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02/11/2004, 2:21:36
NUCLEAR SECRETS
If Brazil Wants to Scare the World, It's Succeeding
By LARRY ROHTER
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Published: October 31, 2004
http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/r.gifIO de JANEIRO — Throughout the world, Brazil has long had an image as a land of soccer and samba, inhabited by a friendly, easy-going people. So why is it locked in a dispute with the International Atomic Energy Agency, accused by American and other nuclear experts of being a nuclear scofflaw whose actions aid rogue states like North Korea and Iran?
Ever since it began observing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1997, Brazil has resisted allowing international inspectors full access to a secretive uranium enrichment plant 100 miles from here. This month, Science magazine sharpened the controversy with an article saying the installation will give Brazil the "breakout capability" to produce enough fissionable material for six nuclear warheads a year, a claim Brazil's government dismissed as fantasy.
Though the military dictatorship that ruled until 1985 had a clandestine nuclear arms program, no one is saying Brazil is trying to build an atomic bomb now. Rather, the concern is that it could export uranium enriched here, or technology, and that such exports could end up in the hands of rogue states or terrorists. International experts worry about Brazil's export controls, and its history. In the 1980's, it secretly sent Iraq uranium and technical assistance.
To outsiders, Brazil's resistance to inspections doesn't make sense. The world is awash in processed uranium, the nuclear program here has consumed more than $1 billion that could have cut widespread poverty, and Brazil's secrecy has only raised suspicions about its trustworthiness and ultimate intentions, the argument goes.
"I don't see how this should be one of their major preoccupations," said James Goodby, who was the Clinton administration's chief negotiator on nuclear proliferation issues. "Don't they at least worry what the rest of Latin America, especially the Argentines, think of this?"
Among Brazilians, however, the government's assertiveness, like the nuclear program itself, has proved quite popular. Though an American ambassador here once described Brazil as "a country that punches under its weight," the nuclearissue seems to have awakened latent pugnacity, and insecurities.
Writing in the 1950's, the playwright Nelson Rodrigues saw his countrymen as afflicted with a sense of inferiority, and he coined a phrase that Brazilians now use to describe it: "the mongrel complex." Brazil has always aspired to be taken seriously as a world power by the heavyweights, and so it pains Brazilians that world leaders could confuse their country with Bolivia, as Ronald Reagan once did, or dismiss a nation so large - it has 180 million people - as "not a serious country," as Charles de Gaulle did.
Whether coincidence or not, the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has launched an advertising campaign to build national self-esteem even as it stands tough on the nuclear issue. He has also stepped up Brazil's campaign for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, leading the daily O Estado de São Paulo to report that Brazil wants to use its nuclear prowess to raise its profile in world affairs.
"What we're seeing are the same ideas of exaggerated nationalism that we have been through so many times before here, the belief that we are going to be a great power and all of that," said José Goldemberg, a physicist who as minister of science and technology in the early 1990's forced an end to the Brazilian military's secret nuclear weapons program. That deep-seated conviction, he added, "leads to a disproportionate response" and what he called "the chauvinist attitude that nobody can come in here."
Resistance to inspections may also be linked to a widespread belief here that an international conspiracy to keep Brazil from becoming a great power is the only thing holding the country back. A whole literature on that subject has led some Brazilians to argue that the International Atomic Energy Agency, despite its record of impartiality elsewhere, is intent on robbing Brazil of a valuable technological secret.
"Why are the Brazilians hiding both the casing and the rotors of their centrifuges?" wonders Henry D. Sokolski, a former Defense Department official who is now executive director of the Washington-based Nonproliferation Policy Education Center. "Their stated reason, the idea that the I.A.E.A. can't be trusted, is incredibly insulting and downright loopy."
For all of Brazil's concerns about being considered a lightweight, it has recorded some notable technological and scientific achievements. Embraer is the world's third largest aircraft manufacturer, a university consortium in São Paulo has become one of the world's leading centers of genome research, and agricultural researchers have developed significant new crop varieties.
But in a land so hungry for respect, that is not enough. The uranium enrichment plant in Resende has been sold to the public as a triumph of "technology that is 100 percent Brazilian," in the words of the minister of science and technology, Eduardo Campos.
