear explosions with peaceful ends. The Argentine government claimed the right to conduct explosion-research and to import materials essential to prime nuclear explosions. At a United Nations General Assembly meeting in 1978 dedicated to disarmament, the Argentine delegation chief, Foreign Minister Vice-Admiral Oscar Montes, reasserted Argentina’s right to develop an advanced nuclear program that clearly distinguished between military and non-military research ends: “Ejercitamos a fondo nuestro inalienable derecho a adquirir, perfeccionar y aplicar los adelantos de la tecnología nuclear para el bienestar y progreso del pueblo argentino.”[16] There had been no substantial shift in Argentina’s international disarmament policy from the left-Center Cámpora government to the military dictatorship. Meanwhile, Argentina repeatedly supported the international politics of nuclear non-proliferation and insisted that it would not produce atomic weapons. Argentina and India emerged in the 1970s as the countries most associated with the defense of nuclear explosions in the developing world.
An Argentine nuclear distancing from Canada and the United States in the mid-1970s had an impact the North Americans neither forecast nor desired. In keeping with the non-aligned movement rejection of Cold War bipolarity, much more so than in the past, Argentina set an independent course in its nuclear foreign policy. Despite a commitment to the heavy water system in the construction of Embalse, top CNEA officials embarked on a secret program to develop an enriched uranium system, without the knowledge of many senior level Commission scientists. Argentina secured a contract to build an experimental reactor in Iran in 1977, and signed a deal with Peru that went far beyond building a reactor. This latter agreement called for Argentine scientists and technicians to help develop a Peruvian nuclear program. In 1976, the Centro Atómico de Bariloche’s Programa de Investigaciones Aplicadas or INVAP was inaugurated. Controlled by the Provincia de Río Negro and in part by CNEA, INVAP was to be the practical arm of CNEA charged with building the reactors for which Argentina would win contracts. INVAP projects ranged from laboratory research to the running of reactors and included the development of enriched uranium technology and the construction of the RA-6 experimental reactor at the Centro Atómico Bariloche.[17]
Perhaps most striking about Argentina’s aggressive pursuit of foreign nuclear contracts after 1974 was the continuity of national nuclear policy through the late 1970s and the 1980s, when INVAP registered its most lucrative contracts, including those to build experimental reactors in Algeria and Egypt. Despite the upheaval of Isabel Perón’s shaky government, the March 1976 coup d’état, the violent dictatorship that followed, and the return to democracy after 1983, a reduction of funding in the latter period marked the only significant shift in Argentina’s foreign nuclear politics. When Augusto Pinochet came to power in 1973, Chile did not give up its membership in the non-aligned movement but exited the group de facto. Chilean diplomats simply never attended another meeting. After the Argentine coup in 1976, a number of military officers were inclined to follow a similar path. To some, the non-aligned movement seemed a bastion for the kind of left-leaning thinking that they were brutally stamping out in Argentina. But others, including the diplomat Nicanor Costa Méndez, convinced the first junta not to abandon the non-aligned movement, that membership in the movement posed no real risks and offered tremendous benefits. Despite linking international communism to human rights groups like Human Rights Watch, to third world nationalism, to leftist insurgency in Argentina as a basis for their internal war, the Argentine generals improved their ties with non-aligned movement members including Yugoslavia, Cuba, India and Algeria, among many others.[18]
Like the period of the Onganía dictatorship, the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional marked a golden era for the nuclear era in several respects, particularly in regard to government funding for research and development. In 1977, as a consequence of strong government funding, for example, the CNEA was able to launch a graduate program in nuclear engineering at the height of the dictatorship. In 1980, the Commission reached an agreement with the Universidad de Buenos Aires to run the program jointly. A year later, in keeping with Argentina’s longstanding policy to aggressively recruit foreign professionals for training, students from other Latin American countries were admitted for the first time – a practice that continued through the 1980s and early 1990s.
