OT: The IEA should sack director general of the IEA and hire Jose Goldemberg!
Brazil poises self as model for peace in nuclear age
BY JIM LANDERS
The Dallas Morning News
SÃO PAULO, Brazil - (KRT) - Jose Goldemberg has an unorthodox idea for easing nuclear tensions in the Middle East: Israel and Iran should edge away from nuclear weapons by following the example of Brazil and Argentina.
"Reason can prevail," said Goldemberg, who played a key role in persuading the Brazilian military to back away from its nuclear program in the 1980s. "Iran can be encouraged to follow the Brazilian model."
But the Brazilian model troubles other nonproliferation specialists. They see little prospect of Israel and Iran negotiating a nuclear freeze or other compacts given Iran's record of violating previous international agreements on nuclear proliferation.
Henry Sokolski, a top nonproliferation official in the Defense Department under former President George Bush, said the U.S. government should be trying to stop work at both plants - Brazil's and Iran's.
"If everybody thinks they have a sovereign right to come up to the edge of making a bomb, as long as they conceivably have some economic justification, this makes it impossible to be anything but weak against countries that really want to do the wrong thing," said Sokolski, now executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center.
Goldemberg, now secretary of state for the environment of São Paulo state, has lectured abroad on how nations give up the quest for nuclear weapons. He sees little hope that Iran will accede to the demands of Washington and Europe to abandon its Natanz uranium enrichment plant. A better approach, he said, would be a dialogue between Tehran and Jerusalem that aims ultimately to turn them both away from nuclear weapons.
Goldemberg's idea has been discussed among nuclear scientists in Israel, which is widely believed to have dozens of nuclear weapons. It offers a different approach to a struggling diplomatic effort now under way to curtail Iran's nuclear work and stop the Islamic regime from building a bomb.
The idea also polishes Brazil's image at a time when some nonproliferation specialists are irked by its construction of a large uranium enrichment plant under circumstances similar to the work in Iran that has raised international alarms.
The Resende enrichment facility outside Rio de Janeiro will supply fuel for Brazil's two nuclear power plants. It could also make weapons-grade materials.
Iran's secret work on a similar plant at Natanz has sparked accusations from the Bush administration that the Iranian regime is pursuing nuclear weapons. France, Germany, Britain and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have urged Iran to abandon the Natanz plant in return for Russian nuclear fuel guarantees, trade and diplomatic concessions. But Iran insists the plant, built in part with equipment supplied by the A.Q. Khan nuclear smuggling ring, is needed for its nuclear power program.
President Bush, in a February 2004 speech at the National Defense University, urged a halt to the spread of uranium enrichment technology because it can be used to make a key ingredient for atomic weapons.
"Enrichment and reprocessing are not necessary for nations seeking to harness nuclear energy for peaceful purposes," Bush said.
On Monday the Bush administration agreed to share nuclear-power fuel and technology with India in exchange for India allowing international inspections and safeguards on its civilian nuclear program. The agreement, which is subject to approval by Congress, does not require India to give up its nuclear weapons.
Mohamed el-Baradei, director general of the IAEA, has urged a five-year moratorium on construction of enrichment and reprocessing facilities while the world body tries to establish a politically neutral corporation to supply fuel to nuclear power plants.
Goldemberg predicted these initiatives would fail. In May, a global nonproliferation conference at the United Nations, chaired by Brazil, ended with no action on curbing enrichment technologies.
"It's not going to fly," Goldemberg said. "The feeling of sovereignty is very strong in some quarters. It's particularly strong in Iran today."
Goldemberg said Iran should be allowed to finish the Natanz enrichment plant and then operate it under IAEA inspections. Iran and Israel, meanwhile, could begin a nuclear rapprochement by pledging not to be the first to use nuclear weapons and build from there.
"Confidence-building measures between Israel and Iran ... could dampen the thirst for Iran to become nuclear," he said.
Earlier this year, when it appeared Iran would spurn the European effort to freeze work at Natanz, Vice President Dick Cheney warned that Israel might act on its own to destroy the facility. The Sunday Times of London reported in March that the Israelis had drawn up plans for an air and ground assault on Natanz. But Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said in April that Israel would not launch a unilateral attack on Iran.
Goldemberg was a minister of science and technology for former President Fernando Collor de Mello when Brazil, in tandem with Argentina, turned away from nuclear weapons. He was given the difficult assignment of persuading the military to give up its nuclear ambitions.
"I said, `Why do we need these things? For prestige? What's the prestige in a bomb? Is that supplying the needs of the people?'" Goldemberg recalled.
Argentina and Brazil had secret nuclear weapons programs under military dictatorships in the 1970s and early 1980s. Neither tested a nuclear weapon, and work stopped before either had assembled enough plutonium or highly enriched uranium to build one, said John Redick, a Latin America specialist who teaches a course on nonproliferation at the University of Virginia.
The accord between Argentina and Brazil is one of the successes in halting the spread of nuclear weapons, and Redick has traveled to Israel, Egypt and South Korea to describe it to nuclear scientists and government officials.
The 1996 presentation in Israel was a pleasant surprise to Redick.
"They didn't laugh us out of the room by any means. I was surprised and fascinated to hear the openness on their part to the kind of things done bilaterally and regionally in Latin America that could conceivably some day be emulated in the Middle East," he said. "They were very open to the fact that they were not against this kind of thing."
David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, was also at the meeting. But he doesn't think Goldemberg's approach would work because of Israeli suspicions that Iran would cheat - just as it did in building Natanz in the first place.
"Israel doesn't feel it would use nuclear weapons first against Iran. ... But Israel will refuse to get rid of its nuclear weapons until there's an adequate verification regime in place and they have confidence Iran doesn't threaten Israel," he said.
Israel would also have to see verification of nuclear disarmament spread across the entire Middle East, he said.
The Bush administration has not criticized Brazil for its work on the Resende plant.
"I don't worry ... that Brazil will seek a nuclear weapon. Brazil is seeking civilian nuclear power," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in April.
Comparing Brazil with Iran is "completely unfair," said a State Department nonproliferation specialist, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"Iran experimented with enrichment in secrecy for almost two decades. Brazil's work is in the open, and all their activities are under international safeguards," he said.
A spokesman at the Brazilian Embassy in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity, also said the comparison is unfair.
"There is no conceivable reason to put Brazil and Iran in the same boat. ... Our constitution strongly prohibits any use of atomic energy for proliferation," he said.
But Sokolski noted that Brazil has refused to allow IAEA inspectors to see the centrifuge machines at Resende used to enrich uranium, claiming they represent proprietary technology. It allows inspectors into the plant, where they can see the pipes leading to and from the centrifuges. The machines themselves are screened from view by panels.
"I'm a Republican, but I know my criticisms won't change my team" in the Bush administration, he said. "But this is not right. We've been making a lot of exceptions lately. ... We read the rules too much in the direction of protecting our friends, and that makes it so much more difficult to go after our enemies." |
