Excited State: How the Nuclear Sector Disciplined the Argentine Military Government, 1976–83

The physicist, Vice-Admiral Carlos Castro Madero led the Argentine Atomic Energy Commission (CNEA) from 1976 to 1983. He so viscerally despised his superior, Admiral Emilio Massera, for the junta member’s notorious slow-witted brutality that on multiple occasions the two almost came to blows. Recently, it is Castro Madero’s memory that has come under fire for his putative role in the disappearance of dozens of CNEA employees during military rule. At the same time, the physical chemist Tomás Buch, an unabashed socialist militant during the 1970s, maintains that Castro Madero protected him and many other politically active atomic sector workers from possible arrest and worse.

These incongruities inside a key arm of military rule highlight the human side of a bureaucratic and policy rarity. The Argentine nuclear sector remained remarkably free from military authoritarianism. Immediately after the 1976 golpe, military leaders came to understand that if they wished to foster and expand the nation’s already powerful and multi-faceted nuclear industry, they would have to approach the sector with greater thoughtfulness and diplomacy than would be the case elsewhere. Drawing on Argentine government archival sources, this paper argues that in how CNEA and its colleagues in the Foreign Ministry’s Department of Nuclear Affairs worked with the military government, power tables were turned. On matters of policy, the nuclear sector directed and charted the relationship, providing independent leadership that shaped military decision-making. Consequently, Argentina’s atomic sector reached an apogee of power and influence, programming for a never-built seven commercial reactors, promising nuclear weapons readiness (for arms that were never built), and most important, pressing an international agenda that generated improbably strong relations with Cuba, Yugoslavia, and other socialist governments.