Word: braziller
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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PROLIFERATION. Washington is deeply disturbed by the Bonn-Brasilia agreement. Over the next 15 years, Brazil will pay from $4 billion to $8 billion for a "full cycle" nuclear complex, giving it all the facilities needed to assemble an atomic power industry completely independent of foreign supplies. The package includes up to eight nuclear power reactors, a uranium enrichment plant, a fuel-rod fabrication plant and a fuel-reprocessing facility...
...commercial transaction, this may well be the atom deal of the century, as many West German businessmen boast. But it has ominous implications for international stability. Endowed with plentiful uranium and thorium deposits, Brazil could use the enrichment plant not only to obtain a concentration of radioactive isotopes sufficient to fuel a nuclear power station, but also to produce the higher concentrations required for bombs...
...proliferation. So far, only the U.S., the Soviet Union, China, France and Britain possess the costly, complicated plants to produce enriched uranium. All other nations must come to these powers for nuclear fuel for reactors. Washington pointed out that U.S. firms are strictly prohibited from selling enrichment plants abroad; Brazil, in fact, would like to have bought the full cycle from U.S. manufacturers but was unable to because...
...counter Washington's arguments, Bonn contended that if it did not provide Brazil with all elements of the full cycle, then another country, meaning France, probably would. Bonn also emphasized that it had obtained Brazil's promise that the German-supplied facilities will be used solely for peaceful purposes and will be open to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based organization that polices the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty...
American experts fear the safeguards are inadequate. The IAEA is understaffed and lacks experience in inspecting full cycle systems. Washington also worries that Bonn may have as little success monitoring reactors in Brazil as Ottawa did in India; the Indians were able to divert nuclear materials from a Canadian-supplied power reactor in order to explode their first atom bomb a year ago last May. Moreover, Brazil's professions that it would use its nuclear facilities only for peaceful purposes encounter some skepticism; Brasilia has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and there have been persistent reports that...