Buenos Aires – A group of Argentine scientists worked secretly to build an atomic bomb during the military government of former dictator Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri in the early 1980s, a major daily reported here on Sunday.
Clarin reported that during the 1976-83 dictatorship, a three-phase project to build a nuclear device was begun by a group of nuclear physicists and engineering specialists at a laboratory charged with producing plutonium and a neutron reflector, both of which were to be used in the weapon.
The first phase of the project was completed in 1981-82, but it was then halted due to the resistence of Argentina’s National Atomic Energy Commission, or CNEA.
The so-called “Nuclear Plan of the Army,” secretly pursued between 1980 and 1982, included setting up the Radiochemical Processes Laboratory, or LPR, at a production facility in the town of Ezeiza in Buenos Aires province.
Designing the plan was a task delegated to Lt. Col. Ricardo Rapacioli, under the supervision of Galtieri, who in 1982 took Argentina to war with Great Britain over ownership of the Falkland Islands, which both countries claim.
The contacts between Galtieri and Rapacioli, who had a doctorate in physics, began in 1976, with the aim of carrying out the army’s nuclear plan, which was divided into three phases, “the calculation phase, the design phase and the construction phase,” personnel linked to the military project told the daily.
The effort was halted before the beginning of the Falklands War in April 1982, and Clarin said that pressures on the CNEA to resume the bomb-building project mounted during the conflict.
However, Adm. Ernesto Fitte recalled that the then-president of the CNEA, Vice Adm. Carlos Castro Madero, “did not even accept any discussion about the bomb.”
“During the war, they asked him again and he answered: don’t even think about it. If we build one, the British are going to throw 10 of them at us. It’s foolish,” Fitte said.
The war began after Argentine troops occupied the South Atlantic islands, which lie just under 500 kilometers (about 300 miles) east of the extreme southern portion of the Argentine mainland, and it ended when they surrendered after two months of bloody combat with British forces dispatched to the region to recapture the archipelago.
In any case, to have proceeded to the construction phase of the plan, the group of physicists and engineers working on the project would have had to “develop the engineering for conventional explosives that explode and cause an implosion that compresses the plutonium and unleashes an uncontrolled nuclear explosion.”
To pursue that task, the CNEA would have had to give its approval, but it never authorized such measures.
Argentine former President Raul Alfonsin, who governed from 1983-89, shut down the nuclear laboratory set up by Rapacioli when his democratic government came to power after the end of the dictatorship.
The government said at the time that it was simply scrapping the project for budgetary reasons, but the military men working there were dismissed from the armed forces without any further explanation, Clarin reported.
Argentina, which in the past also had military rivalries with Brazil and Chile, signed the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1995.
