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Letters to the Editor
Ending Brazil’s Nuclear Weapons Program
In recent months, several reports have appeared in the media—in this magazine and elsewhere—discussing Brazil’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons and when and how they came about (“Brazilian Regulator Denies Uranium Claims,” ACT, November 2005; “Brazil’s Nuclear History,” ACT, October 2005). As a leading participant in the Collor de Mello administration that brought about an end to the program, I thought it was important for the public record to set forth my views on the subject.
Brazil ’s military government, which took power in 1964, made clear its intention to have an independent nuclear program, including indigenous production of enriched uranium. This desire reflected the nationalist aspirations of the military regime and was enhanced by the oil crises of the 1970s, which made clear Brazil’s dependence on foreign sources of energy.
In the mid-1970s, the military government sought to obtain from Germany eight nuclear power plants and the equipment to run the full nuclear fuel cycle. But the deal was severely cur tailed by U.S. pressure. Hedging its bets, the military soon decided to initiate a secret “parallel” program centered in Brazil’s National Nuclear Energy Commission (CNEN), so that civilian scientists could be involved. It also included members of all three branches of the armed forces and their facilities.
At about the same time, neighboring Argentina also had a military government and wanted to be considered a power player. The climate for a regional arms race between the two countries was established with both countries pumping substantial sums into their military industrial complexes. In Brazil, a small group of high-ranking military and civilian hard-liners came to the conclusion that Brazil needed to develop nuclear weapons in order to establish itself as a regional and international power and to defend itself from a potentially nuclear-armed Argentina.
These officials also believed that if Brazil developed nuclear weapons, developed countries such as the United States would have to deal with Brazil in a completely different manner. And these states would have to abandon the sanctions that they had imposed as a way of pressuring Brazil to sign the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and other regional treaties.
Under these sanctions, Brazil was black listed from buying “dual-use” equipment that could be used either for civilian purposes or nuclear weapons production. So, Brazilian companies could not purchase supercomputers (to be used in oil exploration, for example), high-speed industrial water pumps, or even a pen if it was deemed to be of “special material.” The pressure extended further to international loans in the Interna tional Monetary Fund and the World Bank, where the United States was less inclined to support Brazil’s applications for such funds, and to several restrictions in multilateral commercial trade. Rather than dissuade Brazil from the path of nuclear weapons development, however, the reaction from the military government was to stiffen its resolve to pursue such arms.
In 1982 a new head of the CNEN took office and secretly agreed to align himself with the hard-liners’ objectives. From that day on, the nuclear program mushroomed in financial and human terms, and eventually even Brazilian companies involved in the fizzling commercial agreement with Germany came under the same leadership. More than 3,000 technicians and scientists were hired and trained, and the Nuclear Commission became the research institution with the highest percentage of PhDs in the country.
Things began to change in the late 1980s. In 1985 a civilian presi dent, José Sarney, took control, and Brazil’s Congress approved a new democratic constitution in 1988. Article 21 of the constitution stated that “all nuclear activity in national territory will only be admitted for peaceful purposes and under the approval of the National Congress.” Sarney then ordered the termination of the weapons program and the opening of all nuclear facilities to Argentinian inspection.
But that was not the end of the effort. The hard-liners decided to continue on with the weapons program by convincing the army leadership to sponsor it without Sarney’s authorization or knowledge. They tried to hide their real intentions in verbal subterfuges, saying that a nuclear “device” could be developed and tested for peaceful purposes (as India claimed to have done in 1974) while telling Sarney that all nonpeaceful research had stopped. And they stalled for a year and a half in fulfilling Sarney’s promise to open the facilities to the Argentinians. Indeed, the diplomatic maneveuring only truly stopped in March 1990 with the election of Fernando Collor de Mello as Brazil’s new president.
Immediately after taking office, Collor nominated me to head the nuclear program, with a direct order to dismantle the weapons program, follow strictly the 1988 Constitution, and open all nuclear installations to the Argentinians. But even before then, the president’s election had made clear to the hard-liners that their control of the nuclear program was in danger. All sensitive documentation about the weapons program suddenly disappeared from the files of the Nuclear Commission the night before I took charge of that organization. Only a few documents were apprehended when people were trying to smuggle them out of the Nuclear Commission and are now guarded by the civilian intelligence agency under the “Ultra Secret” classification. My predecessor distributed the bulk of the documents through the armed forces’ intelligence services in order to shield those involved in the program and the nature of Brazil’s plans from public disclosure.
Despite the intense resistance from civilian, military, and intelligence quarters, the president’s political determination triumphed. In the following six months, all research groups, equipment, and materi als were either dismantled, destroyed, or put under very tight civilian safeguards. The Brazilian government also cancelled several secret contracts or protocols with certain key countries that year, for example, terminating Brazilian participation in Iraq’s nuclear program in July 1990. Another contract referred to purchasing highly sensitive enriched uranium bought from a nuclear-weapon state—press reports at the time said the country was China—in enough quantity and enrichment to build and test a nuclear “device.” Physical tests showed that the material, while including uranium enriched to weapons-grade level, was not chemically pure. Eventually, this material was chemically purified and down-blended to low-enriched uranium and used as fuel in research reactors.
The most important event of the secret “parallel” program was supposed to be the first nuclear “device” test during the second se mester of 1990. The dismantling of the nuclear-weapon portion of the “parallel” program produced a strong reaction from the hard-liners. But the president stuck to his directive. In late September 1990, he officially ended the “parallel” nuclear weapons program by visiting the proposed test site and closing it himself.
