After 30 years the United States has finally accommodated to our nuclear-free status. It is a victory we should celebrate. We, the New Zealand people, stood up to the world’s superpower and refused to let nuclear-armed or powered warships into our ports. The superpower has buckled first.
We shouldn’t downplay the significance of America’s change of heart, as Prime Minister Key is trying to do. Key portrays the forthcoming visit by a US warship as a deepening of military ties with America. Unfortunately, in one sense that’s true. It has become increasing difficult to distinguish New Zealand’s military policy from America and Australia’s. All three former ANZUS partners had troops in Afghanistan, and now have forces in Iraq. Sadly, the Key government completely buys in to the US government’s military “war on terror”, drone bombings and all. This means that while I celebrate our anti-nuclear victory, I am not, as a peace campaigner, enthused by any American warship visit.
It would be wrong to think that military relations between Wellington and Washington have now been “normalised”. New Zealand’s exclusion of US aircraft carriers and submarines from our waters, under our nuclear-free legislation, thankfully means that we can’t go back into ANZUS as a full-status American ally. John Key has been forced to admit this and talk about New Zealand’s supposedly “independent” foreign policy – not that his government actually demonstrates much independence.
Hopefully, other nations will take heart from the US superpower’s accommodation to our anti-nuclear policy, and now move to ban US aircraft carriers and submarines from their own ports.
Holding fast to our nuclear-free policy also means we can promote nuclear disarmament on the world stage with a clear conscience. There is a lot left to do. There are nine nuclear powers and at present we are trusting that they won’t do something silly, or that there won’t be an accidental nuclear exchange through some technical malfunction or a wrong signals’ interpretation. Do we really trust the generals in Pakistan, Israel, India and North Korea to always get it right and never to press the button? Do we trust the leaders in Britain, France, Russia, China and America? There is political turmoil in most of those countries. And what would a Trump presidency mean? Can we really trust Donald Trump to act responsibly?
There are
over 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world
and we still live in the shadow of a potential nuclear war. New Zealand has much more to do on the disarmament front, and has the support of our people for any anti-nuclear initiative. As we did for 30 years against nuclear warships, New Zealand needs to confront the United States and other nuclear states on their continued possession of weapons of mass destruction. For us, nothing short of full nuclear disarmament should be acceptable.