‘Express’ advises P.M. to reconsider stance

Press, 2 December 1985, Page 6

‘Express’ advises P.M. to reconsider stance

NZPA staff correspondent London

London’s “Daily Express” newspaper said yesterday it hopes the Prime Minister, Mr Lange, thinks.again on New Zealand’s anti-nuclear stance.

The “Express” noted in an editorial that Washington threatened to, end the A.N.Z.U.S. Pact, “faced with New Zealand’s refusal to accept its treaty obligations”. “It'is difficult to see how it (the United States) could wisely do anything else,” the Right-wing newspaper said.

“Leaving the New Zealand Government’s treatywelching unpunished would encourage other United States allies under pressure from anti-nuclear movements to follow Wellington’s example — an attempt to enjoy the benefits of an alliance without incurring any of the costs.” The “Express” added: “We must hope, even at this late hour, that Prime Minister Lange can be prevailed upon to think again.” The British Government told the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Palmer, it did not want New Zealand to introduce anti-nuclear legislation, when he visited London this year. As the nuclear row between Wellington and Washington hotted up again during the last few days, British officials were indignant' at suggestions by an Opposition defence spokesman that the Royal Navy would replace New Zealand in Rimpac exercises with the United States next year. They would not disclose whether a decision had been made on joining Rimpac but said it was “nonsense” to

say Britain would be “a surrogate for another country”. Plans were being worked on for a deployment to the North Pacific, Indian Ocean, Far East and Australasia, the Royal Navy spokesmen confirmed, but they said details were not finalised. The Left-wing British magazine, the “New States-, man,” said that carriers such as H.M.S. Invincible and H.M.S. Hennes were among the few Royal Navy vessels that carried nuclear depth bombs in peacetime. An investigation based on “secret official documents” showed there were “fewer (British) nukes than everyone thinks,” the “New Statesman” said, describing the United Kingdom nuclear stockpile as small and antiquated. There were in total “only about 200 British nuclear weapons — perhaps even •less/’ it added.

“The constraints on British nuclear weapons — in particular the extremely limited amount of weapons, grade plutonium available — mean that even with British Nuclear Fuel’s “military’ reactors now working at maximum capacity, sufficient warheads for the new Trident submarines can only be produced by removing the plutonium from an equivalent number of existing nuclear weapons.” The “New Statesman” said that a defence specialist who had worked inside the nuclear programme during the 1980 s estimated the British stockpile at: • Eighty R.A.F. tactical boihbs, believed to have a nuclear yield between about five kilotons and 200 kilotons (15 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb).

9 Twenty Royal Navy nuclear depth bombs, a lowyield variation of the R.A.F. tactical bomb, for use against submarines. • Forty Polaris-Cheva-line missile warheads, believed to Carry three separately , targeted nuclear weapons. “This makes a stockpile of, at most, about 225 nuclear weapons, or, if Chevaline missiles only contain two warheads, about 185.” The "New Statesman” said in an editorial that Britain would never have enough operational warheads to put in all the Trident missile-firing submarines, “if we are mad enough to go ahead with the Trident project.” “These revelations may come as something of a shock to the peace movement. Successive British Governments for decades, it seems, have pretended that we are much more of a nuclear Power than we in fact are.”

However, the magazine said that 200 nuclear weapons were still “a massive nuclear arsenal, even in a world ’ where the ’ superpowers count theirs in tens of thousands.” This also underlined the fact that “the overwhelming nuclear presence in this country is not British, but American,” the “New Statesman” said.