One of the most difficult actions implemented in 1990 was to begin placing all 44 nuclear facilities (civilian and military) under CNEN control and nuclear safeguards. Their most important task was to account for all enriched uranium in civilian and military facilities. The Nuclear Commission started with its own facilities in April 1990, then went on to the commercial facilities and ended with the military facilities. The most sensitive facility, the Ipero Enrichment Laboratory controlled by the navy, was safeguarded late in October 1990 over the strong opposition of the admiral in charge of the site.
Brazilian military and diplomatic officials also resisted granting access to the Argentinians. But my Argentinian counterpart, Manoel Mondino, and I decided to begin a series of “technical” visits without the knowledge of either country’s diplomats. By mid-July 1990, the “technical” visits had gathered so much momentum that my president decided to establish a formal negotiating group with the incorporation of the Ministries of Foreign Relations and Science and Technology, encompassing both political and technical aspects. Eventually, these talks led to the formation of the Brazilian-Argentinian Agency for the Control and Accountability of Nuclear Materials.
Soon thereafter, Brazil and Argentina began negotiating with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to expand their bilateral agreement to a multilateral one. The IAEA negotiating team was led by Mohamed ElBaradei, who was then legal adviser to IAEA Director-General Hans Blix. The talks came down to one sensitive point: detailed international inspection at the Ipero uranium-enrichment facility. At every meeting, ElBaradei raised the pressure one degree. In November 1991, nerves and tensions were at a critical boil. ElBaradei conveyed the position of the international community: Brazil had to open up the enrichment facility completely. The Brazilian team insisted on retaining what it described as “industrial secrets.”
During one break, ElBaredei pressed me to explain why Brazil would not accept the international demands, and I told him that I had to retain that provision because of military pressure. “Mohamed, you are Egyptian so you know the importance of a military political position. I negotiated with the military this far and anything else more will signify that Brazil will leave the negotiations for good.” So, ElBaradei relented on this point, and the agreement was concluded.
Behind all this maneuvering, however, lay one critical truth. Brazil was subject to political pressure from the international community for several decades. But that pressure did not push the Brazilian government to participate in the nonproliferation regime. The attempted economic, financial, and political blockade did not succeed, and Brazilians learned how to cope with it. What truly made a difference to Brazil’s nuclear ambitions were changes in domestic politics. The shift to a democratic government led officials to defer to public opposition to nuclear weapons and adhere to the Constitution’s provisions prohibiting such weapons.
José Luiz de Santana Carvalho served as president of Brazil’s Nuclear Energy Commission from 1990 to 1993. He is currently a professor of chemistry at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Seismic Sensors for Improved Early Warning
In his recent article (“Space Weapons and the Risk of Accidental Nuclear War,” December 2005), Thomas Graham Jr.notes correctly that Russia’s deteriorating early-warning system increases the risk of accidental nuclear war. For example, he points to a 1995 episode that illustrated how a deficient system is more likely to “detect” false signals of a nuclear attack.
But there is the possibility of creating an additional means of ensuring that no attack is underway at least for land-based ICBMs, which are the most problematic in terms of first-strike fears: cooperatively deploying sensors near U.S. and Russian ICBM silos. Such sensors could reliably detect a genuine launch or signal that none has occurred. While the general idea is not new, I have recently completed a detailed study, published in Science and Global Security, of how such a system would work.
Under my proposal, the countries would bury three seismic sensors and a processing box 200-500 meters from each silo. Above ground at each site, a satellite antenna and perhaps a solar panel for power would be set up. When a missile is launched, the hot exhaust gas creates extremely loud noise—so loud that it can cause ear pain as far as 2 kilometers away. The noise is roughly similar to that of a jet aircraft taking off, but far stronger.
The noise shakes the ground, setting it into motion at amplitudes far above those from traffic or distant earthquakes. It can thus easily be sensed by so-called accelerometers, which are normally used to measure the strong motion of close earthquakes. And by placing three of them 20-40 meters apart, the direction of the source can be estimated. This can help to differentiate noise vibrations from a launch from other strong signals that might be somewhat similar, in particular from low-flying subsonic aircraft.
Buried seismic sensors are recommended because, different from open-air-qualified microphones, they are not exposed to rain, snow, and dust, avoiding the need for regular maintenance and minimizing above-ground construction. At least as important, it would be extremely hard to fool them: setting the ground into motion to simulate a launch or to compensate for the soil motion caused by an actual one is extremely difficult. Insulating microphones from incoming sound or creating compensating sound by a loudspeaker close by is relatively easy, on the other hand.
As a means of verifying that the seismic sensing system was continu ing to function, special authentication codes could be transmitted as frequently as once per minute. In practice, these would operate in a manner similar to schemes developed in the U.S.-Russian Cooperative Threat Reduction programs on materials protection, control, and accounting. In addition, the very low ground-vibration amplitude stemming from other sources such as traffic, weather aircraft, and distant earthquakes could also be transmitted and continuously checked for consistency to ensure that the system works.
Such a system would be inexpensive—far lower, for example, than just the launch cost of even a few early-warning satellites. Installation costs at each silo would be below $50,000; the total cost for approxi mately 500 U.S. and 300 Russian silos would be about $40 million.
Cooperative acoustic-seismic monitoring of ballistic-missile launches is not a surrogate for unilateral early-warning satellites, but it would provide important additional information, namely an independent channel for confirming in the event of an erroneous indication from one system that in fact no launch has occurred. The cooperation involved would contribute to stability and increase mutual confidence. And if such a system were established, it could eventually be expanded to account for mobile ICBMs or nuclear missiles from countries other than the United States or Russia.
Jürgen Altmann is an experimental physicist and disarmament researcher at Universität Dortmund in Dortmund, Germany.