This is outstanding history. The author pitches his analysis expertly across geographies and languages. He writes in the context of the best current scholarly literatures on Brazilian history/politics, international nuclear politics, Cold War tensions, nuclear nonproliferation instruments, and more. The book's research is formidable and includes work in primary and secondary material collections of the Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials, Brazilian National Archive, and Brazilian National Nuclear Energy Commission, among others.
In June 1998, after a flair-up in longstanding tensions between India and Pakistan, US Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright took questions from the media about the threat of nuclear war. Reflecting on how regional nuclear conflict might be avoided, she referenced Argentina and Brazil having voluntarily given up their nuclear weapons. But wait; did Argentina and Brazil have nuclear weapons to give up? Carlo Patti's nuanced analysis dismembers this and other longstanding false Cold War narratives about South American nuclear programs. Many of those narratives were advanced in Washington as a tactic to undermine what the US government considered the dangerous acquisition of nuclear technologies in the developing world, and Washington's failure to distinguish between nuclear programs for peaceful and bellicose ends. Not only is there no evidence that Brazil ever had nuclear weapons, but the linked notion of a Brazilian potential for atomic weapons development was always a red herring. Physicists and others have long compellingly maintained that as early as the 1970s, any organization with a bit of nuclear fuel and a rudimentary grasp of nuclear engineering might have built a bomb in short order.
Patti goes further. Beginning in the late 1960s, and often drawing the ire of the United States and Western European countries, for thirty years Brazil strongly opposed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as inherently discriminatory against its national interests and those of other developing countries. However, as the author demonstrates, public anti-NPT rhetoric obscured more complex and pragmatic atomic foreign policies. Through both military and democratic late-twentieth-century governments, Brazilian authorities were willing to compromise with what Patti calls the Global North to buttress their nuclear programs. They did so primarily in multiple series of negotiations with the West German and US governments. Moreover, when Brazil finally joined the NPT in 1997, that decision was no sell-out to Washington as critics maintained. It was a move that, in the end, cost Brazilian authorities little in political, diplomatic, or strategic capital and allowed the country to pursue important new international nuclear ties.
The argument that the United States exerted enormous influence on the Brazilian nuclear sector is both novel for its complexity and central to Brazilian Cold War history. Despite bilateral tensions over Brazilian nuclear independence, Patti shows that Brazilian authorities rarely challenged the United States in private nuclear negotiations. They preferred a strategy of cooperation. It was only when the US government blocked cooperative agreements that Brazil struck out on its own in search of other nuclear partners—particularly West Germany and France—and a more independent nuclear policy.
Patti's work on Brazilian cooperation with other countries in opposing the NPT is masterful. Brazil worked with Argentina, South Africa, Israel, and the People's Republic of China in confronting an agenda by the Global North to control access to nuclear materials and safeguards. He concludes explosively that a 1978 US Congress ban on atomic exports drove Brazil into a black nuclear market to acquire key technologies and materials toward achieving nuclear independence. Equally significant was Brazil's long-term activity to promote disarmament at the United Nations and in other international forums. In 2010, for example, Brazil tried to shape an accord with Turkey and Iran on the Iranian nuclear sector. Backed for a time by the United States, the agreement fizzled when Washington pulled out of talks.
The book reads at times like a thriller and will be devoured by specialists and non-specialists alike.
