Dialogue: US is dealing with the anti-nuclear manipulator now

By JOHN ROUGHAN

In Washington this week Helen Clark gave the Americans a hint that could heal the nuclear rift. I wonder if they heard it. More to the point, I wonder if they knew who they were talking to.

When she met Secretary of State Colin Powell she reminded him that the nuclear ban has posed no problem for the navies of Britain and France, whose ships have called here since it was enacted. She might have added China and India. Nuclear powers all.

In fact, as she mentioned in interviews before she left, US military planes continue to use the Operation Deep Freeze base at Christchurch though the anti-nuclear law applies to aircraft, too.

None of that would be news to the State Department. They have heard the same point from every New Zealand Prime Minister since David Lange. But do they know who this one is?

Flash back with me to late summer 1985, six months after the election of the Lange Government. It is a Sunday night, when nothing much normally happens around Parliament. I'm alone in the Herald's office, alone in the whole press gallery as far as I can tell.

I've filed a scene-setter on the following morning's Cabinet meeting at which a decision is expected on the first US request for a warship visit since the change of government. I'm wondering whether to close up and go home when a Labour MP looks around the door.

It is all on, he says. The party is kicking up a storm about "this ship". Over the weekend ministers have been deluged with cards and calls from party members, who suspect that the Cabinet is about to agree to the visit.

It figured. During the previous week the Acting Prime Minister, Geoff Palmer, had painstakingly explained how the Government proposed to make its own assessment of the vessel's likely weaponry and ask no questions of the US.

There would be no need for Washington to "neither confirm nor deny" anything. The New Zealand Government would be solely responsible for abiding by the nuclear ban. You would have to trust the Government.

Like hell, said Nicky Hager, also known as the Peace Movement. "Not after the economic surprises of the past six months," Labour activists said to their MPs over the weekend. And leading the charge, according to my visitor, were backbenchers Helen Clark and Jim Anderton, along with party president Margaret Wilson.

The next morning David Lange was returning from a week in the Tokelaus, oblivious to the uprising. A political adviser took the unusual step of flying out to join him for the homeward journey, almost certainly to warn him the ship deal was dead in the water.

So began the diplomatic fallout. Helen Clark, dark, avenging angel of the anti-American left in those days, was there at the inception. She had been always to the fore in Labour conferences when resolutions to withdraw from military alliances embarrassed leaders from Kirk to Lange.

It must have amused her, as it certainly did Anderton, to watch Lange take on the mantle of anti-nuclear champion once they had turned away the USS Buchanan. But it must have thrilled them even more to watch the Americans play into their hands.

Washington drew the obvious conclusion: if an old, conventionally powered vessel was not acceptable, none would be. At least, none of theirs.

The US responded to the Buchanan's rejection exactly as it always said it would. And, as the anti-nuclear campaigners calculated, it was easy to present the response as bullying. Suspension of military exercises succeeded only in turning a pragmatic people, historically quick to volunteer for Western wars, into a defiant nation of nuclear saps.

Washington has always blamed the rift on poor New Zealand leadership. Now it needs to know it is dealing with the New Zealand politician who, more than any, can call the shots on this subject.

The Cold War is long gone, the US says it no longer routinely arms surface ships with nuclear weapons. A more insidious form of foreign violence has shaken American security.

Helen Clark's Government has volunteered impeccably for the war on terror, though she prefers not to call it that. If US intelligence on this country is any good at all, it will know the trust she commands and realise what that makes possible. When she notes that other nuclear navies have found a way to visit, she offers the very deal she once sabotaged.

If the US still has a conventionally powered warship and would like to test the water again, my guess is Helen Clark and Jim Anderton would let it in. They have not changed their nuclear views, but they have more on their minds now.

They want to talk about trade and global problems in Washington and they find, as all New Zealanders do, that our nuclear nonsense is like a smell in the room.

However much both sides may try to ignore it, they can't.

The thing you sense about nuclear-free New Zealand in Washington is the hypocrisy. I mean, imagine if we had a major row with another country and it so much as waved a missile at us. Parliament would repeal that port ban faster than you can say "members' superannuation".

Despite the anti-nuclear stand-off, we still live in absolute confidence that if ever we need them, the US will ride to our rescue. We know it and they know it. It is dishonourable and always has been.

It is doing far more harm to our interests than those of the US. I can think of no reason that they should bother to run a ship past us again, but I wish they would.