N.Z. Urged Not To Spend More On Arms

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31586, 25 January 1968, Page 10

N.Z. Urged Not To Spend More On Arms

New Zealand was not developing nuclear weapons, but the withdrawal of British forces in South-East Asia meant acute problems on defence and national security for New Zealand, Miss Shirley Smith, national secretary of the New Zealand Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, said yesterday. The organisation urged that New Zealand should not invest in arms, but promote the prosperity of less fortunate neighbours. The nuclear news had been contradictory. Miss Smith said. The bombs in the crashed United States bomber would not explode, it seemed, but would they corrode and make the seas off Greenland radioactive?

China might have suffered a set-back in testing, but France threatened an H-bomb test in the Pacific in May. “The apparently hopeless non - proliferation treaty now been agreed on in draft by the United States and Russia, and inducements to sign offered to the non-nuclear weapons states,” she said. “It is too late, however, to dissuade France and China from testing.” Under the 1960 United States-Japan treaty, Japan must allow visits by American nuclear warships, but 30.0b0 Japanese had protested against the visit of the nuclear-powered carrier Enterprise. It appeared that they remembered Hiroshima.

The United State? had abandoned production of a nuclear warhead. This sug-

gested a cut-back in the missile programme, but the United States was developing an older multiple warhead with the result that 60 million Soviet citizens could possibly be wiped out with one stroke. But it was with the Soviet Government that the United States had agreed on the draft non-proliferation treaty. “The basic contradiction is that money and resources des-, perately needed to relieve poverty and give life are being poured out on the I means of death,” Miss Smith said. “Yet it is poverty which gives rise to the unrest which drives nations to spend on arms.”