Argentina’s nuclear programme was built on autonomy, not ambition for weapons – yet its decades-long resistance to the non-proliferation regime made it one of the Cold War’s most scrutinised cases.
From a discredited fusion experiment on a remote Patagonian island to becoming Latin America’s foremost exporter of nuclear technology, Argentina’s nuclear trajectory was always harder to categorise than its critics assumed. Its long resistance to the NPT and Treaty of Tlatelolco was rooted in questions of sovereignty and anti-discrimination, not a concealed weapons programme. This episode traces how Argentina’s nuclear nationalism, its uneasy relationship with the international non-proliferation regime, and its rapprochement with Brazil produced the ABACC: one of arms control’s most inventive bilateral solutions.
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