Vigilance, Repression, and Nuclear Independence
DAVID M. K. SHEININ
Among historians and in Argentine popular culture, Argentina has generally been cast as having positioned itself outside a Cold War strategic framework; as the proponent of President Juan Perón’s tercera posición (third position) from 1946 to 1955, charting a dynamic, independent path in international affairs; and after 1954, outside periods of military rule, as the inheritor of that third position. The story is more disorderly, though, as illustrated by a 1974 trade arrangement through which Argentina may or may not have broken the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba. Through a new Argentine-Cuban trade agreement that year, Chevrolet Argentina, the U.S.-capitalized Argentine subsidiary of the American auto giant, sold the Cuban government a few dozen pick-up trucks built in Argentina. Chrysler Argentina sold nine thousand Dodge 1500s. Ford Argentina sent one thousand F-7000 trucks and fifteen hundred Falcons. As a preamble to the trade agreement, Perón waxed eloquent in a letter to Cuban president Fidel Castro, framing the sale as a mark of Latin American unity, their shared revolutionary voice, and Third World development.1
The military government in Brazil protested the sales as a violation of an Organization of American States (OAS) resolution committing all member states to suspend trade with Cuba. Washington saw things differently. The U.S. Treasury Department had issued the Argentine subsidiary firms waivers that allowed each to bypass the embargo (about which Brazilian authorities knew and with which they disagreed). Earlier that year, the Argentine government had seen an opportunity to jumpstart car exports. For Chrysler alone, the agreement with Cuba doubled foreign sales against 1973 figures. Before the waiver, Argentine Foreign Minister Alberto Vignes announced that the embargo would have to be set aside. If no waiver were issued, the American subsidiary companies would be forced to sell cars directly to the Argentine government that, in turn, would transfer them to Cuba. In that event, the U.S. car subsidiaries would lose valuable government export subsidies.2
Why did Washington agree to the waiver and to what seemed Vignes’s threat? The public Argentine position echoed Perón’s comments to Castro, invoking Latin American solidarity, Argentine nationalism, and a third way—Argentina’s third position—linking Argentina, through Peronism, to other “revolutionary” movements in developing countries. But Washington knew better. Vignes had told them so. In October 1973, in a private meeting at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, the Argentine foreign minister told U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that Argentina would work with the United States in all areas. “Public opinion,” he pointed out, “is highly sensitized and euphoric.… Therefore, while this euphoria may have certain negative reflections, it can also be channeled to positive ends.” Peronism, Vignes was stating delicately, was both populist and highly emotional. He was careful not to opine specifically on Peronist street politics but wanted Washington to know that Perón meant his public pronouncements to be taken in Washington with a grain of salt. Bilateral relations were crucial to Argentina, as it moved to resolve a chronic trade deficit with the United States. In that context, Argentina was desperate for scrap iron for industrial production, which included the auto sector. Kissinger probed. Why had Argentina offered Cuba $200 million in credit? It was strictly business Vignes answered. “Cuba knows that Argentina is justicialista and anticommunist.”3
How did Cuba know when Perón was telling Castro the reverse while framing it in the language of Argentina’s tercera posición? Like U.S. officials, Cubans watched as Perón’s government shifted hard right politically. On 25 September 1973, the Montoneros—a leftist, Peronist revolutionary group with strong ties to Cuba—assassinated centrist Peronist labor leader José Ignacio Rucci, the general secretary of the Argentine Confederación General de Trabajo. Perón was appalled. Days later, trying to convince congressional deputies to vote in favor of tough-on-crime reforms to the Penal Code, Perón asked, “Are we going to allow ourselves to be killed? They killed the general secretary of the Confederación General de Trabajo. They’re killing at will and we’re sitting around with our arms crossed because we don’t have a law in place to counter them.” On 19–20 January 1974, a second leftist revolutionary group, the Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo, attacked a military base in the province of Buenos Aires. Perón instructed the armed forces to annihilate the revolutionary Left, to exterminate the guerrillas (whom he called psychopaths).4
In the seeming chasm between Vignes’s affirmation of anti-Communist, pro–United States Argentine foreign and economic policies, and Perón celebrating Third World desarrollismo and strong ties to his fellow “revolutionary” Fidel Castro, Vignes reinforced key components of Argentine foreign and strategic relations throughout the Cold War. Argentina frequently distanced itself from both Soviet and United States strategic, economic, and policy orbits. That stand, though, was not a set of policy imperatives. Perón’s third position was an ambiguous rehashing of justicialista dictums that never confined Argentina to stated policy. On global social problems, Perón wrote, “The third position, between individualism and collectivism, is the adoption of an intermediate system whose basic instrument is social justice.”5 It never became less abstruse. At the same time, the third position was just that, a diplomatic position that might publicly and ostensibly frame policy, but that was not policy itself. During and after Perón, Argentine Cold War interests frequently dovetailed with those of Non-Aligned Movement members and in other “third way” contexts. However, those points of contact, even when they generated tense relations with the United States, cannot be viewed through a Third World or third way lens. They never jeopardized a vital, largely consistent pro-Washington foreign policy.
Why didn’t Washington balk over the car sales to Cuba? Kissinger took Vignes at his word. While his stance had been framed publicly as a threat to Washington, U.S. ambassador in Argentina Robert C. Hill read the Argentine position as Vignes had cast it to Kissinger in less menacing terms. Hill and other U.S. diplomats and policymakers understood that Perón had staked out a center-right political agenda. Bearing in mind Argentina’s fragile economy, Hill urged that Washington approve the Argentine-Cuba trade deal in order to maintain strong ties with Argentina. Cuban authorities also closely watched the Argentine government’s toughening stand on the revolutionary Left. Soon after the 1976 coup d’état in Argentina, the Cuban ambassador in Buenos Aires told Argentine military authorities that while Cuba had intervened in many countries in support of leftist revolutionaries, Argentine military intelligence would find no such activity in Argentina among the revolutionary Left reviled by Perón. Cuba told the new Argentine junta that it saw the coup d’état as a “necessary change.”6
The broken trade embargo is a faithful reflection of Argentine foreign policy during the Cold War. This goes for periods of peronista governance (1946–55 and 1973–74) most closely identified with a nationalist, third way stand, as it does for periods military rule, short-lived limited democratic governments, and democratic government after 1983. Argentina often demonstrated sympathy for Third World causes. However, Argentina framed an interest in strong ties with developing nations by strong, consistent pro–United States strategic and commercial biases and interests. This chapter explains Argentina’s Cold War in four sections. The first shows the ways in which Argentines have written and read their history after 1945, setting aside continuities in policymaking across dramatic political shifts, the extent of U.S. influence on Argentina, and the Cold War as a formative set of problems. The second section argues that close economic ties with Washington coupled with long-standing anti-Communist policies, foreign and domestic, were the basis for Argentine Cold War foreign policy. The third documents the related problem of Argentina’s independent nuclear foreign policy as motivated by economic gain and international leadership. The final section charts Argentina’s late Cold War push for an end to the nuclear arms race while developing a missile program.
