THIS TIME IT'S THE REAL THING!

October 13, 1989: NCI President Paul Leventhal triumphantly holds aloft a "signed" copy of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that Argentine and Brazilian government officials have just presented to him with their signatures at a banquet following an NCI conference in Montevideo, Uruguay. "This is what you came down here for, Paul," said Miguel Estrada Oyuela (left), director of the Argentine Atomic Energy Commission's International Relations Division, in making the presentation. The three-day conference examined how Argentina and Brazil could normalize nuclear relations and avert a nuclear arms race. The following year, the two countries signed a treaty renouncing development of nuclear weapons and incorporating a number of inspection and verification approaches proposed by U.S. experts at the conference. In 1995, Argentina signed the NPT. On July 13, 1998, Brazil signed the NPT, thereby turning the gag gift of 1989 into the real thing.

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