UPDATE / NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION : Brazil May Not Have Ended Development of an A-Bomb

Will Brazil build the bomb? The question is being asked frequently these days as South America’s most industrialized country re-examines nuclear programs and policies begun under military rule.

President Fernando Collor de Mello, an elected civilian who took office in March, is trying to convince the world that Brazil does not want a nuclear weapon.

“The Brazil of today rules out any experiment that implies nuclear explosions, even for peaceful purposes,” Collor said last week in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly.

He told reporters in New York that he had ordered the termination of a secret military project aimed at developing nuclear weapons.

The previous week, Collor had traveled to a remote site in the Amazon region to watch the closing of a 1,000-foot-deep hole that officials acknowledge was built by the military for a nuclear test explosion. An aide said closing the concrete-lined hole “is to end, in the clearest way possible, speculation that Brazil wants to build nuclear bombs.”

SECRET PROGRAMS: But the Brazilian armed forces have not ended other secretive programs that scientists say could permit them to build atomic bombs. Former Navy Minister Maximiano Fonseca, now an executive with the government petroleum company, said in a recent newspaper interview that the navy has the technology to build such a bomb.

“I would even make one,” he said. “I would make a bomb, I would explode it, and I would say, ‘I won’t make more because it is stupidity.’ ”

The government announced in 1987 that the navy’s Aramar nuclear center in Sao Paulo state had begun enriching uranium. The still-unfinished plant is officially intended to enrich uranium for use by nuclear submarines that Brazil is planning to build.

A report in May by a committee of the Brazilian Society of Physicists said that once Aramar is fully functional, it would be “relatively simple” to increase enrichment to a grade that can be used to make atomic bombs.

Physicist Luiz Pinguelli Rosa, a leading critic of Brazilian nuclear policy who helped draft the report, estimated last week that nearly 1,000 of the navy plant’s planned 3,000 ultra-centrifuge machines are now in operation and that the rest could be functioning in a year. When they are all working, Pinguelli said, they could turn 330 pounds of the lower-grade enriched uranium into 40 pounds of the higher grade in about a week.

“Conditions exist for building a bomb rapidly in Brazil,” Pinguelli said.

He said that Collor’s recent statements ruling out nuclear explosions “are positive” but that the president’s words “must be followed by concrete measures to remove the control of nuclear programs from military hands.”

Unless safeguards are instituted, he said, “it is possible that Brazil could make the bomb secretly without control by civilian society.”

PLUTONIUM CAPACITY: The Brazilian army and air force have been building nuclear reactors that could produce plutonium, a byproduct of nuclear fuel that can also be used to make bombs. Those projects are further from completion than the navy project.

A task force appointed by Collor in March recommended that the military’s nuclear programs be continued with investments of $2 billion. The task force also recommended that the government complete two nuclear generators begun under a cooperative agreement signed with West Germany in 1975.

The Brazilian-German agreement called for the construction of eight nuclear generators, but the program has been stalled by technical and financial problems.

That civilian program falls under international safeguards that bar military use of technology or materials. But because Brazil has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, its military programs are under no such safeguards. Collor’s administration has said it will not sign the treaty because, officials say, it unfairly withholds technology from developing countries.