Foreign experts say that claim is not true. In the past, Brazil made similar statements about its space program, trying to hide the role of French and Russian technology obtained through exchange programs or on the international black market.
"There is foreign assistance, and they carefully mislead people or spin it in such a way that it fits their definition of what indigenous means," said David Albright, a physicist and former nuclear inspector who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security. "We know the Germans helped them make an earlier model of centrifuge, and we think the Germans provided them the technology on how to work with carbon fiber centrifuges."
Doubts have also been raised about just how innovative Brazil's centrifuge process is. They focus on a type of magnetic coil that supposedly makes Brazilian centrifuges more efficient and durable than other nations'. The government has insisted on blocking these from inspectors' view.
But "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," Dr. Goldemberg said. "National pride is involved here, but I don't know if that is worth arousing the suspicion of the rest of the world."
The situation has been complicated by Brazil's apparent desire to deal with the outside world under principles that routinely govern relationships here. In the simplest terms, Brazil is arguing that it deserves a wink-and-a-nod exemption from full inspection because Brazilians are nice people, unlike those nasty North Koreans or Iranians.
Brazilian society functions on the basis of what is known as "jeitinho," a notion that all formal laws and rules can be maneuvered around if one is clever or charming enough. Of course, the more powerful you are, the better your chances of getting around cumbersome procedures by "driblando," the verb Brazilians use to describe a soccer player's adroitness with the ball.
After inspectors were finally granted partial access to the Resende plant this month, there were predictions that the standoff would soon be overcome by some jeitinho. Most likely it will. But even so, foreign experts expect another confrontation over inspections in the coming years, this one involving the navy's decades-old campaign to build a nuclear-powered submarine.
"Submarines are not subject to the safeguards regimen, that's my view of things," said Roberto Abdenur, who became Brazil's ambassador to the United States early this year after being his country's representative at the International Atomic Energy Agency. "Brazil will always respect its obligations, but, like any other member state, we also insist on our right to protect our technological secrets."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/31/weekinreview/31roht.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1099371729-mw6app5Ex+Tl+GdNNJCxfw
If Brazil Wants to Scare the World, It's Succeeding
By LARRY ROHTER
http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gif
Published: October 31, 2004
http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/r.gifIO de JANEIRO — Throughout the world, Brazil has long had an image as a land of soccer and samba, inhabited by a friendly, easy-going people. So why is it locked in a dispute with the International Atomic Energy Agency, accused by American and other nuclear experts of being a nuclear scofflaw whose actions aid rogue states like North Korea and Iran?
Ever since it began observing the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1997, Brazil has resisted allowing international inspectors full access to a secretive uranium enrichment plant 100 miles from here. This month, Science magazine sharpened the controversy with an article saying the installation will give Brazil the "breakout capability" to produce enough fissionable material for six nuclear warheads a year, a claim Brazil's government dismissed as fantasy.
Though the military dictatorship that ruled until 1985 had a clandestine nuclear arms program, no one is saying Brazil is trying to build an atomic bomb now. Rather, the concern is that it could export uranium enriched here, or technology, and that such exports could end up in the hands of rogue states or terrorists. International experts worry about Brazil's export controls, and its history. In the 1980's, it secretly sent Iraq uranium and technical assistance.
To outsiders, Brazil's resistance to inspections doesn't make sense. The world is awash in processed uranium, the nuclear program here has consumed more than $1 billion that could have cut widespread poverty, and Brazil's secrecy has only raised suspicions about its trustworthiness and ultimate intentions, the argument goes.
"I don't see how this should be one of their major preoccupations," said James Goodby, who was the Clinton administration's chief negotiator on nuclear proliferation issues. "Don't they at least worry what the rest of Latin America, especially the Argentines, think of this?"
Among Brazilians, however, the government's assertiveness, like the nuclear program itself, has proved quite popular. Though an American ambassador here once described Brazil as "a country that punches under its weight," the nuclearissue seems to have awakened latent pugnacity, and insecurities.
