P.M. urges treaty to ban N-tests

Press, 31 May 1986, Page 6

P.M. urges treaty to ban N-tests

NZPA staff correspondent Cologne

The Prime Minister, Mr Lange, on Thursday urged nuclear Powers to conclude a comprehensive test ban treaty, saying it was the “single and most important step” towards slowing the nuclear arms race.

“If that treaty is one day concluded it will come about because Governments throughout the

world will have decided that enough is enough,” Mr Lange said in an address to the world congress of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War,

A comprehensive test ban treaty would “blunt the quest for technical advantage which helps drive the arms race and would in time limit the growth of nuclear arsenals.”

“What is required is the political will to make the agreement,” he said. His address to the conference included a cautious assessment of the political realities behind the nuclear arms race.

“It is impossible for me to advance any simple answer to the control of nuclear weapons and the limitation of the arms race,” said Mr Lange.

“We in New Zealand have an alternative to nuclear weapons (based on the country’s size and isolation from its nearest neighbours) ... the answer for New Zealand will not be the answer elsewhere.” Of the nuclear Powers he singled out just France for mention by name.

“Our isolation did not prevent an intrusion by a

nuclear weapons State which still echoes in New Zealand today.

“ France continues to test nuclear weapons under a coral atoll at Mururoa over the objection of every independent South Pacific nation.

"France sent agents of the State to New Zealand to carry out an act of terrorism to protect its nuclear weapons testing,” he said. France had not yet apologised for sinking the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior at Auckland last year, nor made reparation to New Zealand, Mr Lange said. “If you wonder why a large element of public opinion in New Zealand has come to reject the politics of nuclear weapons, there is part of the reason,” he said.

Mr Lange discussed the conclusion of the partial test ban treaty in 1963 and the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1967.

“It seemed for a while (in the early 19605) that there was a real prospect that a comprehensive test ban was within reach. “There seemed to be a genuine will to submit to the procedures of inspection and verification which are an essential

part of such a (test ban) treaty, then those procedures became the subject of dispute and the treaty was lost.

“There came in its place a treaty whose signatories agreed to defer from testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, above the atmosphere and in the sea. The treaty, welcome though it was, has hardly been a restraint at all on the testing and refinement of nuclear weapons. That has continued unabated.

“The preamble to the treaty declared it to be a first step towards a comprehensive test ban treaty but the next step was never taken.”

The Non-Proliferation Treaty equally showed how a measure of arms control which once gave cause for hope had in fact been subordinated to the impulse to compete. “There have been no new nuclear weapon States but those who have those weapons have continued to refine them, to develop new weapons and to station them in host countries.

“Clearly the vision of the framers of the treaty has yet to be achieved,” Mr Lange raid.