Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

With focus on Iran, Brazil gets no favors

Brazil along with a uranium enrichment program anticipates signing contracts with Russia that will give them the capability of bringing to orbit large payloads or to launch ICBMs

It is very clear, Brazil, our neighbor to the South, is going for ICBMs with nuclear warheads. This apparently is being kept quiet probably at least until after our presidential election.
#msg-2800815

-Am


Larry Rohter/NYT NYT Saturday, September 25, 2004
Agency demands uranium plant access

RIO DE JANEIRO With Brazil hoping to begin operating a uranium enrichment plant by as early as year's end, the International Atomic Energy Agency is intensifying efforts to reach an agreement that would guarantee its inspectors unimpeded access to the factory that will produce the nuclear fuel.

Though President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva once complained about being armed with "slingshots" while other countries have "cannons," no one here or abroad is suggesting that Brazil intends to build an atomic bomb. But with the atomic energy agency focused on potentially threatening nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, Brazil's demands for more favorable treatment have created an impasse and fed concerns that any easing of standards would establish a dangerous precedent.

"This comes up at a very, very sensitive and inopportune time," said James Goodby, who was the Clinton administration's chief arms reduction negotiator and is now a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "Brazil is losing a chance for statesmanship by being difficult at a moment when there is broad interest in reining in Iran."

On Thursday, the Brazilian media quoted the minister of science and technology, Eduardo Campos, who was in Vienna to attend an atomic energy agency conference, as having announced an agreement that would allow the agency only partial access to the hundreds of centrifuges at the core of the Brazilian plant. The ministry's Web site later amended that declaration after the agency said negotiations have not concluded.

"We've made progress, but we remain in discussion with the Brazilian authorities on this issue," Mark Gwozdecky, an agency spokesman, said in a telephone interview from Vienna. "The minister was a bit more optimistic."

Brazil has the world's fifth largest natural reserves of uranium, and the plant at the center of the controversy, in Resende, about 160 kilometers, or 100 miles, northwest of Rio de Janeiro, would allow it to join a select group of about a dozen nations that produce enriched uranium. Both the plant and the enrichment program are partly operated and controlled by the Brazilian Navy, and thus are considered to have both possible civilian and military applications.

Brazil's official position, as expressed by Defense Minister Jose Viegas earlier this year, is that it deserves a "dignified and differentiated" treatment, recognizing that it is not a rogue state and that its nuclear program exists exclusively for peaceful purposes. But arms control analysts in the United States and Europe have rejected that approach.

"If we give Brasilia a pass at the same time that we are bearing down on Tehran, it not only will send exactly the wrong message to would-be proliferators, but will sharply diminish any prospects for success with Iran," Brent Scowcroft, a former U.S. national security advisor, wrote in June in an essay published in The Washington Post. "Put simply, the way Brazil is dealt with could prove to be one of the keys in dealing with the Iranian nuclear problem," he continued.

Brazil signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty only in 1997, largely because of resistance by military and nationalist sectors, but has not yet signed an additional protocol that would permit spot inspections at the Resende plant. Though a Foreign Ministry official said Brazil "speaks with one voice on this issue," another official said the current impasse stems in part from continued foot-dragging within the military.

"There are internal divergences between the Foreign Ministry and the navy," said the official, who works in the nuclear field and spoke on condition he not be identified. "Although the navy is willing to account for every gram of fuel, it is balking at letting outsiders have a free run of the structural side, of granting full access to the mechanical and technological aspects."

During the military dictatorship that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985, each of the three military services had its own, largely secret nuclear program. The navy's was the only effort to achieve much success, though plans to build a nuclear submarine, which would use a higher level of enriched uranium, continue to be stymied by budgetary and technical constraints.

In their public statements, both navy and civilian officials have suggested that Brazil sees uranium enrichment as a promising source of income that could ease those problems. It apparently would like to export enriched uranium once Brazil's own needs are met, perhaps to China as da Silva proposed during a state visit there in May, or to license the centrifuge technology.

But some independent experts consider those ambitions to be overblown. They note that there is a glut of uranium on the market, now that atomic powers are building fewer bombs, and that the centrifuge technology Brazil describes as innovative and vulnerable to industrial espionage is in fact widely known.

"These claims of a need to protect industrial secrets are exaggerated, since this technology is used routinely in other applications in other parts of the world," said Jose Goldemberg, a physicist and former secretary of state for science and technology. "National pride is involved here, but I don't know if that is worth arousing the suspicion of the rest of the world."

An atomic energy agency delegation is scheduled to visit the Resende plant in mid-October "to consider possible verification approaches" Brazil has suggested, Gwozdecky said. According to Brazilian experts, the visit is likely to focus on the number and placement of inspection cameras and the visibility of tubes and other parts of the centrifuges, which have been blocked by panels.

"This needs to get done before the plant begins functioning, that's for sure," said a foreign diplomat who is a nuclear affairs specialist. "The bottom line is that the IAEA is going to need full visual access to do proper verification and that standards are the same for similar plants all over the world. There is no discrimination, positive or negative."

The New York Times


http://www.iht.com/articles/540460.html