Qualla: Campo de Provas Brigadeiro Velloso

Campo de Provas Brigadeiro Velloso: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The New York Times put it this way in 1990: Brazilian physicists have concluded that the military was one or two years away from having the materials - twenty to thirty-five pounds of weapons-grade enriched uranium - to make a Hiroshima-type bomb. The testing was happening at a remote complex in the southern Para called Campo de Provas Brigadeiro Velloso. A week after that story broke, Brazil's president Fernando Collor de Mello told the United Nations General Assembly that Brazil today rejects the idea of any test that implies nuclear explosions, even for peaceful ends. The program that he shut down had been authorized fifteen years earlier by military dictator Ernesto Geisel. It had run through the Amazon ground, under cover of a test range that remains one of the most secretive installations in South America.

Campo de Provas Brigadeiro Velloso: A Range the Size of Sergipe

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Campo de Provas Brigadeiro Velloso - CPBV for short - occupies 21,588 square kilometers of southern Para. The perimeter is 653 kilometers. It overlaps four municipalities: Altamira, Itaituba, Jacareacanga, and Novo Progresso. That makes it roughly the size of the Brazilian state ...

Campo de Provas Brigadeiro Velloso: The Original Airstrip

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The airfield opened January 20, 1954, to solve a specific logistical problem. Brazil's economy and population were concentrated in the southeast, around Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, but its territory extended deep into the Amazon. Aircraft flying between those two worlds had to ...

Campo de Provas Brigadeiro Velloso: The Parallel Program

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ernesto Geisel, a retired general who served as Brazil's president from 1974 to 1979, authorized what came to be called the parallel nuclear program in 1975. The public Brazilian nuclear program cooperated with West Germany and operated under international safeguards. The paralle...

Campo de Provas Brigadeiro Velloso: The Shutdown

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1990, Fernando Collor de Mello, a newly elected civilian president, gave a symbolic speech at CPBV. Standing at the edge of one of the shafts that had been excavated for the program, he poured lime into it to seal it. Within days, he addressed the United Nations General Assemb...

Campo de Provas Brigadeiro Velloso: A 737 in the Jungle

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The next time CPBV made international news was September 29, 2006. A new executive Embraer Legacy 600, being ferried by American pilots, collided in level flight with Gol Transportes Aereos Flight 1907 - a Boeing 737-800 carrying 154 people - over the territory of the complex. Th...