Iran says Brazil may enrich its uranium
Iran has cited Brazil as one country where they may outsource uranium to be enriched, so as to show the international community they’re not planning military uses for the nuclear material, according to Brazilian media. The Estado de São Paulo newspaper cited Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s atomic energy agency, as saying the uranium might be shipped to an Asian country, possibly Japan, or perhaps France or Brazil. According to Estado, the Iranian plan is in response to an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) proposal. The IAEA is working with the international community in trying to set out limits for Iran’s nuclear program, to ensure it is developed exclusively for peaceful purposes.
According to Estado, Salehi said Iran was “negotiating” with all these countries for handling its uranium enrichment.
But Brazilian officials denied they were in such talks with Iran. Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim was quoted in Estado: “At no point in the Brazilian government’s conversations with Iran was the possibility of enriching Iranian minerals in our country discussed.”
Brazil has recently tried to position itself as a go-between as Iran and the West try to sort out their differences. The visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Brazil last year was criticized by the United States and other countries. But Brazil has also worked hard to build relations with Israel. Last month, Brazil’s Defense Minister Nelson Jobim visited Israel and met with military and intelligence officials. He also negotiated deals to acquire Israeli-made drone aircraft.
Post Your Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment
T/S Members
Log in with your True/Slant account.
I think this is the problem with the ‘confidence building’ approach to dealing with Iran’s nuclear program. Iran does not have confidence in the international community, and vice versa. So instead of having a frank discussion about Iran’s over all nuclear efforts, the world debates the ultimately rather minor detail about who enriches Iran’s nuclear fuel, Brazil/Japan/etc. or Russia/France. They’ve been jawboning this particular issue now for about six months, and it seems like if you’re not going to go big, you should go home.
It is a good point to raise– how forceful these attempts at confidence building are– but on the other hand “going home” seems a poor alternative right now to some of the others being floated, however unlikely they are, such as dropping bombs on Iran. According to the Brazilian article I linked to in my post, Iran’s nod to foreign enrichment was something of a breakthrough. Is that not right? It’s interesting to me because of Iran’s increasingly high profile in Latin America.
In response to another comment. See in context »I agree that ‘going home’ isn’t a great option, I’m just saying that unless the world goes big, it’s unlikely that they’ll reach any kind of deal.
And I’d say that it’s hard to call the willingness to ship the uranium to Brazil a breakthrough, because Iran is doing an old diplomatic trick of the insincere concession – we’ll do what you want us to do, but only on our terms.
A classic example in recent years was John Bolton at the UN saying that he was in favor of the Security Council adding Japan as a member, but the US was opposed to pretty much every other element of the proposed Security Council reforms. You can no longer state “The US is opposed to Security Council expansion,” but the US is only in favor of a form of Security Council expansion that everyone else in the world finds disagreeable. Same thing with Iran. They’re trying to inject more countries into the nuclear talks who aren’t already involved to further complicate the discussions in their favor. Basically, bring countries into the discussion that are aspiring hegemons and with whom they have more pacific relations because dealing with UK, Germany, France, America, Russia, and China is more difficult.
In response to another comment. See in context »Good points– thanks.
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] recently, Iran said Brazil was one of the countries where it might send uranium to be enriched so as to provide third party guarantees that the mineral would only be directed to [...]