Dialogue: Anti-nuclear policy should have ended with Cold War

So redundant is New Zealand's anti-nuclear stance that we are effectively cutting off our nose to spite our face, writes DENIS McLEAN*.

After all the panoply and warmth of the Prime Minister's reception in Washington, the 1987 Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament and Arms Control Act remains a stumbling block in the way of fully productive relations with the United States.

Helen Clark says it will not be touched and that she had bigger fish to fry in Washington. Jim Bolger, when Prime Minister, not only adopted it as policy but passed up at least two golden opportunities to amend it.

New Zealanders still rejoice in our anti-nuclear policies - as a moral stance, a gesture of independence and a measure of a small country's determination to stand up for itself.

In the past few days, however, we have again been reminded by authoritative Americans that our position is not only irritating but contrary to our interests.

It is time to come down to earth. A harder-headed assessment of our national priorities is required. Leadership will be of the essence. Successive props to our inhibitions about nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered ships have been steadily knocked away.

We took our lonely "nuclear-free"stand in the closing years of the Cold War, long since over. In the aftermath the numbers of nuclear weapons have been dramatically reduced. The 1987 act famously determined that naval vessels would not be admitted unless the Prime Minister was able to declare that they were neither carrying nuclear weapons nor nuclear-powered.

The nuclear powers neither confirm nor deny the presence or otherwise of nuclear weapons on their ships. Then the US President announced in September 1991 that such weapons would no longer be carried on their surface vessels or submarines equipped with short-range missiles. The British and French followed suit.

Anyone who cares to face the issues squarely will accept that this applies also to nuclear propulsion. In 1992 a commission of inquiry into the safety of nuclear-powered ships, headed by Mr Justice Somers, found that port visits by such ships from the US and British navies would be safe.

Such ships from those two navies had never had "an accident to a propulsion reactor involving release of significant amounts of radioactivity"; there had been no releases of radiation in other countries visited by these vessels; and such visits would pose "no significant threat" to the environment.

The Somers commission report was based on close study of the scientific and engineering literature and intensive inquiries in the US, Canada and Britain, including privileged access to naval and other nuclear engineering facilities and expertise.

One of its more striking findings was that the administration of mild doses of radioactive medicines (mainly to treat hyperthyroidism) to patients in Auckland every day released "twice as much radioactivity into local waters as the entire US nuclear fleet and support facilities release annually to all harbours and coastal waters around the world".

A superb analysis of the issues demolished the myths and presented the facts. Having found that "nuclear energy is more feared than understood in New Zealand" the Somers report presented the evidence which should have helped us meet the bogeyman.

Even veteran peace campaigner Owen Wilkes subsequently agreed that the nuclear safety issue had become a red herring. "Much as I'd like to, I can't fault them" - the US Navy's safety precautions and record.

For Washington the issues are global and strategic. The 1987 act is, in principle as well as in practice, unacceptable to the Americans because it places formal conditions on the global deployment of US naval vessels. Others more vitally placed in the grand scheme of things could be tempted to follow suit.

There is another point. By maintaining a legislative ban on American ships, for safety reasons, we, in effect, maintain an insult to a Navy which, as our own findings show, has been operating nuclear-powered ships for many decades, without significant incident.

In the same way, of course, we cock a snook at the US itself, a nation, to say the least, not unmindful of its global responsibilities.

Will Washington come round to our point of view? The answer is Liza Dolittle's: "Not bloody likely".

We have vital national interests at stake in our relationships with the US and important interactions with that country across the board. We want a free-trade deal. We know that the Australians are putting it about that they are more worthy claimants to first attention on a free-trade arrangement because they have been more staunch allies than New Zealand.

The Clark Government has made an excellent start to clearing away the baggage from the 1980s through a commitment to the war on terrorism.

Closure could now be achieved by amendment to the 1987 act - repeal of the reference to nuclear-powered ships.

This would be to enter one of the great no-go areas of New Zealand politics. But without some such summoning-up of political will to break the mould, Washington will be left with the lingering suspicion that what really motivates us is anti-Americanism.

If New Zealand goes on nourishing the belief that we are leading a global campaign against all things nuclear, the sole super-power will continue to be unimpressed.

In any case, our batting average has been poor. Vanuatu and Kiribati seem to be the only recruits to the port-visits cause out of at a rough calculation of some 130 coastal states.

In the interim, at least two more states - India and Pakistan - have tested nuclear weapons. Thirty-one countries now operate a total of 441 nuclear power reactors, with a total generating capacity which is more than three times that produced from all sources in Germany or France. Fifty-six countries maintain nuclear research reactors.

There are now only nine nuclear-powered surface ships in the US Navy. All are aircraft carriers too large to fit into our harbours, even if the Pentagon thought for a moment to send them here. The British have no nuclear-powered surface ships; the French have an aircraft carrier, not yet fully operational; the Russian Navy is not venturing too far afield these days. Persistence with a ban on nuclear-powered naval ships is tilting at windmills. None is coming our way.

Former Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating remarked at last year's Knowledge Wave Conference that New Zealand, faced with a range of options, "seemed constantly to take the one that was, in the long term, least strategically favourable to it. I believe that the danger you face is to limit your horizons and ambitions, to decide that being a beautiful, clean South Pacific island, the largest country in Polynesia, is enough. It won't be."

A large sign, near the airport, has for many years proclaimed Wellington a nuclear-free city. We live, for better or worse, in a nuclear age; we use radioactive materials for medical purposes and research. Who are we fooling?

* Denis McLean is a former Secretary of Defence and New Zealand Ambassador to Washington.