Argentina’s relationship with the United States is key to understanding the limited significance of Perón’s third way and related foreign policy initiatives in the Third World during the Cold War. In that context, four dominant historical narratives have obscured the ways in which Argentina’s Cold War was closely linked to U.S. cultural, political, and strategic leadership. Scholars have routinely argued that, after 1945, Argentina charted an anti-American foreign and economic policy without ever falling under a Soviet orbit—starting with Perón’s third position. This view was regularly reproduced in middle-class intellectual circles.7 Coupled with Argentina’s distance from violent Cold War conflict hotspots, such as El Salvador and Guatemala, this approach reaffirmed the argument that Argentina remained apart from Cold War power politics and cultural determinants. A parallel de facto historical narrative holds that the Cold War touched the Argentine polity only episodically.8 This derives in part from an approach to Cold War Argentina in parameters set by the brutalization of subject peoples in the Caribbean basin through U.S.-sponsored state terror, and as such, relevant to Argentina only peripherally. Finally, Argentine historiography has organized political and other narratives to stress severe breaks from government to government—through peronismo, military rule, and post-dictatorship democracy—in a manner that marginalizes Cold War continuities as of limited relevance to Argentine historical processes.9
The other story is one of continuities. It highlights a historical narrative running apart from, in parallel to, and sometimes at odds with dominant historical accounts that establish severe chronological breaks along political lines. While in no way altering the significance of Argentina’s dramatic political and social upheavals in 1955, 1966, 1973, 1976, and 1983, this chapter holds that dominant narratives have allowed the significance of those jarring, transformative shifts to overshadow key continuities. The latter include the force of anti-Communism in government domestic and foreign policies, the long-standing importance of U.S. -Argentine political, economic, social, and cultural ties, and the emergence of an independent Argentine nuclear policy.
Some building blocks of Argentina’s cultural Cold War have been documented by historians Isabella Cosse (on the impact in Argentina of the translation and dissemination of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s writings),10 Karina Felitti (on evolving sexualities in the 1960s),11 and Carlos Scolari (on the influence of Robert Crumb on political and social cartooning in the serial Fierro in the 1980s),12 among many others.13 Yet none evokes historian Penny Von Eschen’s dictum that cultural exchange “was the commodity that closely pursued the quintessential Cold War commodities, oil and uranium, along with many others critical to America’s seductive abundance.”14 While some authors provide evidence of the connection between U.S. cultural and social influences and larger historical developments in Argentina, none highlights those influences as a key problem in and of itself.
This is sometimes a function of the powerful scholarly and popular commitment to the idea that Argentina’s foreign cultural influences were European in the first instance. In 2016, I asked former Teatro Colón artistic director Darío Lopérfido about high cultural U.S. influences in Argentina during the Cold War. He rejected the notion; Argentina’s inspirations came from across the Atlantic. But in short order, Lopérfido recalled with evident pleasure the brilliant performances of Tennessee Williams plays in Buenos Aires decades ago, and how the writing of Lillian Hellman had shaped his thinking on the intersections of politics and the arts. Jessye Norman, he added, would be performing at the Colón in 2017. Norman had first graced that stage as a young diva in 1978.15
The force of U.S. cultural sway as a Cold War phenomenon tied to U.S. economic power remains apart from how authors have charted Argentine historical narratives, and how deeply those influences have penetrated local cultural strata. In the long-standing primacy of the Ford/Chevrolet rivalry, for example, in Turismo Carretera (rally car racing)—launched by racing legends Juan Manuel Fangio (in his Chevy) and Oscar Alfredo Gálvez (in his Ford)—the notion that those two car brands were from the United States and that the automakers capitalized over the long term on their racing teams’ successes to achieve enormous commercial, economic, and even sinister Cold War political advances has simply never been addressed. Nor have the commercial, economic, and cultural meanings of those brands and their marketing. The Cuban auto sales agreement is a footnote by comparison. The Ford and Chevy brands became Argentine, through dictatorship and democracy.16
A lasting cultural manifestation of Cold War Argentine atomic fears was the Objeto Volador No Identificado (OVNI, Unidentified Flying Object) subculture. Its narrative contours rigorously follow larger, transnational Cold War story lines. It marks Argentina’s enormous distance from third way international politics in its profoundly U.S. story lines. OVNI culture penetrated well beyond loyal followers into mainstream media reports, inexpensively produced paperbacks (most by U.S. authors), genre magazines, and legions of witnesses. While Argentina developed its own nuclear program, atomic fears as expressed through OVNI culture were a reaction to the threat of nuclear weapons—absent in Argentina. Here as elsewhere, the United States became a cultural and scientific reference point. Waves of Argentine OVNI sightings—in 1947 and 1978 for example—corresponded to equivalent waves in the United States.17
The historian Mark Wasserman wondered aloud whether my purpose in arguing that Argentina was not an antagonist of the United States and that U.S. cultural influences exerted defining Cold War–era influences in Argentina was to assert the existence of a hegemonic imperialism.18 The answer is no. Argentina has a place in how we understand the Cold War in Latin America that is strongly influenced by historical change in the United States, that is not marginal to the hemispheric Cold War by virtue of its having been outside core struggles in the Caribbean basin, and that extends past the episodic. That place is both unique and all at once reflective of the transnational Cold War. The geographical and theoretical marginalization of Argentina as a hot Cold War site and the historical treatment of the Cold War as episodic are evident in a seminal study of what editors Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser call the “Latin Americanization” and “transnationalization” of the Cold War conflict.19 In removing the problematizing of the hemispheric Cold War from the limited sphere of U.S. foreign policy experts, the chapters in In From the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham: 2008) include one focused on Argentina. While Ariel C. Armony’s excellent “Transnationalizing the Dirty War: Argentina in Central America” is strong historical analysis, it is distinctive among volume chapters and representative of how Argentina’s Cold War has been cast. Unlike other chapters in the book, “Transnationalizing the Dirty War” combines an exclusive focus on dictatorship, not democracy, with an externalizing of the Cold War—in this case, the notable but relatively insignificant Argentine military incursion into Central America. Here, the Argentine Cold War is constructed entirely from the outside in a National Security Doctrine–inspired military regime and how it fits into the emerging Central American conflagrations of the 1980s. The Cold War becomes a foreign phenomenon in Argentina.20
If Cold War Argentina spanned democracy and dictatorship, incorporated powerful U.S. influences, reflected connections between politics, policy, and culture, and demonstrated continuities across a period not normally constructed as driving Argentine historical processes—1945–90—what can that period tell us about Argentina’s past? Cold War Argentina is a period that, through defining continuities, reshapes Argentine historical narratives. Without erasing the obvious dictatorship-democracy dichotomies, the Argentine Cold War prompts a rethinking of the severity of extant chronological markers and boundaries. Cold War Argentina reflects powerful U.S. influences. But they are often, though not always, influencias argentinizadas, like the hybridizing of Ford and Chevy from classic American brands into Argentine cultural markers through rally racing. In addition, recasting Argentine history as Cold War Argentine history reshapes how we might approach Argentine politics, policies, and international strategy through a Cold War lens.
In considering the foreign policies of peronismo, particularly through 1955, scholars have rehearsed the self-asserted peronista “third position” as a guiding framework, characterized by a policy stand at odds with both the Soviet Union and the United States, and with a strong component of hostility toward the latter.
That approach has masked a strong current of anti-Communism, framed as a Cold War problem. In 1951, as the Argentine government exercised a public, third position foreign policy, in secret it outlined policy and action far more in keeping with U.S. Cold War strategic positions. In March 1951, the Defense Ministry issued a secret position paper calling for the Argentine government to press for an end to “Chinese communist aggression” and for the development of a public government position more clearly in keeping with that stand. In response, Under-Secretary of Foreign Relations Guillermo R. Spangenberg argued that the Cold War was now the key determinant of Argentine international ties. Argentina could no longer see itself as in any way neutral. A war between “East and West” was coming, imagined privately by Argentine policymakers as two clear-cut binaries: Communism versus anti-Communism, and the “East” versus “Western Civilization.” Argentina had developed a military strategic plan, the “Fórmula Media.” When the new world war came, the Argentine Navy would deploy to join U.S.-led expeditionary forces, the Army would maintain internal security and “repress fifth columns,” and the Air Force would preserve air sovereignty in the face of possible Communist aggression. This came long before the advent of National Security Doctrine thinking in Washington.21
These tenets guided Argentine strategic policymaking for decades. They disarm a popularly held notion that Argentina was a dogged antagonist of the United States. In the context of longstanding anti-Communism—reinforced by U.S.-influenced Argentine government responses to the Korean War and the 1954 Guatemala crisis—Argentina held to three additional priorities through the end of the Cold War. First, Argentina sought stronger economic ties with the United States. It is part of Argentine nationalist history and lore that during his first presidency (1946–51), Perón imposed economic impediments on commercial and financial relations with the United States. True enough, but at the same time Argentina pursued stronger business ties with the United States in many areas. Moreover, policymakers in both countries understood that there was progress here, despite the commonly known barriers.
Second, while Argentina asserted its independence as a strong diplomatic third way, that independence was nuanced and tended toward good relations with the United States. Third, where Argentina asserted policy independence from Washington, it did so only on matters that would not fundamentally shake sound bilateral ties. Argentina took strong and consistent positions, for example, at the United Nations and in other forums on the need for an international redistributive economic politics as both just and as an antidote to Communist advances. This last, most consistent area of Argentine policy between 1945 and 1955 was largely divorced from the first two. As Argentina came closer to U.S. positions on the first two, its consistent backing for the third became more hollow and more rote. As such it anticipated the failures of Operación Panamericana in the late 1950s and the Alliance for Progress in the 1960s.
In the late 1940s, despite commercial tensions between Argentina and the United Sates, both saw barriers as negotiable. Dozens of U.S. companies continued to function unimpeded in Argentina. For many, business grew quickly. Coca-Cola S.A. opened its first Argentine plant in 1942, its second in 1948, and its third in 1954. In the case of General Motors Argentina, while import restrictions curtailed manufacturing at its San Martín plant, in response, the company switched gears by winning new lucrative Argentine government contracts for school desks, doors, windows, steel cabinets, and more. In 1944, E. R. Squibb & Sons Argentina reached an agreement with the Argentine government, which blocked importation of penicillin as long as Squibb Argentina could supply the country’s requirements. Over the next decade, Squibb increased output of the drug by 6,000 per cent over its initial production in 1945. In 1952, the company built the first commercial pharmaceutical research laboratory in South America.22
The United States’ demand for beryllium, a key component of metal alloys in weapons systems and in the burgeoning nuclear sector, grew rapidly in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It typified continuity in the U.S. consumption of Argentine raw materials. In 1947, the New York–based Foote Mineral Company advised the U.S. Commerce Department of an unexpected opportunity to export the resource from Argentina. While there had been no beryllium imports from Argentina the previous year and though the government-controlled Argentine Trade Promotion Institute (IAPI) purchased all beryllium and fixed prices for export, the U.S. Commerce Department saw an opportunity. Strategically important Argentine beryl ore was now available for purchase by the United States.23 Private negotiations advanced despite a supposed Argentine embargo on beryllium exports to the United States. A year later, Argentine and U.S. authorities continued to negotiate a beryllium purchase in return for the sale to Argentina of Geiger counters. Both the U.S. State Department and the Argentine Foreign Relations Ministry were marginal to negotiations conducted by the U.S. Commerce Department, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the Argentine Army, and the Argentine War Ministry. In 1952 and 1953, exports of beryllium to the United States resumed in part as a result of negotiations and military contacts that dated back to the late 1940s.24
On matters of regional and global strategy, Argentina’s long-standing independent foreign policy deferred to U.S. guidance on the question of international Communism. Throughout the first peronista presidencies, Argentina read U.S.-Argentine relations and U.S. global strategy as shaped in part by imperial, interventionist American ambitions. At the same time, Argentina’s vocal challenges to that imperialist tendency were often pro forma. Far more significant was Argentina’s adherence to the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (1947), which the Argentine Foreign Ministry acknowledged privately in 1947 to be “a military alliance.”25 From that point forward, the Argentine government gradually aligned its strategic thinking more with that of the United States, viewing a Communist peril in increasingly severe terms. Argentina read the United States agenda for the planned Fourth Meeting of Consultation of Foreign Ministers of the American Republics (1951) as a major transformation of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance into an even more explicitly military alliance for both defensive and now offensive purposes. The American push came in response to the outbreak of the Korean War, to which Argentina’s reaction was unequivocally in support of the United Nations, at odds with “international Communism,” and “For the western world.” Argentina again balanced independence of action with alignment toward the United States. In confronting the international Communist menace, Argentine positions threaded a policy needle “with the United States, but not for the United States.”26
In November 1953, Argentina reasserted its long-standing position that states should be free to recognize military dictatorships when such governments came to power under the “norms of international law.” That same month, Argentina registered what it described as its unwavering support for the principal of nonintervention.27 However, the Guatemalan crisis transformed Argentine foreign policy in the latter stages of the second Perón presidency toward an even harder anti-Communist line. In early 1954, many Argentines followed the Guatemalan crisis closely. Dozens protested U.S. intervention in Central America to Argentine authorities—from residents of Barrio Candiotti in the city of Santa Fe to the Asociación de Estudiantes, Ciencias Económicas, Concordia (Entre Ríos) to the Communist Party–affiliated Unión de Mujeres de la Argentina (Ciudad Evita branch).28 On 25 June 1954, the Guatemalan ambassador to Argentina, Manuel Galich, wrote to the Argentine Foreign Ministry describing a slaughter on par with Guernica the day before: “Modern planes … mounted a criminal attack against civilian populations in Chiquimula, Gualán and Zacapa, dropping trinitrotoluene bombs and machine gunning helpless people.”29 It made no difference. At the Tenth Inter-American Conference in 1954, Argentina defined its firmest pro–United States, anti-Communist line to date. It abstained from the crucial vote condemning Guatemalan Communism. In the fog of McCarthyist America, U.S. policymakers read this as hedging. But the abstention came as a reflection of Argentina’s pro-Washington independence. A vote otherwise would have been read in Argentina as an abrogation of Argentina’s commitment to anti-intervention in the Americas. The abstention was, nevertheless, a remarkable step back from decades of strong, condemnatory language on U.S. intervention in the hemisphere.
The Argentine delegation to the 1954 Caracas conference held that international aggression could not be reasonably defined in that various international conventions had failed to come up with an objective designation on meaning.30 The delegation went on to argue that the problem of aggression was of limited importance; as a practical matter it would always fall to the OAS to assess any supposed aggression when it arose. At Caracas, Argentina played a central role in removing lingering obstacles to U.S. anti-Communist intervention. In addition, Argentina argued for “the impropriety of applying the collective security [components of the Rio Pact] in response to cases of aggression that might be covered by United Nations accords.”31 In the aftermath of United Nations support for the United States during the Korean War, Argentine policymakers found that body a more reliable arbiter of international aggression than the Rio Pact.
During the 1960s and 1970s, anti-Communist precepts rather than an ostensible third position guided Argentine policy in the Middle East in a manner that transcended the shifts from democratic to military governments in Argentina. Publicly, the Argentine diplomatic position was often one of moderation and what Argentine diplomats termed an “equidistant” approach in policy between Arab and Israeli interests. Privately, some of Argentina’s most relied-upon diplomats in the field characterized regional conflicts as primed in the first instance by Soviet-American confrontation. Advising the foreign ministry in 1969, the Argentine chargé d’affaires in Syria, Raúl Lascano, conceived of regional problems as deriving from how the superpowers pressed their regional clients. Moreover, he argued that a next Middle East fracas would most likely be the result of Soviet or American reactions to an expansion of Chinese power in the region and Chinese backing of the Palestinian Fedayeen.32
The Cold War framing of Argentine policy was evident in diplomatic approaches elsewhere but also in what the Foreign Ministry did with those on-the-ground interpretations and reports. In 1967, the Argentine ambassador in South Korea, Alejandro A. Galarce found laughable a suggestion from UN Secretary General U Thant that the United States stop its bombing campaign in North Vietnam without a quid pro quo from the North Vietnamese or the Viet Cong. “This … ignores,” he wrote, “that the only means of stopping the Communist advance or bringing about an end of the war is to destroy through bombing the centers of support for the Red Army.” Galarce squared Argentina’s geopolitical circle with Lascano’s views by arguing that should it win its initiatives in the Southeast Asian conflict, China would move to assert “predominance” over the Middle East.33
A key architect of Argentina’s late 1960s Middle East strategy took it all in. Ambassador to the United Nations José María Ruda privately linked his country’s interests in the Middle East to equivalent Cold War interests in Southeast Asia when he reported to his superiors in Buenos Aires in 1968 that the risk of war in Cambodia had diminished thanks to Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s pro–United States position and to the effectiveness of the U.S. bombing campaign in Laos (known at the time in diplomatic circles) as the only force blocking further Communist advances in the region.34
The persistence of Cold War anti-Communism in Argentine foreign policy and strategy dovetailed with a domestic equivalent that transcended democratic and dictatorial regimes. In 1951, the Argentine government identified “vigilance and repression” as a first domestic priority in confronting Communism.35 In 1959 and 1960, a high point of post–World War II Argentine democratic governance, Argentine policing and justice retained strong Cold War anti-Communist operating precepts dating not only from the recent Revolución Libertadora, but also from the period of peronista governance before 1955. Argentine authorities regularly detained purported Communists for unspecified crimes. In August 1960, for example, the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Federico Monjardín, complained to Interior Minister Alfredo Roque Vítolo that federal police had detained two Communist Party members in Luján without cause. Late at night, police had stormed their homes, breaking windows and doors with submachine guns at the ready. Both suspects were apprehended. One of those sought climbed out of bed and surrendered immediately, but was still subjected to blows as reported by neighbors. Several days later, the two were released without charges having been laid. Then a few days after that, at 11:00 A.M., police went after them again, this time in the manner of grim Keystone Kops. Monjardín told the interior minister that anybody in Luján could have told the police where the two were that morning. Instead, several police vehicles raced about town, sirens blaring until they finally settled inexplicably on the offices of the newspaper El Civisimo, which they entered—guns at hand—and ransacked. Having published for forty years as an organ of the centrist Unión Cívica Radical Party, El Civismo was targeted, a police officer stated eventually to the incredulous newspaper director, because there had been reports that it was publishing Communist propaganda.36
Atomic policy expressed each of Argentina’s Cold War policy priorities and reflected the highest level of consistency and continuity across the period. Beginning in the mid-1940s, Argentine leaders, like their equivalents in Canada, France, and other countries, viewed nuclear power as a path to modernity. They imagined it might power a dynamic naval fleet and as a necessity for expanded industry. Most important, they saw the international dissemination of Argentine nuclear technology as a route to strategic influence. From the 1960s forward, Argentina’s Cold War position on nuclear development was anathema to the United States. Argentine authorities held to a distinction between bellicose and nonbellicose nuclear programs. Theirs was peaceful. It had no relevance to weapons systems. Successive U.S. administrations took a different view, never shaped by any specific action taken by Argentina. All nuclear programs, including Argentina’s, had military potential and as such, marked a threat to the international Cold War strategic order. Before 1990, the two countries were never able to reconcile these competing viewpoints. This prompted low-intensity diplomatic tensions at times, but nothing equivalent to the concerns Washington held with regard to India or Pakistan in similar contexts or the issues that almost brought Chile and Argentina to war in the late 1970s. The nuclear standoff between the two countries was marginal to how bilateral relations unfolded. Beginning in the 1960s, Argentine authorities began to target other developing nations as markets for nuclear technology, products, and education.
Argentine governments adopted a set of foreign policy positions that shaped clear boundaries on their independence. Argentina tacitly and often practically backed U.S. Cold War positions on international Communism. Those positions dovetailed with domestic anti-Communism, but did not preclude Buenos Aires from adopting diplomatic positions critical of the United States. While Argentine leaders saw their adherence to the Rio Pact as making them part of a U.S.-led military alliance, they also saw the practical benefits to diplomatic independence. Each of these elements, along with a developmentalist foreign policy, shaped the country’s nuclear foreign policy. After 1980, such initiatives were explicitly packaged as a Third World, “Sur-Sur” outreach. However, throughout the Cold War, profit, economic advantage, and a boost to the Argentine technology sector drove Argentine nuclear policy. Argentina sold to whoever was interested in buying.
Longstanding nonadherence to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) (effective 1970) did not signify that Argentina was a proliferator of nuclear arms or that it favored proliferation. While it was ostensibly designed to block the proliferation of nuclear weapons and while treaty adherents took the position that the accord governed only arms, Argentina held that the treaty discriminated against nonnuclear powers in their potential for the development of nonbellicose nuclear programs. Article 18 of the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean (Treaty of Tlatelolco, 1968) preserved the right of nonnuclear powers to conduct nuclear explosions toward peaceful uses of atomic energy, a right prohibited by the NPT. Privately, Argentine authorities were more nuanced than in their public stand against NPT. They recognized that there was practical merit to the NPT failure to distinguish between bellicose and nonbellicose nuclear explosions. A 1975 memorandum from the Ministry of Foreign Relations Department of International Organizations (United Nations Division), for example, noted that the NPT prohibition on nuclear explosions of any sort made sense when bearing in mind the recent nuclear explosion in India. Publicly there was no Argentine reconciling the India case with the fact that the NPT proscription limited a nonbellicose nuclear option for Argentina. According to the Argentine permanent representative to the United Nations in 1968, “The key dilemma presented by [the NPT] is how to achieve a balance between an effective guarantee of national security, to which we all have a right, while at the same time creating an instrument that will not function as a barrier to nuclear development in our countries”—that is, underdeveloped countries. Argentina felt the effects of the India explosion in 1974. Before then, it enjoyed somewhat open technological and scientific assistance from more developed countries. After the explosion, Canada was among several countries to restrict the transfer of nuclear technology. The result, for Argentina, was some loss of economic and development opportunities over the short and medium terms.37
As a matter of Cold War policy, Argentines identified three dimensions of nonproliferation: “vertical,” “geographical,” and “horizontal.” The first two spoke not to a shared nuclear interest with other developing countries but to a long-term Argentine sense of hypocrisy on the part of the five nuclear powers and Argentina’s distance from proliferation. Vertical proliferation marked the exponential growth of nuclear arsenals among the great powers. Geographical proliferation represented the dissemination of nuclear weapons by the great powers outside their national territories in those of their dependencies, other states, or air and maritime space outside of great power national jurisdictions. Horizontal proliferation was what concerned the United States and other strong advocates of nonproliferation agreements. It covered the ambiguous—and in the opinion of Argentine leaders, undemonstrated—likelihood that new nuclear arms players might emerge among nation-states that previously did not have such weapons. Advanced as a panacea by its advocates, the NPT not only ignored the first two categories, it legitimized them. Only one clause in the NPT concerned vertical proliferation. Clause 6 determined that the nuclear powers promised nothing more than to negotiate in good faith on the end of the nuclear arms race and disarmament—a process that bore little fruit in the two decades between the signing of the treaty and the end of the Cold War.38
There was no middle ground on the disparate Argentine and U.S. approaches to nuclear arms and proliferation. While the 1974 Indian explosion of a nuclear device proved to Americans that horizontal proliferation was real, Argentines privately reached the same conclusion and, at the same time, took it as an indication of the reverse. It was an exceptional event. That there was only one explosion of this sort after NPT demonstrated that horizontal proliferation was a fantasy even as the great powers added thousands of weapons to their arsenals. For successive Argentine governments the way to prevent horizontal proliferation was simple: end the nuclear arms race and dissolve the barriers to the free and open transfer of nuclear technology and know-how for the peaceful development of nuclear energy. Argentines complained publicly and privately that limits placed by the United States and Canada on nuclear technology transfers to Argentina after India’s first nuclear explosion in 1974 had had a deleterious impact on the Argentine atomic sector. But that impact was minimal. And there were benefits. Those limits accelerated Argentina’s push to nuclear self-sufficiency and scientific advancement, not to sharing nuclear secrets with other developing countries or easing tensions with their chief rival in the sector, Brazil. Thus they contributed, for example, to the Argentine decision to develop the capacity to enrich its own uranium, and then to produce its first batch on the eve of democracy’s return in 1983. Argentine nuclear physicists, chemists, and engineers continued to work at an advanced scientific level, often in academic and other collaborations with their colleagues in the United States. Perhaps more important, Argentine policymakers saw no contradiction in opposing U.S. policy on nuclear proliferation and at the same time advancing strategic positions that conformed to U.S. Cold War strategic stands.
The transition from dictatorship to democracy in 1983 marks the most striking of the chronological narrative breaks in how Argentines imagine their past. It is also the key point through which nuclear policy remained unchanged in larger contexts of global strategy, much of which continued to draw implicitly and explicitly on 1950s anti-Communist precepts. By 1980, Argentina had a commercial nuclear reactor in operation (Atucha at 334 MWe) and a second under construction (Embalse at 600MWe). The Argentine government had plans for four more plants to come on line by 1990. That they were not built had less to do with the transition to democracy three years later than with the shift away from nuclear power in many countries, including Canada and the United States, as the 1970s oil crisis subsided.
In 1977, the Argentine National Atomic Energy Commission (CNEA) designed and built an experimental reactor in Lima, Peru. Argentine leaders hoped the Peru project would establish Argentina as a leading nuclear power with a mandate to assist other developing countries to develop nuclear technologies. Argentina planned to equip Peru with an infrastructure of nuclear science and technology that would include the production of radioisotopes, a disposal system for nuclear waste, and the training of technical staff to operate all facilities. The 1977 bilateral contract ensured that Peruvian professionals would take part in each stage of the project from design to reactor commissioning. In addition, then, to a more common turnkey contract, Peru would emerge with a nuclear research center, as well as a local team of technicians to run the national nuclear project.39
Through the 1980s, the Peru venture was a model for Argentine foreign atomic policy and a centerpiece for late–Cold War Argentine international relations. Nuclear ties were meant to foster business opportunities and good bilateral relations with other countries across political divides, without prejudice to a pro-U.S. strategic foreign policy. Argentina opened and maintained strong nuclear ties with nations from every region and every political bloc. Where Argentina balked at establishing nuclear ties, it did so for narrow pragmatic purposes. In the late 1970s, for example, nuclear cooperation with South Africa was filtered through familiar and consistent geostrategic reasoning. In reference to apartheid and the occupation of Namibia, Argentina found the political situation in South Africa “delicate.” The Argentine-assisted development of South Africa’s nuclear sector would engender apprehension in the United Nations, in France, and in the United States. It would produce “totally negative consequences” for Argentina among governments that had expressed support for Argentina’s military government. To support the South African nuclear program presented a threat of criticism on human rights in the international community. The decision by the military government, then, to back away from atomic cooperation with South Africa had nothing to do with the evils of apartheid, but rather with concerns over isolation in the international community.40
After 1983, the Argentine government identified a strong position in favor of nuclear disarmament in conjunction with an effort to “recover the confidence of the international community” lost during the military dictatorship. That narrative of disarmament referenced a strategic position going back to the 1950s, Argentina’s active participation since 1969 in the Conference on Disarmament, and the nation’s membership in the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), where, along with India and Mexico, Argentine leaders had helped define the NAM’s position on atomic weapons.41 Nothing had changed here in the 1983 transition to democracy. The Argentine government continued to seek nuclear markets and partnerships on the same policy premises as in the past, with no bearing on its geopolitics or its support for disarmament.
In keeping with excellent ties to the Soviet Union during the dictatorship, Argentina maintained ongoing relations with the Soviet Union on nuclear matters through the 1980s. From 1981 to 1985, Argentina bought tube-laminating machines from the Soviet Union for the building of reactor fuel tubes to hold enriched uranium. In 1981, the Argentine government acquired five tons of heavy water from the Soviet Union to help power its Canadian-built Atucha I commercial nuclear plant. In 1982, Argentina contracted with the USSR for the enrichment of uranium for use in the reactor it had built in Peru and for the experimental reactor at the Centro Atómico Ezeiza, outside Buenos Aires. In 1988, Argentina negotiated for the acquisition of a further two tons of heavy water.42
In 1987, Argentina and Syria opened conversations on nuclear cooperation and exchanged nuclear delegations. In 1988, working with the Argentine government, the state-owned Investigaciones Aplicadas S.E. offered the Syrian government a contract to build a turnkey commercial nuclear reactor similar to one the company had recently built for Algeria.43 Argentine leaders saw an opportunity that, once again, was strictly business. The fall of President Jacques Chirac in 1989 brought an end to France’s interest in building a reactor in Syria, as did political turmoil in the USSR. Syria welcomed the Argentine pitch.44 In 1985, Argentina and China signed a fifteen-year agreement fomenting the transfer of technology, equipment, and personnel destined exclusively for the peaceful production of nuclear energy. The agreement was modeled on a similar agreement negotiated in 1985 by the United States and China. For Roberto M. Ornstein, CNEA director of international affairs, the hook for China was Argentina’s offer of what he wrote in English as “on the job training”—Argentine technicians and scientists training their Chinese equivalents in the design, project management, construction, and technology transfer in the building of commercial nuclear reactors.45
The end of the Argentine Cold War was encapsulated in Argentina’s push for leadership among nations working on nuclear disarmament and, at the same time, on the development of missile systems with the capacity to carry conventional and nuclear payloads. While Argentine officials played an increasingly important role among nonaligned nations advocating for disarmament, their meetings with officials from the USSR and United States to demand arms reduction were often undemanding. In 1983, in the shadow of US-USSR arms control negotiations and the killings of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi and Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, Sweden, Argentina, India, Mexico, Greece, and Tanzania opened discussions among the “Group of Six” on reducing or eliminating missiles in Europe and on an aggressive nuclear arms reduction program. The other Group of Six members shared Argentina’s refusal to follow U.S. pressures on arms reduction by region, emphasizing global solutions and a new issue of demilitarizing outer space. Five years later, however, Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlson expressed the group’s disappointment that Moscow and Washington had by and large ignored them, particularly with regard to their advocacy of a complete ban on nuclear weapons testing.46
There is no evidence that the Group of Six altered how the great powers or other nations developing nuclear weapons proceeded with their arms programs or that they had any illusions about doing so. When Argentine officials met with their U.S. and Soviet counterparts in the 1980s, their statements on arms reduction were made and received as an obligatory formality, much in the way Soviet officials had chided Argentina in the late 1970s on human rights. In September 1988, Soviet and Argentine foreign ministry officials met for an annual bilateral private meeting on disarmament. It was a recital of official positions, not a conversation. On the December 1987 signing of the first nuclear disarmament treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union specifically targeting the elimination of all intermediate-range missiles, Argentina expressed its approval and itemized further weapons reductions that were needed. The Soviets responded simply by noting that any intermediate-range missile reductions were conditional on the two sides reaching a new agreement on cruise missiles launched from warships and on nuclear weapons in space. Argentina halfheartedly pressed the Soviets on wrapping up longstanding negotiations on a comprehensive agreement for the elimination of nuclear weapons.47
While Argentina pressed the great powers on disarmament, the Argentine military had begun to develop the Cóndor II rocket. In April 1987 and September 1988, with greater concern than had ever been shown for Argentina’s nuclear program, the United States held multilateral meetings with Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan on the Cóndor II. In response to the rocket project, they agreed on restrictions on technology transfers to Argentina with possible military applications. U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz held further meetings with his equivalents from the Soviet Union, China, and Brazil, as well as with Argentine Foreign Minister Dante Caputo. U.S. Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci met with his Argentine equivalent Horacio Jaunarena to express concerns. This was the first time that United States and Argentine defense ministers had met one on one during the Cold War.48
Argentine authorities recognized the fine line they were walking between the peaceful and the bellicose. In 1988, Ministry of Foreign Relations, Department of Nuclear Affairs (DIGAN) director Roberto García Moritán privately addressed accusations that the Condor missile program had crossed that line. The missile program had developed an Argentine capacity to build a rocket for peaceful purposes that “technically, is not a missile.” García Moritán understood the nuance. Like Argentina’s nuclear program, the Condor program was a peaceful one in terms of stated intent and track record. The rockets, Argentina maintained, were for the deployment of meteorological and communications satellites. It escaped nobody’s attention that the program had the financial and technical backing of the Egyptian government, itself a beneficiary of massive U.S. military aid. But García Moritán also reasoned that the program was never a secret: it was covered widely in academia and the media and exhibited at the 1987 Argentine Air Force celebration of its seventy-fifth anniversary. Egyptian help on the Condor project was in part a quid pro quo for progress on a bilateral nuclear agreement that would include Argentine technical expertise in the building of a nuclear reactor.49
Perón’s rise showed some of the hallmarks of two other nationalist leaders espousing third way foreign policies, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Charles De Gaulle. At the same time, Perón differed from the Egyptian, the French, and other third way nationalist models on lines in the sand over which Argentina would not cross—and in proximity to the United States. Those lines distinguish Argentina’s far more tepid flirtation with a third way from that of the others. The latter generated more severe breaks with the United States, more lasting policy shifts, military conflict or the threat of international strategic crisis, and perhaps most significantly, and as a consequence of those actions, changes in important international followings and global leadership roles. Argentina’s international positions might as reasonably be compared with those of Canada as those of third way exponents. A middle power with a mixed economy like Canada, Argentina cultivated relations with Third World nations often as a path toward more agricultural sales and other economic advantages, but in addition in a manner often independent of the United States; Canada was similar in its strong relations with revolutionary Cuba and Nicaragua, for example. For each, conflicts with the United States on economic and political matters were brief, of little significance to Washington, and against a backdrop to generally strong bilateral ties. Both nations highlighted human rights as a policy priority during the final decade of the Cold War. While there was no Argentine parallel to the significance of Canada’s membership in NATO, Argentina never deviated from an anti-Communist strategic position in line with that of Washington.50
Perón shared the nationalism and anti-elitism of another military officer who led a political revolution at roughly the same time, Egypt’s Nasser. Both charted political movements that linked modernity to international leadership, Third World solidarity, and populist revolution primed in significant measure by an industrial working class. But Nasser’s willingness to confront imperial power militarily during the Suez Crisis and the Arab nationalist policies that led to Egypt’s political union with Syria had no equivalent in Argentina. Moreover, while Nasser’s economic program—focused on the expropriation of large landholders and the buttressing of state capitalism—functioned for almost two decades as a “frenetically action-oriented”51 strategic basis for his Third World nationalism, Argentina never advanced economic confrontation with the great powers as policy, over an extended time period.52
Like De Gaulle, Perón imagined a continental bloc of nations free of U.S. influence. But while Perón had some success in regional labor diplomacy,53 it was very limited in comparison with the impact of De Gaulle’s withdrawal of France from NATO. Like France (and Canada), Argentina developed a nuclear sector in the 1940s and 1950s capable of a weapons program. Unlike France (though much like Canada), Argentina’s atomic goals never veered toward weapons production (much less a nuclear test) and, as a consequence, never contributed to advancing an equivalent to De Gaulle’s international stature as a strategic antagonist of the United States. Part of what De Gaulle, Nasser, and other third way exponents sought was what Gaullists called national grandeur. In the end, this may be the most significant distinction between Argentina and nations that followed a successful third path during the Cold War. Without the international status, read by multiple measures, of De Gaulle or Nasser, Argentina’s tercera posición remained a vague statement of intent.
