Nuclear ban agreement welcomed by Forum

Press, 28 August 1984, Page 1

Nuclear ban agreement welcomed by Forum

NZPA staff correspondent Funafuti South Pacific leaders agreed in Funafuti, Tuvalu, yesterday that the region should become a nuclear-free zone, but that individual nations should decide whether to accept visits by nuclear-powered ships

During their South Pacific Forum meeting, the leaders set up a working party of officials to draft a nuclearfree zone treaty with the intention of reporting back to the next Forum meeting in 1985. The spokesman for the Forum, the Australian Prime Minister, Mr Hawke, announced the decision. He said it was unanimous. A proposal from the New Zealand Prime Minister, Mr Lange, that the Forum try to have the issue made subject of a United Nations resolution was not supported by the meeting, according to both Mr Hawke and Mr Lange. The zone would prohibit the manufacture, use, storage, and acquisition of nuclear weapons. It would also ban the dumping of nuclear waste within the region. The actual size of the zone is one of the questions to be addressed by the working party. Whether to allow the visits of nuclear warships would be up to each individual country to decide. At a press conference, Mr Lange said that the Forum had had to accept that it did not have the power to reverse the entire history of doctrines relating to the freedom to navigate the high seas.

If nuclear ships were barred in the region, the zone would not work because it would never attract the support of the nuclear weapon States, he said. On the leaders’ decision not to accept the New Zealand proposal that the zone be subject of a United Nations resolution, Mr Lange said there was a feeling that if the zone was to come from the Forum it would have to be emphatically defined and refined.

Mr Lange said he reported to the Forum on the results of the joint scientific expedition to Mururoa Atoll. He said that the expedition report may have allayed fears about the shortterm effects of French nuclear testing, but it had raised fears as to the longterm prospect of extensive damage from the tests. “We are resolved more than ever in our opposition to that testing programme being undertaken by France,” said Mr Lange.