Going Nuclear Over the Falklands

Argentina's President Cristina Fernández stood in front of a map of Las Malvinas (the Falklands) this week to denounce Britain's militarization of the dispute over the islands.Eduardo Di Baia/Associated PressArgentina’s President Cristina Fernández stood in front of a map of Las Malvinas (the Falklands) this week to denounce Britain’s militarization of the dispute over the islands.

LONDON — Argentina has turned up the heat in its rekindled dispute with Britain over the Falkland Islands by accusing the perfidious British of dispatching a nuclear-powered, and possibly nuclear-armed, submarine to the South Atlantic.

The latest twist in the saga of the remote archipelago, which Argentines know at Las Malvinas, dominated the headlines in Buenos Aires on Saturday after Héctor Timerman, the foreign minister, appeared at the United Nations in New York brandishing a dossier on Britain’s alleged military moves.

Tensions have been rising with the approach of the 30th anniversary of a war in which a British military task force crossed 8,000 miles of the Atlantic Ocean to recover the colonial outpost from an Argentine invasion force.

The atmosphere did not improve when London announced that Prince William, heir to the British throne after his father Prince Charles, was heading for the Falklands along with a new warship.

What British officials described as a routine deployment for the 29-year-old air force helicopter pilot was denounced in Buenos Aires as a provocation.

After the 1982 conflict, the two countries pledged to keep the peace over their opposing claims to the islands. Britain believes the islands’ future is a matter for the Falklands’ population of around 3,000 English speakers to decide.

In the meantime, Britain reserves the right to have forces there and to patrol South Atlantic waters. Mark Lyall Grant, Britain’s envoy at the U.N., said his country does not comment on the deployment of its submarines or nuclear weapons. But he dismissed Mr. Timerman’s accusations that it was militarizing the situation as “manifestly absurd”.

Britain has confirmed, however, the dispatch of HMS Dauntless, a new air defense destroyer — again as part of a routine deployment. Nigel Haywood, the British governor of the islands, told the Argentine daily Clarín that sending the Dauntless was just like upgrading your home computer when a better model comes out.

The Falkland Islands were virtually unknown to the wider British public until 1982, when the campaign to “liberate” them cemented the reputation of Margaret Thatcher, the then British prime minister, as “The Iron Lady”.

For Argentines, however, their country’s claim to the barren islands — where sheep outnumber the human population — is something they learn at their mother’s knee.

In the past, successive British governments would dispatch a nuclear submarine to the South Atlantic each year, and made sure the Argentines knew about it, to deter them from seizing the archipelago. That policy was shelved by the Thatcher government to save money, according to former officials familiar with the situation at the time.

Argentina’s murderous military junta, which had wiped out thousands of its own citizens, misread the signal as an indication Britain was ready to abandon the islands. They believed in April 1982 that an uncontested invasion would divert their population’s attention from a dire economic crisis by instilling it with patriotic fervor.

The ruling generals and admirals lost the gamble and were overthrown.

Cynics in Britain say the Argentines were the real victors in the war: they got democracy, while the British got another decade of Margaret Thatcher.