Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

Brazil’s uranium enrichment program, the pieces fall together.


In the next few months Brazil anticipates signing contracts with Russia that will give them the capability of bringing to orbit large payloads or to launch ICBMs

A little-discussed Brazilian uranium enrichment program illustrates some critical flaws in the Bush administration's campaign to prevent the proliferation of what it calls the world's most dangerous weapons.

It is very clear, Brazil, our neighbor to the South, is going for ICBMs with nuclear warheads. This apparently is being kept quiet. -Am


Bush's two-tiered nuclear policy
Allies allowed to proliferate, but U.S. targets unfriendly nations

News analysis

James Sterngold, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, February 22, 2004


At a time when the United States is struggling to undo the damage from a recently uncovered, global black market in nuclear weapons technology, Brazil would seem an unlikely cause for concern.

But some experts say that a little-discussed Brazilian uranium enrichment program illustrates some critical flaws in the Bush administration's campaign to prevent the proliferation of what it calls the world's most dangerous weapons.

Brazil is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT, and insists it has a right under the agreement to enrich uranium for commercial reactors, even to export it. Brazil has opened its facilities to some inspections to guarantee they are not being misused, while resisting others. Brazil even had a weapons program at one time.

Yet the United States has not demanded that the Brazilians dismantle their program or even confronted the country publicly over what officials say has been its reluctance to grant free access to International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors.

Much of what Brazil has done, Iran has also attempted.

But President Bush has declared Iran to be one-third of the "axis of evil" and is trying to get its enrichment program shut down. Brazil, unlike Iran, has not been accused of harboring terrorists and it does not refer to the United States as "the great Satan," so, to Washington, it does not present the same menace.

While the IAEA is exerting enormous pressure on Iran to admit inspectors without restrictions, there is no public concern over Brazil's enrichment program and the possibility of leaks of technology or materials.

The contrast of the two cases underscores a sharp philosophical divide that lies beneath the debate on the best way to stop nuclear proliferation:

-- Should the policy be based on a view that nuclear weapons are not inherently bad, but rather perilous only if they fall into the wrong hands?

-- Or should the international policy be that the weapons are so dangerous that the aim should be applying restrictions equally and eliminating all warheads and production programs, even in the United States?

The Bush administration, experts on both sides of the divide say, has clearly embraced the first approach. It is not applying pressure on current allies such as Pakistan, India, Israel or Brazil, for instance, to close enrichment or weapons programs or to eliminate warheads -- even after the recently disclosed sale of Pakistani know-how to Iran, Libya and North Korea demonstrated that allies can pose a terrible threat.

Neither is the United States offering to destroy any of the weapons from its stockpile of more than 10,000 warheads or stop the production of warhead components. Bush has initiated programs to develop a new generation of specialized warheads.And the administration has abandoned efforts to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would prohibit nuclear testing.

Not surprisingly, even some experts who believe the United States needs to maintain a stockpile of nuclear weapons accuse the White House of hypocrisy. It relies on a double standard, they say, that may undermine the moral weight of nonproliferation efforts unless the United States embraces mutual arms reductions and a gradual elimination of the means for producing the materials used in the weapons.

"I see no sign that arms control is in the administration's thinking at all," said Michael May, a former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which designs nuclear weapons, and now a professor emeritus at the Center for International Security And Cooperation at Stanford. "I see no sign of it. It's a real shortcoming. That has to be part of the efforts."

This debate burst into the open when Bush delivered a major address on Feb. 11, offering proposals for tightening the controls over the spread of nuclear technology and weapons materials, without any mention of broader arms reductions or restraint of the nuclear programs of America or its allies. He called the weapons the gravest threat facing the country and said it is probably just a matter of time before a terrorist group obtains one.

The next day, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, offered a counterpoint in an opinion piece in the New York Times. "A clear road map for nuclear disarmament should be established," he insisted, in a clear challenge to Washington.

He added, "We must abandon the unworkable notion that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue weapons of mass destruction yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them for security -- and indeed to continue to refine their capacities and postulate plans for their use."

What has disturbed some experts on international affairs and nuclear weapons strategies is that the president's approach could end up hurting any consensus for tougher nonproliferation measures, and may stiffen the resistance, at least by some countries.

"We need to be talking about getting rid of all of the weapons eventually," said John Holdren, a former nuclear scientist and a director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "It is time to think seriously about total nuclear disarmament, like biological weapons and chemical weapons."

What all agree on is that fears about the risks of proliferation have grown sharply since the Pakistani government disclosed that the father of its weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, had for years been illegally selling nuclear enrichment technology and even bomb plans to some of America's most implacable enemies.

That has altered the basic calculus about where the proliferation risks lie and how to reduce them, many experts say.Pakistan has said Khan was working alone, and the Bush administration has accepted that explanation. But the idea that Khan's ring could operate unfettered for so long, and that the weapons program of even an ally could suffer such a disastrous leak, has shaken many experts and added urgency to the need for a stricter nonproliferation regime.

"I suppose the thing that strikes you is how easy it was, how long it went on undetected," said George Shultz, the former secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan and a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, in an interview.

He said he supports the Bush administration's efforts to prevent countries that do not have weapons technology from obtaining it, but he added that he also advocates stronger American arms reductions over time.

He wrote the preface for a new book, "The Gravest Danger: Nuclear Weapons," by two Stanford experts, which argues for greater American restraint, not a double standard. "The title of the book says it all," Shultz said. "I agree with those goals."

Still, there are strong advocates for Bush's positions, based on the notion that America is a force for good and thus it can be trusted with a large stockpile, as can its allies.

C. Paul Robinson, the director of the Sandia National Laboratories, one of the country's weapons design labs, and a long-time arms control adviser, said he believed that the United States needed to push tough nonproliferation measures, but that the country needed to maintain its own arsenal, too.

He argued that the United States and Russia, which have by far the largest stockpiles, have demonstrated they can be trusted to manage the weapons wisely, and that neither country is a nuclear threat, unlike hostile countries such as Iran.

He suggested that the United States is a good judge of which nations are responsible enough to have weapons programs and that, in the long term, he advocated not disarmament but placing weapons under international controls to reduce tensions and the possibility of accidental strikes.

Nuclear weapons experts say the question of who can be counted as responsible has been badly blurred by the Pakistani revelations. If a "rogue scientist" can leak weapons plans, even a responsible government may not be enough, they say. Some experts also point out that even governments allied with the United States have been engaged in proliferation over the years or may have an incentive to in the future.

Israel, for instance, is reported to have once helped South Africa develop its since-abandoned nuclear weapons. China is suspected of providing Pakistan with its first bomb designs. India's foreign minister recently visited Tehran and announced that his country was assisting Iran's commercial nuclear power program. Asia may be even more volatile. If North Korea refuses to dismantle its program, there are worries that South Korea might build the bomb, and Taiwan and even Japan could follow suit.

Said Holdren of Harvard: "As long as the Bush administration policy is 'Do what we say, not what we do,' you are going to have problems getting others to follow us."


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/02/22/NUCLEAR.TMP