The decision for Argentina to remain within the non-aligned movement became particularly crucial to the nuclear sector in a context of strong financial backing from the military regime. At home, and at the height of the international energy crisis, the military invested heavily in the nuclear sector. By the end of the dictatorship in 1983, there were plans for seven reactors on the books. Overseas, Argentine sales in the nuclear sector skyrocketed as Yugoslavia, Cuba, and other non-aligned nations became major consumers of Argentine technology and information. Ironically, despite the enormous political shift from dictatorship to democracy in 1983, key components of Argentine nuclear foreign policy remained unchanged. The principal shift was financial. Suspicious of the tight links between the military and CNEA, the elected government of Raúl Alfonsín slashed spending on research and development in the nuclear sector, prompting a crisis in the area from which, according to many in the sector, the country never recovered. Argentina maintained its place in the non-aligned movement, but not surprisingly, had less interest in contacts with more authoritarian regimes and placed more emphasis on the developmentalist component on the movement. A new Sur-Sur policy — where Argentina would return to a more consistent “third position”outside both the Soviet and the American spheres — was championed by Foreign Minister Dante Caputo. It touched the nuclear sector in two key ways. First, it marked an unprecedented aggressiveness in Argentine disarmament policy in its criticisms of both the Soviet Union and United States for their unwillingness to move more quickly on nuclear arms reduction. Second, and more important, and where Alfonsín era policies dovetailed with those of the military government that had come before, the Alfonsín administration used Sur-Sur as a starting point from which nuclear sales to poor nations soared into the billions of dollars.[19]
At the same time, Argentina maintained its longstanding policy on training foreign scientists and technicians in the nuclear sector. Through short courses, training programs, the sponsorship of scientific meetings, on-the-job training programs, and in other respects, Argentine authorities claimed credit for the training of scientists in the peaceful use of nuclear technology during the Cold War in twenty-two Latin American and Caribbean countries, twelve European countries (mainly in Eastern Europe), seven African nations, and fourteen Asian countries (including Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan). Between 1980 and 1997, Argentine authorities organized fifty-eight courses sponsored by the International Atomic Energy Organization, with attendance in excess of 750 foreign scientists from fifty-two countries. Course topics included the application of radioisotopes and radiation in agriculture, the application of radioisotopes and radiation in biology, security in nuclear energy production, and the development of a national nuclear sector.[20]
In keeping with decreasing Cold War tensions after 1986 and Argentina’s modest rapprochement with Chile over outstanding boundary disputes, the Argentines did an about face on nuclear weapons policy and relations with Brazil. Overnight, Argentina reversed its twenty year-old rejection of the idea of Latin America as a nuclear weapons free zone. Traditionally, Argentine diplomats had argued that there was no way of reasonably controlling nuclear weapons in the Americas, without also limiting a country’s access to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. Suddenly, that stand was abandoned. Writing in 1997, Ambassador Julio César Carasales, a key architect of Argentina’s nuclear policies in the 1960s and 1970s, was now at a loss to explain Argentine policy. There was no easy explanation, he argued long after the fact, for Argentina’s refusal to ratify the Moscow Treaty (1963) for more than twenty years after Argentine officials signed the accord.
Quizá tuvo que ver de alguna manera con la actitud renuente y crítica que durante varias décadas mantuvo la Argentina contra variadas maneras de regulación internacional de la actividad nuclear. Quizá tambien pudo haber influido la inestabilidad que caracterizó en general a sucesivos gobiernos argentinos, cuyas preocupaciones estaban absorbidas por otros problemas. Al mismo tiempo, hay que reconocer que en el caso de gobiernos militares el Tratado de Moscú podía haber sido ratificado por un Decreto-Ley, como ocurrió con otras convenciones sin pasar por un Parlamento inexistente.[21]
Without an explanation for the radical shift, the administration of President Raúl Alfonsín sent a message to Congress on 24 January 1986 asking for the ratification of the Moscow Treaty. Debate in each house was equally ambiguous. In the Senate, the Foreign Relations Committee report on the matter was terse. Debate was virtually nonexistent. The only concern raised was how ratification might impact on ongoing contentions with Great Britain over the Malvinas Islands.[22]
