Editing Huemul Project (section)

==Public reaction==
Shortly after Richter's conference, the matter was discussed in the ''[[Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists]]'', where it was noted that Richter's announcement had revealed no details of the system of operation. They also noted that Richter claimed three key advances during experimentation, but failed to mention any of them during the conference. Finally, although the method for measuring temperature was announced, the temperature itself was not. The [[United States Atomic Energy Commission]]'s (AEC) comment on the announcement was simply that "the Argentine Government announced more than a year ago that it was planning to engage in nuclear research."{{sfn|Cabral|1987|p=89}}

American physicists were universally dismissive of the announcement. Among the more famous responses was that of [[George Gamow]], who said "It seemed to be 95% pure propaganda, 4¾% thermonuclear reactions on a very small scale, and the remaining ¼% probably something better."{{sfn|Cabral|1987|p=90}} [[Ernest Lawrence]] was not so dismissive, noting that, "There is a tendency to laugh it off as being a lot of hot air or something. Well it may be, but we don't know all, and we should make every effort to find out."{{sfn|Cabral|1987|p=90}} [[Edward Teller]] put it succinctly, "Reading one line one has to think he's a genius. Reading the next line, one realizes he's crazy."{{sfn|Arnoux|2011}}

British scientists, at that time working secretly on the [[z-pinch]] fusion concept, did not rule out the possibility of small-scale reactions.{{sfn|Davenport|1983|p=322}} [[George Paget Thomson|George Thomson]], at that time leading the [[United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority]] (AEA), suggested it was simply exaggerated. This opinion was mirrored by [[Mark Oliphant]] in Australia, and [[Werner Heisenberg]] and [[Otto Hahn]] in Germany. Perhaps the most biting criticism came from [[Manfred von Ardenne]], a German physicist now working in the [[Soviet Union]]. He advised that people should ignore Richter's claims, noting that he had worked with Richter during the war and said he confused fantasy with reality.{{sfn|Cabral|1987|p=91}}

In May, the ''[[United Nations World]]'' magazine carried a short article by [[Hans Thirring]], the director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Vienna and a well known author on nuclear matters. He stated that "the chances are 99 to 1 that the explosion in Argentina occurred only in the imagination of a crank or a fraud."{{sfn|Cabral|1987|p=92}} When Thirring heard the announcement, he had gone searching for anyone that knew Richter from before he arrived in Argentina. He found that Richter had studied under Heinrich Rausch von Traubenberg in the 1930s, who described him as a peculiar eccentric, but von Traubenberg had died in 1944 so there was no way to follow up on the story. Richter's dissertation was never published, and the university in Prague burned during the war.{{sfn|Hagood|2014|p=268}}  Richter was invited to prepare a rebuttal, which appeared in the July issue. He simply dismissed Thirring as "a typical textbook professor with a strong scientific inferiority complex, probably supported by political hatred."{{sfn|Cabral|1987|p=94}}