of pursuing a unilateral approach to security. Positive relationships between leaders
spilled over into the inter-societal level as Argentina and Brazil became partners
across a whole range of political and economic issues. Thus the nuclear issue was
one aspect, albeit a critically important one, of the wider process of cooperation and
increasingly economic integration that was developing between the two countries.^60
Andrew Hurrell has argued that democratisation was an important motor in leading
both countries to redefine their interests in ways that promoted this integration, and
that this changing conception of interests sprung from a redefinition of identity. The
need to nurture their fledgling democracies and promote joint economic develop-
ment became the shared values of Argentine and Brazilian policy-makers. Rivals
became ‘friends’, a transformation Hurrell described as the emergence of a ‘loosely
knit security community’.^61
By the early 1990s, Alfonsín’s and Sarney’s successors now trusted each other
sufficiently to establish a new joint organisation, the Argentine–Brazilian Agency
for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials (ABACC). The organisation
comprises inspectors and officials from both countries and serves to reassure the
political and military leaders of both states that their counterparts are not covertly
developing nuclear weapons. This is not to say that everyone in Argentina and Brazil
had total confidence about each other’s future nuclear motives and intentions. The
existence of ABACC, for example, cannot guarantee against the possibility (however
remote) that Brazil and Argentina might at some future date decide that their security
depends upon developing nuclear weapons. The key point is that this uncertainty
is not incompatible with relations of trust, and nuclear threats will not figure in the
planning of either country’s political and military leaders as long as Buenos Aires
and Brasilia continue to act on the basis of the trust they have established.
The framing of the transformation in relations between Argentina and Brazil in
terms of a developing security community would be countered by proponents of
offensive realist logic, who start from the same structural explanation as Waltz, but
give it a different operational significance in the nuclear (and other) areas. Offensive
realism is predicated on the assumption that, given the inescapable uncertainty
about the motives and intentions of others, states have no choice but to behave
aggressively. Rationality demands it. This is not because others are assumed to be
predatory or malevolent in intent, but because in a condition of anarchy major states
can only be secure if they maximise their power.^62 Mearsheimer, the founding
theorist of offensive realism, has applied this reasoning to the Deutschian claim
that Western Europe became a security community in the 1950s. Mearsheimer
controversially argued in his 1990 ‘Back to the future’ article that Europe up to that
point had only remained peaceful because the United States’ commitment to
Western Europe has pacified Europe’s traditional security anxieties. He predicted
that if the US presence was removed, European states would return to the
competitive security policies of the past as they once more viewed each other with
fear and suspicion.^63 Offensive realism accepts that states occasionally cooperate
together, but such arrangements cannot endure as they represent the pursuit of
narrowly defined interests, and are frequently aimed at third parties as part of the
Beyond Waltz’s nuclear world 259