Defence Minister Chris Penk has reawakened the sleeping element of New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policies.
His suggestion that the opening of New Zealand ports to nuclear-powered vessels while keeping them closed to ones carrying nuclear arms was a proposition initially favoured by the former National Prime Minister Jim Bolger.
And it was a policy initially favoured by former Labour Prime Minister David Lange.
At the party’s 1983 regional conference in Wellington, his first as party leader, Lange was rebuffed in an attempt to water down the party’s anti-nuclear policy to allow nuclear-powered warships into New Zealand.
He made a plea to the 120 delegates not to be “sidetracked” into the issue of nuclear propulsion, but the conference voted overwhelmingly for the exclusion of both nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed ships from New Zealand waters.
Lange asked the conference not to be sidetracked onto the nuclear ship propulsion issue.
“It is nuclear weapons which must have our priority,” he said.
This obvious lack of enthusiasm from Lange for the ban on nuclear propulsion was one of the reasons that persuaded the American Embassy in Wellington that he was soft on the nuclear ban and would water it down if her got into Government.
That did not happen.
But he hit the nail on the head pointing to the weapons ban being at the ehart of the policy.
That led to the independent foreign policy.
The ban on propulsion was more relevant in 1983 when the United States still had naval surface vessels that were nuclear-propelled.
Now only aircraft carriers and submarines use nuclear propulsion, and only submarines carry nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons were removed from surface vessels in the early 1990s.
There was always a tension between those in the Labour Party who emphasised the reasons for banning propulsion as being the potential dangers of a nuclear leak and those in Labour who thought the emphasis should be on weapons.
Those worried about a leak tended not to engage in the geo-political arguments about membership of ANZUS, which the anti-weapons lobby focused on.
They were supported by Labour’s left wing.
Things came to a head at the party’s annual conference in Auckland in 1983 when they had to call on the former Prime Minister, Sir Wallace Rowling, to mediate between the two factions.
The left had proposed a remit calling for the next Labour government to withdraw from ANZUS.
Sir Wallace asked the conference to consider the remit in the light of political reality and the objective of becoming the Government.
Resolving to withdraw from ANZUS. was an impotent gesture that could play a part in keeping Labour in opposition, he said.
Remits promoting armed neutrality as an alternative to ANZUS. were unrealistic because they did not consider the policy’s cost.
“I suggest that any arrangement which attempts to shut out the Americans would be unrealistic,” Sir Wallace said.
He proposed an omnibus remit to replace the remits on ANZUS. This called for the renegotiation of New Zealand’s association with Australia and the United States.
The irony was that once New Zealand implemented the ship ban in 1985, the United States effectively expelled New Zealand from ANZUS, a position that the National Party eventually accepted.
But National did so, having first floated the idea that New Zealand could employ the same solution to ship visits as Japan.
In 2019, the United States Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, Stuart Munsch, outlined the way officials should reply to questions about Japan’s policy.
“It is the policy of the U.S. Government not to deploy nuclear weapons aboard U.S. Navy surface ships, attack or guided missile submarines and aircraft,” his note proposed, but it went to reaffirm the fundamental US policy of neither confirming nor denying the presence of nuclear weapons on ships.
“However, we do not discuss the presence or absence of nuclear weapons,” it continued.
“The U.S. Government understands the special sentiment of the Japanese people concerning nuclear weapons and has faithfully honoured its obligations under the treaty of mutual cooperation and security and will continue to do so.”
This could best be described as the “trust us” policy.
But what it underlines is that the question of nuclear propulsion is a sidebar.
If the United States does not confirm or deny whether any of its vessels are carrying nuclear weapons, then we are still in the same position we were in at the end of 1984.
The situation with Australia is well into the future, probably 2032 at the earliest, when it acquires three nuclear-powered Virginia-class submarines from the United States as a stopgap until the AUKUS submarines are ready in the early 2040s.
The former director of the Australian Centre for Strategic Studies, Professor Hugh White, a frequent visitor to New Zealand, has argued that it has always been clear that Washington would only sell the submarines if it was absolutely certain Australia would commit them to fight if the US went to war with China.
The US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, appeared to confirm this during a press conference at the Shangri-La Dialogue last week when he answered a question from an Australian journalist.
“Those subs, obviously in the hands of Australia, are important for your defence, but they also add to the combined defence of what we would need to do,” he said.
And that, not nuclear propulsion, is the real question as it has always been.
It is not what drives the vessels that is the real issue, but what the vessels are intended to do.
Does New Zealand see itself in the future as part of an alliance that is at war with China?
