50 Attend City Meeting On Nuclear Tests

Press, Volume C, Issue 29625, 22 September 1961, Page 10

50 Attend City Meeting On Nuclear Tests

The Government will be asked to use its influence urgently in the United Nations and through diplomatic channels to end all testing of nuclear weapons. A resolution to this effect was passed at a meeting of about 50 Christchurch citizens last evening. A resolution was also passed that the diplomatic representatives of the four nuclear Powers in New Zealand be advised of the meeting's action. No-one voted against either resolution.

The meeting was called by the Christchurch branch of the New Zealand Council tor Nuclear Disarmament and the Christchurch branch of the National Council of Churches. Addresses were given by Mr M. D. Kane, a trade union secretary and a vice-presi-dent of the Christchurch branch of the Nuclear Disarmament Campaign; the Rev. G. D. Fa Hoon. a Presbyterian minister and chairman of the public questions committee of the Christchurch Presbytery; and Mr G. Troup, a senior lecturet in French at the University of Canterbury and president of the Christchurch branch of the United Nations Association. Mrs M. Woodward, secretary of the Christchurch branch of the Nuciear Disarmament Campaign, was chairman.

“We recognise that the development of nuclear power could be one of the benefits of mankind," Mr Kane said. “Any person who has any regard for the life he loves or the people he loves should work to see it channelled into constructive causes.” Mr Kane said that not even the trade union movement was united on the question of nuclear tests but that there was a growing awareness of it. Mr Falloon said he was

convinced that 90 per cent of the common people in the world were against the tests but bad no effective platform from which to speak He said that in the West the

governments were the elected representatives of the people and those in power in totalitarian countries might also have a certain measure of responsibility to the people. "United we stand, divided we. fly to bits,” Mr Falloon

“We in New Zealand are directly linked with the nuclear curse by reason of our membership in the A.N.Z.U.S. and S.E.A.T.O. pacts, backed as they are by the threat of the bomb," said Mr Troup. “With no control of the detonation thereof, we may find ourselves branded with the deep damnation of its setting-off. We shall find our South-east Asian friendships withering, and our security, patiently built on good wiU, compromised. Moreover, when the time comes to make peace and reconstruct, we shall find the earth and the air poisoned, literally and figuratively, so that the work of reconstruction is indefinitely delayed.”