Any sources for this story? I learned that Brazil and Argentina had long been partners in nuclear matters, and never heard of any spying or competition that took place in the last century.
Comment on xkcd #3173: Satellite Imagery
marcos@lemmy.world 2 days agoDuring the last dictatorships in South America, Brazil and Argentina were in a bit of an arms race.
One day, the Brazilian government created a nuclear program that over the course of several years managed to enrich some nanograms of uranium. The Argentinian gov started their own program as a response.
When both countries published their data, the Argentinians had plenty of spying documents saying that the Brazilian program had incredibly security, they could only discover a small lab and some people digging missile silos.
(And yeah, the Argentinians managed to enrich milligrams of uranium, beating Brazil by 2 orders of magnitude.)
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 2 days ago
marcos@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I have no deep sources in English, but Wikipedia has some references:
en.wikipedia.org/…/Brazil_and_weapons_of_mass_des…
en.wikipedia.org/…/Argentina_and_weapons_of_mass_…
Argentina’s last dictatorship was extremely afraid of Brazil attacking them.
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 2 days ago
thanks; and I’m sure some level of spying happened, but idk if there was any actual tension between the countries, especially considering that the Argentinian president was one of the first people officially informed when Brazil achieved enrichment capabilities in the 80s and later on both countries joined a bilateral inspection agreement.
marcos@lemmy.world 1 day ago
officially informed when Brazil achieved enrichment capabilities in the 80s
That one was about the official nuclear program, that wasn’t intended to create nuclear weapons. The Brazilian nuclear weapons program was a secret out of the clearance level of the official nuclear program so there was never any interaction between them.
And yes, it was in the later 80s, when Brazil was trying to repair the damaged relations with Argentina.
xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 2 days ago
Pft. Ahaha!
“We have no idea where they’re hiding the real program. This is clearly just the decoy we were meant to find!”
“How can you be sure?”
“It’s obvious: There would be no point if this was all they had.”