ABSTRACT
The “nuclear revolution” in military and industrial affairs since 1945 has garnered an enormous amount of scholarly attention, but the part that Latin American countries have played in the worldwide nuclear drama has been largely ignored. A simple materialist perspective has no difficulty explaining the overall pattern of acquisition and non-acquisition of nuclear energy technologies across Latin America. Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico have historically been by far the three largest economies in the region, and they are the three states that operate nuclear power plants. The unhappy experience of Brazil’s civilian nuclear power program contrasts starkly with the rapid progress of its covert, navy-run “parallel program” of uranium enrichment. Brazil’s military government created the parallel program in the mid-1970s, in part as a reaction to United States nonproliferation pressures. The most interesting aspect of the Mexican nuclear story, however, is not its technical troubles.
