Brazil going nuclear.

"While the world community scrutinizes Iran's nuclear plans, Latin America's biggest country is weeks away from taking a controversial step and firing up the region's first major uranium enrichment plant," reported a February 10 Knight Ridder dispatch from Rio. This isn't the first time Brasilia has pursued nuclear weapons technology: in the early 1990s, Brazil's military ran a secret program to develop a nuclear weapon. Brazil is ready to open a nuclear power plant at Resende that will produce enriched uranium, "which can be used to generate nuclear energy and, when highly enriched, to make nuclear weapons."

The South American giant, which has the resources and population base to be a superpower, has the world's sixth largest uranium reserves. Under the administration of Marxist Luis Ignacio "Lula" de Silva, Brazil has become a very close ally of other regional Marxist regimes, such as that of Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez, and has entered into a wide-ranging commercial and strategic relationship with Communist China.

"The road to Resende did hit a few bumps in 2004 when Brazil refused to let [International Atomic Energy Administration, or IAEA] inspectors view centrifuges used in the enrichment process, saying they had to protect Brazilian-designed innovations vulnerable to industrial espionage," continues the Knight Ridder report. "Alter months of negotiations, the two sides agreed to a confidential inspection regime, which is still in place.... That agreement allows IAEA inspectors to examine material coming in and out of the centrifuges but not the equipment itself, which is covered by opaque panels."

"Without enriched uranium," comments Brazilian energy adviser Rogerio Cezar Cerqueira Leite, "you don't have nuclear technology. It's not just national prestige. If you don't make it yourself, you will always be behind in the nuclear race."

The parallels between Brazil's nuclear ambitions and Iran's are numerous and i striking. One critical strategic difference is found in the fact that if Marxist-led Brazil became a full-fledged member of the nuclear weapon club, its alliance with Beijing, its developing space program, and its proximity to the U.S. would make it a far greater potential threat than Iran could ever be. Yet, as Knight Ridder points out, "Brazil's program hasn't drawn the outcry that Iran's nuclear plants have."