Brazil quietly prepares uranium enrichment center

As Iran faces international pressure over developing the raw material for nuclear weapons, Brazil is quietly preparing to open its own uranium enrichment center, capable of producing exactly the same fuel.

Brazil - like Iran - has signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and Brazil's constitution bans the military use of nuclear energy.

Also like Iran, Brazil has cloaked key aspects of its nuclear technology in secrecy while insisting the program is for peaceful purposes.

While Brazil is more cooperative than Iran on international inspections, some worry its new enrichment capability - which eventually will create more fuel than is needed for its two nuclear plants - suggests that South America's biggest nation may be rethinking its commitment to nonproliferation.

"Brazil is following a path very similar to Iran, but Iran is getting all the attention," said Marshall Eakin, a Brazil expert at Vanderbilt University. "In effect, Brazil is benefiting from Iran's problems."
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8/30/1990: THE BRAZILIAN BOMB South America goes ballistic

As the United States worries about missiles in the hands of Iraq and other countries in the Middle East, an egregious case of missile proliferation is taking shape in its own back yard.

Brazil is now turning its largest and most successful space rocket, the Sonda IV, into an intermediate-range, nuclear-capable missile. The con-version is being handled by a research arm of the Brazilian Air Force called CTA (the Aerospace Technology Center). Besides converting the Sonda IV to a missile, CTA is also converting natural uranium into nuclear-weapon-grade material at a secret installation, according to press reports confirmed by US. officials. There is no reason to expect that CTA will keep Brazil's obligatory promise to restrict the European rocket technology to peaceful use. In fact, Brazil is already breaking a peaceful use pledge to West Germany. To import German nuclear equipment, Brazil promised to allow inter-national inspectors to verify that it would not be used to make atomic bombs. Not only has Brazil refused to allow inspections, it has even shifted German-trained engineers from the civilian to the military side of its nuclear program.

Brazil is one of the world's largest arms exporters to the Third World.
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4/16/2004: Brazil's commitment to nonproliferation under suspicion

Brazil's refusal to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to fully inspect one of its nuclear facilities has heightened suspicions about its commitment to nonproliferation.

Although Brazil signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1997 and said its nuclear program has peaceful objectives, suspicions over its commitment have simmered for more than a year.

They came to a head last week after the government confirmed that IAEA inspectors were denied access in February and March to uranium-enrichment centrifuges at a facility under construction in Resende, near Rio de Janeiro.

"If we don't want these kinds of facilities in Iran or North Korea, we shouldn't want them in Brazil," said former U.S. nuclear negotiator James E. Goodby. "You have to apply the same rules to adversaries as you do to friends. I do not see that happening in Brazil."
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10/5/2004: Warming to Brazil, Powell Says Its Nuclear Program Isn't a Concern

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, stepping up the American courtship of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said Tuesday that the United States had no concerns that Brazil was planning to develop nuclear weapons despite the country's resistance to allowing international inspectors greater access to one of its nuclear reactors.

On the nuclear issue, Mr. Powell addressed a question about concerns in many countries that Brazil's opposition to unlimited inspections, as sought by the International Atomic Energy Agency, might embolden other nations like Iran and North Korea to reject inspections of their suspected nuclear arms programs.

"I don't have those concerns," Mr. Powell said at a news conference after meeting with Foreign Minister Celso Amorim. "I don't think Brazil can be talked about in the same vein or put in the same category as Iran or North Korea."