In addition, and at the prompting of the United States, Argentina moved to improve ties with Brazil’s nuclear sector, indeed to develop the means for a cooperative understanding between the two countries. Cooperative agreements were signed and longstanding bilateral tensions declared at an end.[23] Argentina’s independent nuclear policy, generally at odds with that of the United States, disappeared quickly. The governments of Argentina and Brazil, the Agencia Brasileño-Argentino de Contabilidad y Control de Materiales Nucleares, and the International Atomic Energy Organization reached an unprecedented nuclear safeguards accord in December 1991 that promised verification that nuclear materials in the hands of both states would not be used in nuclear detonations of any sort. As part of President Carlos Menem’s dramatic foreign policy reversal in favour of close ties with the United States and an end to Argentine participation in the non-aligned movement,[24] Argentina simply dropped its decades-old distinction betweeen peaceful and non-peaceful nuclear explosions. The Acuerdo para el Uso Exclusivamente Pacífico de la Energía Nuclear, signed by Argentine President Menem and Brazilian President Fernando Collor de Mello on 18 July 1991 (then quickly ratified by both countries), contained this stunning passage:
Teniendo en cuenta que no existe, actualmente, distinción técnica
posible entre dispositivos nucleares explosivos para fines pacíficos
y los destinados a fines bélicos, las Partes se comprometen, además,
a prohibir e impedir en sus respectivos territorios, y a abstenerse de
realizar, fomentar o autorizar, directa o indirectamente, o a participar
de cualquier manera en el ensayo, uso, fabricación, producción o
adquisición por cualquier medio de cualquier dispositivo nuclear
explosivo, mientras persista la referida limitación técnica.[25]
In 1994, after two decades of harsh denunciations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement, the Argentine government ratified the treaty.[26]
For many who work in the nuclear sector, the Menem era in Argentina and the end of the Cold War mark a nadir in Argentine nuclear politics. With the availability of relatively inexpensive fossil fuels, none of the seven nuclear reactors planned by the military in the early 1980s was ever built. CNEA members complained that cooperation with Brazil had not amounted to very much. In the spirit of cooperation with the United States, Menem slashed nuclear spending still further. Many within the CNEA complained that the government was gutting their organization. As part of that strategy, some maintained, the government stripped the CNEA of a variety of its functions. The CNEA lost its authority, for example, over the regulation of the nuclear sector when the Autoridad Regulatoria Nuclear was created in 1997. In 1994, the government created Nucleoeléctrica Argentina Sociedad Anónima to assume control over nuclear power generation, previously a central concern of the CNEA. The new company would be managed primarily by the federal Ministerio de Economía. Dozens of physicists and engineers left the CNEA to find work overseas or in areas outside their professional specialty. Even so, the nuclear sector continues to be the source of important connections overseas, in hardware sales, technology transfer, and the training of foreign scientists and technologists. In all likelihood, if Argentine gas supplies expire in little more than a decade – as many geologists predict – the Argentine nuclear sector may well undergo a resurgence.
Notes
[1] Zulema del Valle Marzoratti, “Análisis de Mundo Atómico. Revista de divulgación científica,” Saber y Tiempo (July-December 1998): 88; Mario Mariscotti, El secreto atómico de Huemu: Crónica del origen de la energía atómica en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana-Planeta, 1987), 96-108; Hugo Gambini, “Un sabio atómico,” Primera Plana, no. 240 (1967), 36-39.
[2] Enrique Gaviola to Ernesto Sábato, 21 January 1956, B-9, Gaviola Papers, Archivo Histórico, Centro Atómico de Bariloche, Argentina; Enrique Gaviola, “La herencia de Richter: parasitismo atómico,” Mundo Argentino, 21 December 1955; “La Argentina no prepara atómicas,” Crítica, 27 March 1947.
[3] Oscar A. Quilhillalt, Presidente, Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica, “Plan de Acción Inmediata de la Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica,” 10 November 1955, Archivo Histórico, Centro Atómico de Bariloche, Argentina.
[4] del Valle Marzoratti, “Análisis,” 90-91.
[5] See Tulio Halperín Donghi, Historia de la Universidad de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, 1962) and Carlos Mangone and Jorge A. Warley, Universidad y peronismo (1946-1955) (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1984).
[6] Fernando E. Barrera Oro, Logística Conjunta (Buenos Aires: Círculo Militar, 1963), 107.
[7] Fernando A. Milia, Estrategia y poder militar (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Publicaciones Navales, 1965), 129.
[8] No. 4159, “Estados Unidos de América – Unión Soviética,” 19 April 1977, SIDE, Argentine Government Documents (AGD).
[9] Roberto Mario Ornstein, “La formación de recursos humanos extranjeros en el país,” in Julio César Carasales and Roberto Mario Ornstein, La cooperación internacional de la Argentina en el campo nuclear (Buenos Aires: Consejo Argentino para las Relaciones Internacionales, 1998), 55-58.
[10] Jorge Coll and Renato Radicella, “Las primeras transferencias de tecnología nuclear y los desarrollos posteriores en el campo de los radioisótopos,” in Carasales and Ornstein, La cooperación internacional, 97-108.
