A Shortcut to Autonomy or a Path to Dependency? Foreign Assistance and Brazil’s Search for Nuclear Autonomy

ABSTRACT

How did foreign assistance influence Brazil’s path to attaining nuclear autonomy? To answer this question, a technopolitics hypothesis centred on the role played by national scientific and technological strategies will be discussed, focusing on two case studies: the history of the Thorium Group (1965-71) and the 1975 Brazil-West Germany nuclear agreement. In both instances, Brazilian policy-makers relied on imported technologies as shortcuts to implement nuclear projects without designing a coordinated plan that involved national scientific programmes and research centres. The Brazilian case highlights the limits of initiatives aimed at attaining nuclear autonomy that revolve only around foreign assistance without complementary investment in national scientific initiatives.

KEYWORDS:

• Brazil
• science & technology
• nuclear autonomy
• foreign assistance

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Stephen Herzog, Tom Sauer and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. The article also benefitted from discussions with Carlo Patti, Dawisson Belém Lopes and André Luiz Cançado Motta. The study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001.

Notes

1 This treaty represented a successful regional initiative by Latin American countries to denuclearise the region – a thorny issue at the time due to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

2 This article understands foreign assistance and nuclear assistance as synonyms.

3 Technopolitics refers to the use of technologies to achieve a political goal. The literature on nuclear-related topics, for example, claims that nuclear technologies can be employed to promote economic development and international diplomatic prestige (see Edwards and Hecht 2010).

4 This article does not aim to explore the differences between Global North suppliers. Indeed, it reckons the existence of agents aimed at more fiercely conditioned foreign assistance to respect non-proliferation norms (for example, the US) and others that are not too concerned about this topic (for example, West Germany and France) (see Kroenig 2007; Krige and Sarkar 2018). As this article demonstrates, Brazil sought Bonn’s assistance for this reason (Patti 2021). Yet, this study explores two attempts at receiving nuclear assistance – one from the US and the other from West Germany – and concludes that the fundamental puzzle is how policy-makers in Brazil dealt with the situation.

5 These ultracentrifuge machines work to enrich nuclear fuel by employing the molecules of uranium hexafluoride (UF6).

6 Some documents cannot be reproduced here because of the archives’ policies.

7 Because of personal issues and professional ethics, the identity of the interviewees has been anonymised. All interviews were conducted with informed consent of the interviewees.

8 Admiral Álvaro Alberto has been considered a sort of founding father of the Brazilian nuclear programme, according to the navy perspective. He played a relevant role in promoting S&T programmes in Brazil during the first half of the 20th century. He represented Brazilian diplomacy during the initial discussions about non-proliferation regulations at the United Nations. See Patti (2021).

9 Interview #4 (2022).

10 Interview #2 (2022).

11 Interview #5 (2023).

12 A turnkey agreement is a type of agreement where the contractor is charged with the whole production of the reactor. In this sense, there is no transfer of technology. The name refers to the fact the country that purchases the reactor “has only to turn a key” to make the engines work.

13 Regarding divergences within Brazilian military forces over nuclear policy, the most important topic was the split over the technology to produce nuclear fuel for the Brazilian nuclear programme during the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, the Brazilian Army tried to assume a more pro-autonomy perspective by investing in a short-lived project to use natural uranium reactors, moderated by graphite, that could reprocess plutonium, which was abandoned during the 1990s. The Air Force focused on a sophisticated idea of enriching uranium with laser. Although it counted on the support of scientists from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), it did not flourish due to its costs. The Navy’s nuclear project instead counted on the robust endorsement of Brasília and proposed the PWR with a view to building the nuclear-powered submarine.

14 This was a famous expression coined by João Augusto de Araújo Castro (1972) to demonstrate that the Brazilian government did not agree with the NPT since it would privilege great powers and hamper the S&T development of other countries.

15 Brasília and Bonn acquiesced to IAEA safeguard rules (INFCIRC/237), during the 1970s, to regulate this bilateral agreement.

16 Interview #1 (2022).

17 Interview #1 (2022), #3 (2022) and #6 (2022).

18 Interview #5 (2023).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

João Paulo Nicolini Gabriel

João Paulo Nicolini Gabriel is a PhD Candidate at the Universite Catholique de Louvain, Louvain, Belgium.