Saturday, October 2, 2004
Brazil denies nuclear deal with Pak
Press Trust of India Rio De Janeiro, October 2
The Brazilian government has denied acquiring key nuclear technology from Pakistan amid allegations that a smuggling network headed by disgraced Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan may be the source.
Brazil's navy, which launched its nuclear program in the 1980s, said in a statement on Friday that it "denies any type of link with Pakistan regarding the development of Brazilian centrifuges."
Brazil's Ministry of Science and Technology said it "objects to news accounts attributed to anonymous sources without the support of any institution or country and that try to link decades of scientific development and technologies to obscure procedures or to international scandals."
Henry Sokolski, a former Pentagon official who now runs the Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center think-tank in Washington, said on Friday that Brazil's centrifuges look similiar to a type sold by Khan's network, which supplied Iran, Libya and North Korea.
On Thursday, the daily Estado de Sao Paulo quoted Sokolski as saying in Washington that officials in the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency suspect that the network is the source of Brazil's centrifuge technology.
© HT Media Ltd. 2004.