Brazil should have nuclear arms, says top minister
The comment triggers alarm although the new left-wing government says he was not expressing official policy
RIO DE JANEIRO - A senior official in the left-wing government that took power last week triggered alarm by arguing that Brazil 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,' said Mr Roberto Amaral, the newly appointed Minister of Science and Technology in an interview with the Brazilian service of the BBC that was broadcast on Sunday night. Advertisement
'We can't renounce any form of scientific knowledge, whether the genome, DNA or nuclear fission.'
His remarks, coming as the United States faces a nuclear crisis with North Korea and is preparing for war with Iraq over its weapons programmes, has reawakened debate over Brazil's own nuclear energy and research programme, 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 Mr Amaral's pronouncement that 'mastery of the atomic cycle is important' to Brazil, saying that his remarks were not an expression of official policy.
'The government favours research in this area, solely and exclusively for peaceful purposes,' Mr Andre Singer told reporters in Brasilia.
Mr Luiz Pinguelli Rosa, Brazil's most prominent nuclear physicist and the newly appointed head of the state electrical power utility Eletrobras, said on Wednesday: 'Brazil does not have, does not need and should not obtain the knowledge of this technology. The bomb is a plague of mankind.'
But Mr Amaral's declarations echoed a certain discontent expressed by Mr da Silva as a candidate last year.
In a speech here in September, he criticised the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as unjustly favouring the United States and other nations 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 programme undertaken by the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985 and caused immediate alarm here.
The environmental organisation Greenpeace, for example, criticised Mr da Silva's position, as did groups of scientists here and abroad and even members of his own Workers' Party.
The Brazilian Constitution, promulgated in 1988, forbids the development of nuclear weapons and their presence here.--New York Times