The agreement on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, which almost nobody in Germany knows about, will be half a century old at the end of June. It has defied the German anti-nuclear movement, survived the nuclear disasters of Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011, and even the nuclear phase-out in 2023 with the shutdown of Germany's last three nuclear power plants.

The treaty aimed to construct eight nuclear power plants, a uranium enrichment plant and a nuclear reprocessing plant in Brazil by Siemens, including training for scientists.

The signatories were the German coalition government of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt on the one side, and the Brazilian military dictatorship headed by President Ernesto Geisel on the other.

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"It was celebrated in 1975 as the biggest technology agreement of the century, the enthusiasm was huge on both sides," recalls 73-year-old German-Brazilian sociologist Luiz Ramalho in an interview with DW. Ramalho is chairman of the Latin America Forum in Berlin and has been a critic from the very beginning.

He has made terminating the treaty, which is only possible every five years, his life's work. At the end of 2024, he thought he had almost reached his goal with the center-left government the SPD, environmentalist Greens and FDP.

There were talks in the ministries at the time, and a termination was examined, especially in view of the notice period on November 18. But then the government fell apart in November 2024.

The Green Party has long wanted to end........

© Deutsche Welle