Brasil nuclear: dos interpretaciones opuestas sobre la orientación de su programa atómico

Abstract

The analysis of the Brazilian nuclear program from different theoretical approaches shed light on differences regarding its orientation and purposes. Optimistic views, from a liberal standpoint, emphasize the idea that States’ foreign policy should be asses in a favorable fashion according to certain aspects such as democratic values, compliance with international norms and legitimacy from public opinion. But in opposition to perspectives based on normative arguments, a power politics perspective emphasizes least idealist aspects: the reconfiguration of international power hierarchy and the aspirations of an emergent global power as subjacent motivations for the technical developments of the atomic program. This work ponders the relative utility of both perspectives focusing on situations, developments and discourses from recent past that make possible to infer the political orientation of Brazilian nuclear program. The study proceeds by contrasting the evidence available with theoretical elements from each perspective. First, Brazilian foreign policy regarding the Nonproliferation Regime is compared with assumptions from Liberal thesis about State conduct. In that sense, aspects such as the weight-normative international institutions, domestic democracy and legitimacy provided by these principles, would have an important explanatory importance. In the second part, an opposed view is adopted: the liberal thesis applied to the problematic of Brazilian nuclear program are seen critically from the standpoint of an interpretation about its orientation based on a revisionist policy and pragmatism related to major objectives of international status and power relations with Great Powers. An important evidence in that sense is the ambiguity of the nuclear program and its military purposes, which suggest that the second perspective offers a better explanation of Brazilian objectives in this area. Conclusions are focused on three distinctions between both perspectives that give answers to the problems of the study: the absence of a nuclear program in contrast with the militarization of the nuclear technology and its applications; the acceptance of international institutions in contrast with the pragmatism and selectiveness of the compliance of certain principles; and finally, the unclear conceptual frontiers exposed by the Brazilian nuclear program.