Brazilian's remark about nuclear weapons causes alarm

www.iht.com Larry Rohter The New York Times Friday, January 10, 2003   RIO DE JANEIRO A senior official in the leftist government that took power last week has set off a furor here and alarmed neighboring countries by maintaining that Brazil, Latin America's largest nation, should acquire the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon.

"Brazil is a country at peace, that has always preserved peace and is a defender of peace, but we need to be prepared, including technologically," Roberto Amaral, the newly appointed minister of science and technology, said in an interview with the BBC that was broadcast this week. "We can't renounce any form of scientific knowledge, whether the genome, DNA or nuclear fission," he added. Amaral's remarks, coming as the United States faces a nuclear crisis with North Korea and is preparing for war with Iraq over its weapons programs, has reawakened debate over Brazil's own nuclear energy and research program, the most advanced in Latin America.

On Tuesday, a spokesman for President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was quick to distance the new president from Amaral's pronouncement that "mastery of the atomic cycle is important" to Brazil, saying that the minister's remarks were not an expression of official policy.

"The government favors research in this area solely and exclusively for peaceful purposes," the spokesman, Andre Singer, said at a news briefing in Brasilia.

Nevertheless, Amaral's declarations echoed a certain discontent expressed by da Silva as a candidate last year. In a speech in Rio de Janeiro in September, he criticized the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as unjustly favoring the United States and other countries that already had nuclear weapons, asking, "If someone asks me to disarm and keep a slingshot while he comes at me with a cannon, what good does that do?"

Those remarks were made to a group of retired military officers, many of whom supported the ambitious nuclear program undertaken by the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, and the remarks caused immediate alarm in Brazil. The environmental organization Greenpeace, for example, criticized da Silva's position, as did groups of scientists in Brazil and abroad and even members of his own Workers' Party. Da Silva later issued a "clarification" saying that Brazil did not intend to develop nuclear weapons.

The Brazilian Constitution, promulgated in 1988, forbids the development of nuclear weapons or their presence in the country. That action was taken a year after the government announced it had developed the technology to enrich uranium, but it was not until Fernando Henrique Cardoso took office in 1995 that Brazil agreed to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Until the mid-1980s, Brazil and its neighbor and traditional rival, Argentina, had programs aimed at developing the ability to produce atomic bombs. But after military dictatorships in both countries gave way to democratic rule, civilian presidents negotiated an end to those programs.