Next nuclear weapons problem: Brazil?

It’s far from one’s idea of a rogue regime: a longtime friend and ally in the hemisphere. But Brazil under President Inacio "Lula" da Silva is putting its money where its leader’s mouth is, moving his country toward the manufacture and export of nuclear-weapons material.

Lula appears to be making good on a campaign promise, discounted by most in Washington but noted with concern at the time on this Website, to raise Brazil’s prestige by resurrecting a mothballed nuclear-weapons program and exporting sensitive military technology abroad.

Press reports over the New Year state that Brazil is set to manufacture highly-enriched uranium (HEU) for its two nuclear power plants, and according to Samuel Faiad of the government-run Nuclear Industries of Brazil, to sell any HEU surplus on the world market.

Brazil is an old friend. But the US should be alarmed, for two main reasons:

(1) Lula, a lifelong Marxist organizer, campaigned on a shrill anti-US platform and views himself as an ally of Fidel Castro of Cuba, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, and rogue regimes around the world. For more than a decade he has sponsored an annual meeting, the Forum of Sao Paulo, of the hemisphere’s extremist political parties and movements, revolutionary guerrilla groups, and terrorists as a sort of Ibero-American latter-day Comintern. He invited the regimes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il to participate as observers.

(2) Lula ran for office saying it was a mistake for Brazil to join an international nuclear non-proliferation treaty and pledged to the military that, if elected, he would make the nation a military power respected worldwide. Now, his government does not intend to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to conduct unannounced spot inspections of the uranium enrichment program. So it’s clear that the Brazilian government intends to hide something.

At the time of Lula’s election in 2002, House International Relations Committee Chairman Henry Hyde warned the Bush Administration of an emerging "Axis of Evil in the Americas" led by Castro, Chavez and Lula. One of the only people issuing warnings at the time was Constantine Menges of the Hudson Institute.

The National Security Council official in charge of Latin American policy at the time, John Maisto, didn’t take the warning seriously. (Maisto is now US Ambassador to the Organization of American States).

Even a former senior Clinton Administration nonproliferation official is now raising the alarm.

US leaders should treat the recent development as a threat to national security, and not be seduced by Lula’s pro-business rhetoric, before the centrifuges start churning out HEU later this year.