1. “Cuando Perón le vendió autos a Fidel (y Brasil se enojó),” Autoblog, 30 November 2016, http://
2. Doc. no. 1974BUENOS00435_b, U.S. Embassy, Argentina, to U.S. Secretary of State, 18 January 1974, Wikileaks, wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1974BUENOS00435_b.html. [19 May 2017]; José Bodes and José Andrés López, Perón-Fidel Linea Directa: Cuando la Argentina rompió el bloqueo a Cuba (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Deldragón, 2003), 91–104.
3. U.S. Department of State, Memorandum of Conversation, “U.S.-Argentine Relations,” Alberto Vignes, Henry Kissinger, Neil Seidenman, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York, 5 October 1973, Box 2092, Subject-Numeric File, 1970–1973, Record Group (RG) 59, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD (hereafter NARA); David M. K. Sheinin, “Making Friends with Perón: Developmentalism and State Capitalism in U.S.-Argentine Relations, 1970–1975,” Federal History 5 (January 2013): 111–12.
4. “Cuando Perón habló de ‘exterminar uno a uno’ a los guerrilleros,” Clarín, 18 January 2009, www
5. “Esta es la tercera posición,” in Perón Mediante: Gráfica peronista del periodo clásico, ed. Guido Indij (Buenos Aires: La Marca, 2006), 223.
6. Doc. no. 1974BUENOS02392_b, U.S. Embassy, Argentina, to U.S. Secretary of State, 3 April 1974, Wikileaks, wikileaks.piraattipuolue.fi/plusd/cables/1974BUENOS02392_b.html; David M. K. Sheinin, Argentina and the United States: An Alliance Contained (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006); Ezequiel F. Pereyra, Director of External Politics, Argentine Foreign Relations Ministry, “Entrevista del Director General de Política Exterior con S. E. Embajador de Cuba,” 24 April 1976, 419-B, Archivo del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto, Buenos Aires (hereafter AMREC).
7. Carlos Escudé, El estado parasitario: Argentina, ciclos de vaciamiento, clase política directiva y colapso de la política exterior (Buenos Aires: Lumiere, 2005); Mario Rapoport and Noemí Brenta, “La gran inundación,” Página/12, 26 March 2013; David M. K. Sheinin, “Peripheral Anti-Imperialism: The New Revisionism and the History of Argentine Foreign Relations in the Era of the Kirchners,” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 25, no. 1 (2014): 63–84.
8. Leandro Morgenfeld, Relaciones peligrosas: Argentina y Estados Unidos (Buenos Aires: Capital Intelectual, 2012); Mario Rapoport and Claudio Spiguel, Relaciones tumultuosas: Estados Unidos y el primer peronismo (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2009).
9. See for example, Germán Ferrari, 1983, el año de la democracia (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2013); Horacio Gaggero, Alicia Iriarte, and Humberto Roitberg, Argentina, 15 años después: de la transición a la democracia al menemismo, 1982–1997 (Buenos Aires: Proyecto Editorial, 2000).
10. Isabella Cosse, Pareja, sexualidad y familia en los años sesenta (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2010), 184.
11. Karina Felitti, La revolución de la pildora: Sexualidad y política en los años sesenta (Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2012).
12. Carlos A. Scolari, Historietas para sobrevivientes: Comic y cultura de masas en los años 80 (Buenos Aires: Colihue, 1999), 249–93.
13. Matias Raña, Guerreros del cine: Argentino, fantástico e independiente (Buenos Aires: Fan, 2010); Mabel Bellucci, Historia de una desobediencia: Aborto y feminismo (Buenos Aires: Capital Intelectual, 2014), 297–313; Valeria Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics & Sexuality from Perón to Videla (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
14. Penny M. Von Eschen, “ ‘Satchmo Blows Up the World’: Jazz, Race, and Empire during the Cold War,” in “Here, There and Everywhere”: The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture, ed. Reinhold Wagnleitner and Elaine Tyler May (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), 164.
15. Author’s interview with Darío Lopérfido, December 12, 2016, Buenos Aires.
16. Jorge Ezequiel Sánchez, El fenómeno TC (Buenos Aires: Clarín, 2004); Irma Emiliozzi, Los Emiliozzi: De la historia a la leyenda (Buenos Aires: Claridad, 2015); “Chevrolet busca un campeonato,” Corsa, 92 (January 23, 1968): 4–7.
17. Javier García Blanco, Humanoides. Encuentros con entidades desconocidas (Buenos Aires: Edaf del Plata, 2003), 97–100.
18. Comment to the author by Mark Wasserman, 5 March 2016, Philadelphia.
19. Gilbert M. Joseph, “What We Now Know and Should Know: Bringing Latin America More Meaningfully into Cold War Studies,” in In From the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 7.
20. Ariel C. Armony, “Transnationalizing the Dirty War: Argentina in Central America,” in In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 134–68.
21. José Humberto Sosa Molina, Minister of Defense, to Hipólito Paz, Minister of Foreign Relations, 16 March 1951; Ministry of Defense, “La Junta Interamericana de Defensa, 16 March 1951; Grupo de Trabajo No. 2, minuta 1, 23 February 1951; Minuta 2, 28 February 1951, File: “Estudio Técnico-Militar,” all in Working Group No. 1, File IV, AMREC.
22. No. IRI. ARG. 4. U.S. United States Information Service (USIS), “USIS Survey in Economic Field,” 15 November 1955, Box 1, Field Research Reports, 1953–82, Entry 1007B, RG 306, NARA.
23. U.S. Department of State, “Argentine Beryl,” 13 May 1947, File 21, Box 25, Atomic Energy Matters, 1944–52, RG 59, NARA.
24. Horace T. Reno, “Beryllium,” in United States Bureau of Mines, Minerals Yearbook: Metals and Minerals, 1954, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1958), 221–27. U.S. Department of State, “Radioactivity Detectors for Argentina and Beryl for the United States,” June 7, 1948, File 21, Box 25, Atomic Energy Matters, 1944–52, RG 59, NARA; A. A. Welles, United States Atomic Energy Commission, to R. Gordon Arneson, Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of State for Atomic Energy Affairs, “Argentine Embargo on Beryl,” 5 October 1948, File 21, Box 25, Atomic Energy Matters, 1944–52, RG 59, NARA; D. H. Hershberger, Treasurer, The Brush Beryllium Company, to Otto Tolderlund, Minerales y Metales, 7 December 1951, File 21, Box 25, Atomic Energy Matters, 1944–52, RG 59, NARA.
25. Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto (hereafter MREC), “Política de los Estados Unidos de América con respect a la Argentina,” 1947, Memorandums, 1947–48, 36, AMREC.
26. MREC, “Reunión de Consulta de los Ministros de Relaciones Exteriores de las Republicas Americanas,” 21 December 1950, IVa. Reunión de Ministros de Relaciones Exteriores de las Repúblicas Americanas, Comisión Especial, No. 8, AMREC.
27. José Carlos Vittone, Embajador Argentina ante la Organización de Estados Americanos (OEA), “Recapitulación de los aspectos más importantes de la política sustentada por el gobierno argentine en la OEA,” 28 December 1953, 554, AMREC; 160, José Carlos Vittone, “Informe complementario, s/recapitulación de intervenciones argentinas en la O.E.A.,” 8 April 1954, 554, AMREC.
28. Unión de Mujeres de la Argentina, Filial Ciudad Evita, to Perón, June 1954; Residents of Barrio Candioti to Remorino, June 1954; Asociación Esdudiantes, Ciencias Económicas, Concordia, to Remorino, June 1954, 15c, División Estados Americanos, AMREC.
29. No. 454, Galich to Remorino, 25 June 1954, Caso Guatemala, OEA, 2174, AMREC.
30. MREC, Departamento de Organismos Internacionales y Tratados, “Quinta Reunión de Consulta de Ministros de Relaciones Exteriores,” 7, 1956, AMREC.
31. MREC, Departamento de Organismos Internacionales y Tratados, “Quinta Reunión de Consulta de Ministros de Relaciones Exteriores.”
32. No. 61, Lascano to Foreign Relations Ministry, 8 July 1969, Crisis del Medio Oriente; No. 651/155, José María Ruda to Foreign Relations Ministry, 7 May 1969, Conflicto Árabe-Israelí, Refugiados Palestinos, 1969, Packet 26, Box 5, AMREC.
33. No. 5, Galarce to Nicanor Costa Méndez, “Empeoramiento de la situación en Asia,” 22 May 1967, File 37, Box 8, AMREC.
34. No. 87/8/108, Ruda to Costa Méndez, 17 January 1968, “Informar” problemas fronteras Laos, Camboya,” Cuestiones del Sudeste de Asia, 1966–72, File 37, Box 8, AMREC.
35. No. 5, Departamento de Política, MREC, IV Reunión de Consulta, 19 January 1951, No. 5, 3, AMREC.
36. Monjardín to Vítolo, 29 August 1960; Juan Enrique Olivella to Director de Coordinación Federal, Policía Federal, 29 August 1960, File 85, Box 139, Secretos, Confidenciales, y Reservados, Ministry of the Interior, Archivo Intermedio, Archivo General de la Nación (henceforth AI-AGN), Buenos Aires.
37. MREC, Department of International Organizations (United Nations Division) to Eastern Europe Division, “Visita Embajador Tsarapkin,” 10 July 1975, 110, Noproliferación de armas nucleares, AMREC.
38. No. 67, Asuntos Nucleares y Desarme, Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto (MREC), to Argentine Embassy, Ottawa, “Adelanto lineamientos de la política argentina sobre T.N.P.,” 13 May 1985, 26, Dirección General De Asuntos Nucleares (DIGAN), AMREC.
39. Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica (CNEA), Argentina, “Possibilities of Cooperation in the Nuclear Field Offered by the Argentine Republic,” 1980, 3, Movimiento de Países No Alineados (NOAL), AMREC.
40. Carlos Ortiz de Rozas, Comisión Desarme, MREC, to Subsecretario de Relaciones Exteriores, “Consulta efectuada por la Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica,” January 15, 1979; A. J. A. Roux, President, Atomic Energy Board (South Africa), to Carlos Castro Madero, President, CNEA, 28 September 1978, 25, DIGAN, MREC.
41. MREC, “Sentido de la Iniciativa de las Seis Naciones Para la Paz y el Desarme,” n.d. [1988], 15, DIGAN, MREC.
42. No. 610.000-925/88, Roberto Ornstein to Sub-Secretariat of International Cooperation, MREC, 10 August 1988, 43, DIGAN, AMREC.
43. No. 010289/89, García Moritán to Argentine Embassy, Syria, “Siria-Relación nuclear-visita director Comisión,” 14 March 1989, 15, DIGAN, AMREC; No. 010673/1989, Guyer to DIGAN, “Presentación oferta argentina p/suministro invest. nuclear,” 28 September 1989, 15, DIGAN, MREC; No. 010069/89, García Moritán to Secretaría de Estado de Asuntos Multilaterales y Espaciales, 24 August 1989, 15, DIGAN, AMREC; José María Trillo, Argentine Chargé d’Affaires, Damascus, to Enrique J. Candioti, Director General, Seguridad Internacional y Asuntos Estratégicos, MREC, 12 December 1990, 15, DIGAN, AMREC.
44. No. 010378/90, Trillo to DIGAN, “Requerir información estado bilateral en temas nucleares,” 4 January 1990, 15, DIGAN, AMREC.
45. Roberto O. Cirimello, Development Manager, and Enrique E. García, Manager, Heavy Water Projects, CNEA, “Desarrollo Nuclear de la República Popular China,” n.d. [1988], 15 DIGAN, MREC; 575/86, Adolfo Saracho, Director, Nuclear Affairs, MREC, to Secretaría de Estado de Relaciones Internacionales, “Compra Agua Pesada a China Popular,” 2 October 1986, 79, DIGAN, AMREC; 610.000-1088/85, Roberto M. Ornstein, Director, International Affairs, CNEA to DIGAN, 28 August 1985, 79, DIGAN, MREC; 610.000-1047/85, Ornstein to DIGAN, 20 August 1985, 79, DIGAN, MREC.
46. Andrés Ortega, “Los ‘seis’ aprueban hoy una declaración que pide prohibir las pruebas nucleares,” El País (Madrid), 21 January 1988, http://
47. No. 967/88, DIGAN, “Consulta política annual con la cancillería soviética sobre temas de desarme,” 29 September 1988, 43, DIGAN, MREC.
48. García Moritán, “Sugerir Tratamiento Tema Espacial con los E.E.U.U.,” 19 October 1988, 43, DIGAN, MREC; García Moritán, “Sugerir tratamiento tema especial en próxima reunion entre señores Caputo y Schultz,” 5 October 1988, 43, DIGAN, MREC.
49. No. 959, García Moritán to Cabinet of the Foreign Minister, “Relación con la República Árabe de Egipto en los usos pacíficos de la energya nuclear,” 26 September 1988, 43, DIGAN, MREC.
50. Maurice Vaïsse, La puissance ou l’influence? La France dans le monde depuis 1958 (Paris: Fayard, 2009), 104–07.
51. Tarek Osman, Egypt on the Brink: From Nasser to the Muslim Brotherhood (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 53.
52. Steven A. Cook, The Struggle for Egypt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 42–69.
53. Ernesto Semán, Ambassadors of the Working Class: Argentina’s International Labor Activists and Cold War Democracy in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 15, 108.