After a months-long deadlock over international inspections, Brazil agreed yesterday to allow officials from the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency to visit a nuclear facility.
The concern is that Brazilian enriched uranium, if refined to a level capable of powering an atom bomb, would become available to a terrorist organization or a rogue state.
“There is no Iran syndrome” in Brazil, Minister of Science and Technology Eduardo Campos told a Brazilian newspaper on Monday. “There is no atomic mystery. Brazil does not represent a nuclear threat.”
Brazil’s nuclear program is “pacifist and strategic to the country’s future,” Mr. Campos said earlier.
Nevertheless, Brazil’s reluctance to fully open its nuclear program to outside scrutiny has engendered a major concern that it could serve as a precedent for other nations asked to provide full access to their nuclear programs, such as Iran and North Korea.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is mandated under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to ensure member states do not divert nuclear material for military purposes.
Brazil, which has one of the world’s largest uranium reserves, denied IAEA inspectors full access to its centrifuges at its plant in Resende, about 60 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro, in February and March.
Mr. Campos said the performance of Brazil’s centrifuges was 30 percent more efficient than those of plants in other countries and, accordingly, Brazil should be allowed to protect the technology that could be stolen by other countries if outsiders got a glimpse of it.
“Brazil has nothing to hide with respect to its process of enriching uranium, except with the technology Brazil acquired and has a natural desire to protect,” Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said recently.
IAEA officials yesterday declined to offer details of inspections yesterday, saying they were still continuing negotiations with Brazilian authorities.
A diplomat who spoke to the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity said an agreement would allow inspectors to vindicate Brazil’s contention that it has neither enriched uranium to weapons-grade levels nor diverted the nuclear material to other places.
“They came upon a formula that gives the agency enough and yet lets Brazil save face,” said one diplomat in Vienna, Austria, where the IAEA is based.
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