U.S. newspaper accuses N.Z. of self-delusion

Press, 11 June 1987, Page 38

U.S. newspaper accuses N.Z. of self-delusion

By

TOM BRIDGMAN

NZPA Washington A huge Soviet missile about to land on New Zealand features in a leader-page cartoon in the conservative newspaper, the "Washington Times;” Underneath, one character cheerfully tells another, “Hey, hot to worry ... It’s banned!"

The paper, owned by the Unification Church, in an accompanying editorial describes the antinuclear act passed recently as “one of those febrile gestures by which democracies sometimes communicate a secret death wish.

“Whether the supporters of the measure imagine that, in the event of a nuclear war, the new law will make the detonations neatly circumnavigate their islands is unknown, but given their evident capacity for selfdelusion, such fantasies are not unlikely.” The , “Washington Times” commented that the security of New Zealand and other nations was not the product of parliamentary resolutions. “In the South Pacific, a

region today obscure to most Americans and never clearly drawn on most maps of the world, security, or what remains of it after the contributions of Mr Lange and his party, is becoming as rare as the koala, as the Soviets and even the seemingly übiquitous Colonel Gadaffi spread their tentacles.”

The paper said that the success of the anti-nuclear “and implicitly anti-West-ern” movement in New Zealand fitted neatly into the more tangible military and diplomatic dimensions of the political warfare being waged by the Soviets and their Libyan surrogate.

“The destablisation of Governments in the Pacific Basin, the encouragement of alienation from the West, and the shadow cast on the warm regional waters by the increased Soviet naval presence threaten an eventual interdiction of American access and the establishment of anti-Western chessmen on the southern flank of the Philippines, Japan and Indonesia,” the editorial.