Writing in the 1950's, the playwright Nelson Rodrigues saw his countrymen as afflicted with a sense of inferiority, and he coined a phrase that Brazilians now use to describe it: "the mongrel complex." Brazil has always aspired to be taken seriously as a world power by the heavyweights, and so it pains Brazilians that world leaders could confuse their country with Bolivia, as Ronald Reagan once did, or dismiss a nation so large - it has 180 million people - as "not a serious country," as Charles de Gaulle did.
Whether coincidence or not, the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has launched an advertising campaign to build national self-esteem even as it stands tough on the nuclear issue. He has also stepped up Brazil's campaign for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, leading the daily O Estado de São Paulo to report that Brazil wants to use its nuclear prowess to raise its profile in world affairs.
"What we're seeing are the same ideas of exaggerated nationalism that we have been through so many times before here, the belief that we are going to be a great power and all of that," said José Goldemberg, a physicist who as minister of science and technology in the early 1990's forced an end to the Brazilian military's secret nuclear weapons program. That deep-seated conviction, he added, "leads to a disproportionate response" and what he called "the chauvinist attitude that nobody can come in here."
Resistance to inspections may also be linked to a widespread belief here that an international conspiracy to keep Brazil from becoming a great power is the only thing holding the country back. A whole literature on that subject has led some Brazilians to argue that the International Atomic Energy Agency, despite its record of impartiality elsewhere, is intent on robbing Brazil of a valuable technological secret.
"Why are the Brazilians hiding both the casing and the rotors of their centrifuges?" wonders Henry D. Sokolski, a former Defense Department official who is now executive director of the Washington-based Nonproliferation Policy Education Center. "Their stated reason, the idea that the I.A.E.A. can't be trusted, is incredibly insulting and downright loopy."
For all of Brazil's concerns about being considered a lightweight, it has recorded some notable technological and scientific achievements. Embraer is the world's third largest aircraft manufacturer, a university consortium in São Paulo has become one of the world's leading centers of genome research, and agricultural researchers have developed significant new crop varieties.
But in a land so hungry for respect, that is not enough. The uranium enrichment plant in Resende has been sold to the public as a triumph of "technology that is 100 percent Brazilian," in the words of the minister of science and technology, Eduardo Campos.
Foreign experts say that claim is not true. In the past, Brazil made similar statements about its space program, trying to hide the role of French and Russian technology obtained through exchange programs or on the international black market.
"There is foreign assistance, and they carefully mislead people or spin it in such a way that it fits their definition of what indigenous means," said David Albright, a physicist and former nuclear inspector who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security. "We know the Germans helped them make an earlier model of centrifuge, and we think the Germans provided them the technology on how to work with carbon fiber centrifuges."
Doubts have also been raised about just how innovative Brazil's centrifuge process is. They focus on a type of magnetic coil that supposedly makes Brazilian centrifuges more efficient and durable than other nations'. The government has insisted on blocking these from inspectors' view.
But "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," Dr. Goldemberg said. "National pride is involved here, but I don't know if that is worth arousing the suspicion of the rest of the world."
The situation has been complicated by Brazil's apparent desire to deal with the outside world under principles that routinely govern relationships here. In the simplest terms, Brazil is arguing that it deserves a wink-and-a-nod exemption from full inspection because Brazilians are nice people, unlike those nasty North Koreans or Iranians.
Brazilian society functions on the basis of what is known as "jeitinho," a notion that all formal laws and rules can be maneuvered around if one is clever or charming enough. Of course, the more powerful you are, the better your chances of getting around cumbersome procedures by "driblando," the verb Brazilians use to describe a soccer player's adroitness with the ball.
After inspectors were finally granted partial access to the Resende plant this month, there were predictions that the standoff would soon be overcome by some jeitinho. Most likely it will. But even so, foreign experts expect another confrontation over inspections in the coming years, this one involving the navy's decades-old campaign to build a nuclear-powered submarine.
"Submarines are not subject to the safeguards regimen, that's my view of things," said Roberto Abdenur, who became Brazil's ambassador to the United States early this year after being his country's representative at the International Atomic Energy Agency. "Brazil will always respect its obligations, but, like any other member state, we also insist on our right to protect our technological secrets."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/31/weekinreview/31roht.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1099371729-mw6app5Ex+Tl+GdNNJCxfw