[11] Juan Archibaldo Lanús, De Chapultepec al Beagle: política exterior argentina, 1945-1980 (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1984), 401-404; No. 43, Julio César Carasales, Argentine Chargé d’Affaires, Geneva, to Diógenes Taborda, Argentine Foreign Minister, 14 August 1959, File 187, Conferencia de Ministros de Relaciones Exteriores de Francia, Estados Unidos, Reino Unido, y URSS sobre el problema alemán, AGD.
[12] Comisión Preparatoria para la Desnuclearización en América Latina (COPREDAL), Discurso del Delegado argentino, Embajador Luis Santiago Sanz, Acta de la 19a. sesión, 19 de abril de 1966, in Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores de México, Desnuclearización Militar de América Latina—Documentos (1964-1967), vol. IV, (México: Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores, 1967), 182.
[13] Julio César Carasales, “Las explosiones nucleares pacíficas y la actitud argentina,” Colección Documentos de Trabajo, No. 20 (Buenos Aires: Consejo Argentino para las Relaciones Internacionales, 1997), 18-19; Tercer Informe del Grupo de Trabajo 1, Documento COPREDAL/GT. 1/3, 3 de febrero de 1967, in Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores de México, Desnuclearización, vol. V, 197-198.
[14] Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas, 22 Período de Sesiones, Primera Comisión, sesión 1572a, 22 de mayo de 1968, Documento A/C. 1/PV. 1572, 8-9.
[15] “Instrucciones para la delegación argentina a la conferencia de Ministros de Relaciones Exteriores de los países no alineados (Lima, 25 al 29 de agosto de 1975),” No. 684/724, Gastón de Prat Gay, Argentine Chargé d’Affaires, New York, to Alberto J. Vigners, Argentine Foreign Minister, 23 July 1975; Fernando Vaca Narvaja, Secretario de Relaciones Exteriores del Movimiento Peronista Montonero, “A la Conferencia de Ministros de Relaciones Exteriores del Movimiento de Países No Alineados,” 25 July 1978, AGD.
[16] Discurso del Vicealmirante Oscar Montes, Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas, Décimo Período Extraordinario de Sesiones, 5a. sesión plenaria, 26 de mayo de 1978.
[17] Tomás Buch, “La proyección comercial internacional,” in Carasales and Ornstein La cooperación internacional, 149-150.
[18] CNEA, Ayuda memoria para la visita del Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores de la República Federal de Alemania – Area Nuclear,” 7 February 1984, AGD.
[19] “Posiciones sobre desarme de los estados integrantes de la iniciativa de las siete naciones,” nd (1987); Mario Cámpora, “Iniciativa de los seis,” 12 January 1988; No. 183, “Entrevista con el Embajador Argentino en Irak,” 29 April 1985; “Aproximaciones al tema de armas convencionales (A.C.) desde el punto de vista de Argentina,” nd (1988), AGD; David Fischer and Paul Szasz, Safeguarding the Atom: A Critical Appraisal (London: Taylor and Francis, 1985), 90-92.
[20] Ornstein, “La formación de recursos,” in Carasales and Ornstein, La cooperación internacional, 52-53.
[21] Carasales, “Las explosiones nucleares,” 32.
[22] Diario de Sesiones de la Cámara de Senadores (Argentina), 20 de abril de 1986, 3850.
[23] Julio César Carasales, De rivales a socios: el proceso de cooperación nuclear entre Argentina y Brasil (Buenos Aires: Grupo Editor Latinoamericano, 1997), 48-51; Mónica Serrano, “Common Security in Latin America,” University of London, Institute of Latin American Studies, Research Paper Series (1992), 6-7; Antonio Carvallo Rojas, “El problema de la intervención militar,” in Pablo González Casanova, ed., No-intervención, autodeterminación y democracia en América Latina (México: Siglo XXI Editores, 1983), 41; “Argentina-Brasil,” nd (1992); “Resumen de lo conversado en las reuniones de planeamiento político con Brasil,” 29-30 July 1991, AGD.
[24] See Carlos Escudé, Estado del mundo: las nuevas reglas de la política internacional vistas desde el Cono Sur (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1999) and Carlos Escudé, Foreign Policy Theory in Menem’s Argentina (Gainesville, FL: U of Florida P, 1977).
[25] Carasales, “Las explosiones nucleares,” 38.
[26] Julio César Carasales, “A Surprising About-Face: Argentina and the NPT,” Security Dialogue, vol. 27, no. 3 (September 1996): 325-335.