ANDRES OPPENHEIMER Brazil's nuclear plans are troubling

What? A Latin American nuclear power? A Brazilian secret uranium-enrichment program that could destabilize the region and become a new global security headache for the United States?
The Brazilian government says such speculations are preposterous, and for all we know, it may be telling the truth. But its refusal to allow U.N. inspectors to monitor all parts of its new uranium-enrichment plant in the southwestern city of Resende has sounded alarm bells in Washington and Latin America.
"The mere doubt over Brazil's true intentions will definitely cause concern in other countries, and could start a nuclear race that would be totally unnecessary in our subcontinent," Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias said Wednesday in a telephone interview.
Brazil says its refusal to allow the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to examine all corners of its Resende facility is to protect industrial secrets.
New technology
The facility, aimed at supplying commercial nuclear plants with enriched uranium, operates with a new technology that allows Brazil to produce the material at a fraction of other countries' costs, Brazilian officials say. Brazil invested $1 billion in the new technology, they say.
Furthermore, Brazil says that unlike Iran and North Korea, it has signed international nonproliferation treaties whereby it renounced long ago any effort to develop nuclear weapons. And its new technology at the Resende facility enriches uranium at 5 percent levels, whereas one would need a 90 percent enrichment to produce nuclear weapons, Brazilian officials say.
Earlier last week, Brazil said it will allow U.N. inspectors to monitor the Resende plant's enriched uranium, but not the way in which it is made. Brazil needs to protect "the technology it has developed," a government communique said. Hmmm.
U.S. officials are suspicious. What do the Brazilians have to hide, they ask. There is no evidence that Brazil is cheating, but some U.S. officials say previous statements by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva make them nervous.
During the 2002 electoral campaign, Lula criticized the 1970s nonproliferation treaties as unfair. Later, he said Brazil has no intentions of developing a nuclear program. But subsequent statements by his science and technology minister, Roberto Amaral -- who has since resigned -- raised new questions in Washington.
Many Latin American military experts are skeptical about Brazil's claims that it has come up with new uranium-enrichment technology. Other critics note that if Brazil wants to protect its technology, it should do so by registering the patent internationally, like all other countries do.
"There is no need to move toward isolationism," Argentina's daily La Nacion noted in an editorial Wednesday. The bottom line is that, even if Brazil ultimately agrees to full-fledged international inspections, some damage has already been done.
"We're going back to the times of mutual distrust in the region, a time that we all thought was over for good," Julio Cirino, an Argentine expert on political and military affairs, told me last week.
Indeed, Latin America had made great progress in the early 1980s, when new democracies in the region signed confidence-building agreements that included information exchanges on troop deployments and advance notifications of weapons purchases.
Weapons race
But in recent years, a lot of things have gone wrong. The Clinton administration in 1997 lifted a decades-old ban on the sale of sophisticated U.S. weapons to Latin America. Since then, Chile has purchased 10 U.S.-made F-16 jet fighters and 200 Leopard tanks, Brazil has announced its intention to buy up to 70 fighters for $3.5 billion, and Colombia earlier this year announced it is buying 40 tanks from Spain.
Latin America still spends well below the world average on weapons, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. But that may be starting to change.
My conclusion: Unless Brazil reaches a deal with the U.N. inspections agency, its latest fit of nationalist defiance will increase mutual distrust in the region, which will in turn lead to greater arms expenditures. In a region where 44 percent of the people live below the poverty line, that would be about the most senseless thing that could happen.
X Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune.