Brazil and weapons of mass destruction
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Based on Brazil's history, it is believed that the country does not possess any weapons of mass destruction. Although a covert nuclear weapons program was pursued by Brazil under a military government in the 1980s, it was ended after the rise of an elected government in 1985. José Sarney (President 1985-1990) is reported to have stated the previous military dictatorship had gone as far as preparing a nuclear weapon test site.
Brazil's 1988 Constitution states in Article 21 that "all nuclear activity within the national territory shall only be admitted for peaceful purposes and subject to approval by the National Congress".
Brazil acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty on September 18, 1998.
Brazil is not believed to have any biological or chemical weapons programmes. Brazil ratified the Geneva Protocol on 28 August 1970, the Biological Weapons Convention on 27 February 1973 and the Chemical Weapons Convention on 13 March 1996.
Brazil has a program to produce enriched uranium for power plants using Zippe-type centrifuges, officially opening the Resende enrichment plant in May 2006 [1]. Brazil's enrichment technology development, and the plant itself, involved substantial discussions with the IAEA and its consitutent nations. The dispute came down to whether IAEA representatives (many from countries with their own commercial enrichment programs) would be allowed to inspect the machines themselves. The Brazilian authorities, at first, did not allow the inspection of the centrifugal machines, arguing that this would reveal technological secrets (probably relating to the use of electromagnetic levitation instead of fragile and unreliable bearings to allow the rotor to spin in place). The Brazilian authorities said that, as Brazil is not part of any axis of evil, the pressure for full access to inspection - inspection even in universities - was an attempt to pirate industrial secrets. They also claimed that their technology is better than that of the USA and France, mainly because the centrifugal axis is not mechanical, but electromagnetic. American authorities have stated that a significant improvement using this technique is unlikely to be possible. They still believed the inspection should have been made to guarantee there are no nuclear weapons being built. Eventually, after extensive negotiations, agreement was reached that while not directly inspecting the centrifuges, the IAEA would inspect the composition of the gas entering and leaving the centrifuge. US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, stated in 2004 that he was "sure" that Brazil had no plans to develop nuclear weapons [2].
If Brazil decided to pursue a nuclear weapon, the centrifuges at the Resende plants could easily be reconfigured to produce enough highly enriched uranium to make a bomb quite quickly - possibly around six bombs per year [3]. Given access to sufficient quantities of HEU, the design and construction of a "gun bomb" akin to Little Boy is generally regarded as very straightforward, even for organizations with far fewer resources than the government of a middle-income country.
