It was a policy adopted unilaterally by our Government, in direct contradiction to the long-standing policies of our major traditional allies: Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and France. It's no exaggeration to say the leaders of those four nations were literally furious at our decision, and did everything they could think of, short of a full-scale military assault, to force a reversal.
Despite this, the nuclear free policy was widely applauded by nations throughout the world who had not already adopted nuclear weapons themselves, and by millions of individual citizens of the nuclear-armed countries also.
More to the point, the policy was very popular in New Zealand, so much so that the National Party, which initially condemned the policy, was forced to reverse its own position in order to get re-elected to government. National has not changed its policy since, despite continuing pressure from the nations already mentioned.
The reason our nuclear free policy was so popular was that many, many people throughout the world had recognised that any future use of nuclear weapons in war would be likely to cause the destruction of human life on Planet Earth, and they were determined to embrace any credible policy that confronted that existential threat directly. The only policy on offer was New Zealand's.
Nuclear destruction of Planet Earth is not hard to visualise. We've all seen photos of nuclear explosions, and a plethora of movies have been made, imagining and re-imagining the consequences.
Climate change, however, is far harder for most people to visualise, and unlike nuclear war, it is not seen as an immediate threat. Except of course by the climate scientists who are studying it, and steadily refining their knowledge and understanding as new results come in.
The vast majority of scientists are now telling us we cannot delay any longer: unless we stop spewing out toxic gases into the global atmosphere, we are headed for an irreversible calamity.
Irreversible, because once the global tipping points are reached, it will not be physically possible to halt the thawing of the tundra and other frozen wastes, or the melting of the polar ice caps and glaciers, or the resulting sea level rises, in due course reaching similar levels to those that saw New Zealand completely under water in geological times past.
These scientists are not politicians, or even journalists. For the most part they avoid political controversy, but on this all-important topic, global warming, increasing numbers of them are speaking out. We must listen to them before it's too late.
Comparing "climate change" with nuclear war shows us both similarities and differences. Differences include the perceived immediacy of the threat, but also the strength of the vested interests opposing any change.
The nuclear industry was not a pushover: it had significant global support, especially from military strategists committed to nuclear arms, and from the military-industrial complex identified as a major threat in 1961 by the former Allied commander in Europe General Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he retired from the US presidency.
But compared with the opponents to climate policy changes – Big Coal, Big Oil, Big Gas, Big Farming, Big Auto, Big Power and Big Mining – the opponents of the "nuclear free" policy were the merest pussycats. Do we really have the courage of our convictions to face these vested interests down? We shall soon see.
Similarities include the fact that global threats require a global response. New Zealand cannot slow down climate change by reducing our net greenhouse gas emissions to zero, as the Government proposes to do by 2050.
The whole world will need to do this. And we have recently seen the world's largest economic and military power, the US, which has historically poured more pollution into the planet's atmosphere than any other country, elect a president bent on denying the very existence of global warming, and who is now systematically dismantling all the pollution controls previously put in place under other presidents.
But of course, New Zealand was not able to force the abandonment of nuclear weapons either. What we were able to do, back in the 1980s, was add our voice, from three small islands at the bottom of the South Pacific, to the many other voices speaking up on behalf of saving our planet's future.
And those voices were listened to enough that major reductions were made to global stores of nuclear weapons, and new safeguards were implemented against accidental nuclear war, of the kind that so nearly broke out in the 1960s Cuban crisis.
In my opinion, what we New Zealanders did in the 1980s, by forbidding nuclear weapons in our own territory, we need to do again by directly opposing any further net greenhouse gas emissions from New Zealand's farms, power stations, cars, aeroplanes and other polluting industries.
And if we are seen to be really doing this, not just talking about it, I believe that millions of others throughout the world will stand up and applaud our decision.
Bill Sutton was Labour MP for the former Hawke's Bay electorate and later served as a Hawke's Bay regional councillor.
Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz
