Nuking ourselves in the foot
We have wasted more than three decades on a quarrel with our allies that need never have happened, argues Gerald Hensley, who had a box seat during events in the 1980s.
We have wasted 32 years on a quarrel with our allies that need never have happened, argues Gerald Hensley.
The stand-off that has lasted 32 years is coming to a close this week with the visit of the guided-missile destroyer USS Sampson. The public reaction seems to be quietly approving, in dramatic contrast to the uproar that followed the announcement of a projected visit by the last American candidate, the destroyer USS Buchanan in January 1985.
A leading activist of the earlier campaign has even described Sampson’s visit as a “victory”. A victory it may be for common sense, but it is a curious victory. As far as I can see, the terms for the two visits are identical. Washington still adheres to its policy of neither confirming nor denying the possible presence of nuclear weapons, and Wellington has again relied on the judgment of the Prime Minister and his advisers to decide that the visit conforms to New Zealand policy, which does not allow into the country ships that are nuclear-armed or -powered.
If having Sampson on this basis is a victory, then we could equally have had Buchanan on the same terms. This raises an awkward question: have we wasted more than three decades on a quarrel with our allies that need never have happened?
THE LONG PEACE AND NUCLEAR DETERRENT
In 1984, we basked, as we still do, in what might be called the Long Peace, the longest period in our history without a major war – even after 70 years there is no end in sight to this happy situation. Over a lifetime, we came to take our peaceful neighbourhood for granted, and the extent to which we owed this to the US Navy’s dominance in the Pacific sank below the horizon of our thinking. It was not so much that security bred contempt – though it did for a small section of New Zealanders – as that it bred complacency. So complacent, indeed, that we felt confident enough to shut out of our ports the navy that had guaranteed our security since 1942.
That strange outcome came from the fusion of
a latent anti-Americanism by some and a much wider fear of nuclear weapons by much if not most of the population. As the Cold War drew to a close, it encouraged some of us to be tempted by the hot simplicity of single-issue politics and to campaign against American nuclear weapons.
There is an irony here: nuclear weapons, deeply dismaying though they are, have underwritten the Long Peace. Without them, we would be back to 1939 when mass warfare was still thinkable. Every country, at least so far, has been careful to keep any trouble well away from the nuclear trigger.
“So far” is the catch. The awkward fact behind the Long Peace is that it has been sustained by the doctrine of nuclear deterrence whose implicit acceptance of enormous destruction is repellent when looked at in the cold light of day. Everyone’s security has rested on a paradox: deterrence is acceptable only if it stays out of sight. New Zealanders, though least likely to be a nuclear target, became increasingly troubled by the lack of progress in reducing reliance on these weapons, and in the 1980s, excitement over anti-nuclearism swamped any discussion of our foreign policy or defence needs.
LANGE’S MURKY POSITION
In June 1984, the country elected a Labour Government, led by David Lange, which pledged to renegotiate the Anzus alliance with the US and Australia and to exclude nuclear-armed or -powered warships. As is the way with election manifestos, no one could be sure quite what this meant in practice. The people had spoken, but the country had to wait for Lange to tell them exactly what they had said.
Lange’s position was murky. He had stood aside from formulating the anti-nuclear stance, and over the previous year he had assured the Americans and others several times that he intended to change it. He asked Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke what he had done on the issue and claimed Hawke had said, “When we were in Opposition, I played along with them, but once we won the election, I kicked the bastards in the crutch.” “And that’s what I’m going to do”, Lange told the Chief of Defence Staff when he called on the then Leader of the Opposition.
Whatever Lange said in his year as Opposition leader, a formidable problem faced him in government. He had been elected by a large majority on a platform that excluded even the possibility of nuclear weapons in New Zealand’s harbours. No ifs, no buts, no weapons.
On the other hand, it raised a difficult issue for countries such as the US and the UK, whose warships regularly carried nuclear weapons on long cruises. Both rigidly adhered to a policy of neither confirming nor denying the presence of any nuclear weapons on board. The main purpose of this was to conceal not so much the presence of nuclear weapons as their absence. They were expensive to carry, requiring special space and crew and cumbersome control systems, and captains preferred not to carry them if at all possible. A policy of not commenting meant in many cases the weapons could be left at home, but no one could know this for certain.
So there was a dismayingly wide gap between insisting nuclear weapons not be allowed even temporarily in New Zealand waters and the refusal of friendly navies to disclose what they had on board. US Secretary of State George Shultz said he was determined not to make an enemy out of New Zealand. In Wellington on a visit just after the election, he told his delegation there could be no trade retaliation. Throughout all the subsequent turns of the quarrel, he and the Reagan administration held firmly to this position.
In the course of his visit, he met Lange, then Prime Minister-elect. Given the subsequent arguments and recriminations over what was said at this meeting, it would have been helpful if someone had kept a record.
The Americans came away with the impression that given six months, Lange would work on his party and overcome the problem with naval visits. The New Zealand side say no undertaking was given, just that the new Prime Minister would do his best. Lange’s own summary to his deputy, Geoffrey Palmer, is probably as accurate as any – “US expecting the NZ Government to find a way through, and that we would try”. His message to the Americans, though, came wrapped in a manner that for those who worked with him became very familiar. When Lange was uneasy, the reassurances and jokes tumbled out, the subclauses billowed like spinnakers and the listeners were submerged in a rush of friendliness and charm.
THE RADICAL LEFT GETS SUSPICIOUS
There was a vague assumption in the country that Lange would do what the Australians had done a year earlier – have a review of the Anzus Treaty and conclude that no change was needed. The radical left of the NZ Labour Party, always prone to believe that leaders sold out when they came to power, knew their man and were deeply suspicious he might do just this. As the American Embassy reported, they were watching Lange “like a Hawk, with an E”.
However, the first person to dismiss the possibility that Lange would do a Hawke was Bob Hawke himself. They met as prime ministers for the first time in August 1984 at Port Moresby, where Hawke took an instant dislike. He interrupted Lange’s account of the anti-nuclear policy to say, “David, you don’t seem really convinced by what you are saying.” Lange agreed, saying that when he came to power, an understanding had been reached with the left on nuclear weapons and ship visits in return for a free hand on economic reform, and so his hands were tied. Hawke said he thought, “Who is this f--ing fellow”, and was so shocked when Lange was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize that he thought of writing to complain, presumably in less Australian language.
Given the intransigent stand of the Labour Party, the only possibility seemed to be to arrange a visit by a patently nonnuclear vessel. The key to getting the right ship was the US Commander-in-Chief in Honolulu, Admiral William Crowe, and in mid-November, Lange sent Chief of Defence Staff Ewan Jamieson to talk to him. They were personal friends and Jamieson stayed at his house. The admiral offered him a choice of three conventionally powered ships; Jamieson chose an elderly destroyer, USS Buchanan, because it was not operationally equipped for nuclear weapons. The admiral was punctilious about giving no hint of its armament, but he was as aware as the New Zealanders of the significance of the visit and the need for the ship to be “clean”.
Lange seemed comfortable with this choice. In December, he told the US ambassador to submit a formal request for a visit by Buchanan for the Cabinet to consider early in the New Year and said he saw no
When Lange was uneasy, the jokes tumbled out, the subclauses billowed like spinnakers and the listeners were submerged in charm.
difficulty. The Secretary of Foreign Affairs was optimistic enough to tell Bill Rowling, our new ambassador to Washington, that whatever else happened in his term, he would not have to worry about ship visits.
This proved to be a substantial underestimate. Word of an impending visit, though not the name of the ship, leaked out of Washington after a visit there by Helen Clark, then chair of Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee, who reportedly telephoned her fellow activists to say, “Push the button.” Across the country, the machinery of protest was set in motion: the telephone trees, networks, haunting of newsrooms and demonstrations that distinguished the left when it was energised by a hot issue.
A brilliant public relations campaign caught the Government unprepared. There had been no Cabinet consideration of the Buchanan visit; no minister knew anything about it. It had all been held closely by Lange. When he had earlier been offered a draft Cabinet paper to brief his colleagues, he declined, saying he preferred to do it his way. His way turned out to be not to say anything at all, not even to his deputy.
PALMER GETS DROPPED IN IT
Then, amid the rising public storm, Lange chose to go off on a visit to the atolls of Tokelau. The navy offered to take him in a frigate, but he preferred the informality of a rusty island trader with an unreliable wireless. Sailing from island to island, he was out of communication for eight days. Only a short warning from Palmer, tapped out letter by letter, got through.
Palmer – immersed in briefings and besieged by anti-nuclear lobbyists – had to decide what to do. Lange later and rather unkindly described his efforts to catch up with events as “headless chookery”. Palmer’s first instinct was to confirm that a visit was in prospect and would be considered in accordance with “our established procedures”. In these neutral words, the left sensed an impending betrayal. The pressure was stepped up by backbench members and by Labour’s Executive Council, which insisted on the absolute purity of its nuclear policy, saying, “There is no need to accommodate the American point of view.” As party president Margaret Wilson later said, “We did not think about the foreign policy implications – that was not our world.”
In the end, the harried Palmer stuck with the party manifesto, deciding as a lawyer that the absence of nuclear weapons on Buchanan could not be proved “beyond reasonable doubt”. His colleague Richard Prebble complained he treated the problem as if it were merely one of statutory interpretation rather than one of relations with the US. It was certainly the first time a criminal standard of proof had been applied to a ship visit.
There was no Cabinet discussion of his decision. Although a bundle of briefing papers had been prepared, they were never circulated to ministers. Mike Moore and other colleagues thought in later years they had failed in their duty of collective responsibility by not insisting that the Cabinet discuss the biggest foreign policy issue to face the country in decades. They knew nothing of the background and felt sorry for the way Palmer had been dropped in it. All the same, they were careful, in Prebble’s recollection, “never to let on what a shambles the decision-making had been”.
“YOUR PM LIED TO ME”
When Lange, flown home from Pago Pago by the air force, entered the Cabinet room later that day, he realised the issue had been settled. He said to me that evening, “You’ve no idea how difficult it was in Cabinet, Gerald. I was in a minority of one.”
The Americans felt they had been tricked and deliberately humiliated. New Zealand had chosen a ship, invited it to visit and then publicly rejected it. “Your Prime Minister lied to me,” said Shultz. Rowling, who had to cope with the angry fallout in Washington, had no illusions about the muddle Wellington had created. He told an Australian in Honolulu a few months later that an agreement on the Buchanan visit had been clearly understood by both sides: “When it had come to the crunch, however, Lange had been unable to deliver”.
Lange continued to insist on the importance of Anzus and the Western alliance to New Zealand, but events moved him into the more congenial role as the world’s nukebuster. His triumph a few weeks later at the Oxford Union debate settled any remaining hesitations, and henceforth his and his country’s role would be as a beacon of hope in a nuclear-mad world.
New Zealand’s nationalism had been challenged and the myth became accepted that the US had tried to bully New Zealand into accepting nuclear weapons. The Americans had made it clear several times that New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policy was its own business. But they and the Australians did not accept that New Zealand could unilaterally alter the terms of a 30-year alliance to exclude a member’s ships. As Shultz said, the alliance was essentially a maritime one, and that being so, it made no sense to stop visits to one another’s ports.
They felt New Zealand should choose: either to be anti-nuclear outside the alliance or to stay in the alliance and accept the ship visits that had been the norm for the previous 30 years. To the irritation of our friends,
Word leaked out of Washington after a visit there by Helen Clark, who reportedly telephoned her fellow activists to say, “Push the button.”
we would not choose: we excluded American ships while arguing vigorously that the Anzus Treaty remained in full effect. This illogicality was forced on the Government because the polls consistently showed that the public supported both the anti-nuclear policy and continuing membership of the alliance. Palmer told an Australian Minister that they had to prolong the negotiations as long as possible. When it was no longer possible, he thought “the public would come down on the side of keeping Anzus”.
As a result, efforts to square this circle dragged on for over a year with a series of negotiations that invariably proved fruitless. Shultz complained to the British Foreign Secretary: “They are very difficult people to deal with. They tend to issue public statements at variance with what has been said in confidential talks.” In the end, after a last talk with Lange, he pulled the plug, saying, “We part company as friends, but we part company as far as the alliance is concerned.”
REPAIRING THE TRUST
Since then, tempers have cooled and the quarrel has come into a clearer perspective. Those who had worried about the disappearance of the security guarantee found the world looked no different without it. In the sunny afternoon of the Long Peace, such guarantees seemed to have lost their point. When nothing happened either to New Zealand’s trade or its security, the worries about the country’s new stance faded as quickly as they had arisen. It was replaced by a new pride, in New Zealand’s firm antinuclear stand.
However, we quickly learnt that we could not operate without a comfortable relationship with the US. Under several governments, including Helen Clark’s, we spent the next two decades trying to rebuild the links that had been lost – a clear sign both of the magnitude of the original mistake and of the unavoidable need to set it right.
Reinforcing this need is the slow change in the strategic weather that New Zealanders are beginning to sense. China’s naval expansion is hinting for the first time at a challenge to the US Navy’s long mastery of the Pacific Basin. The expansion is not nec- essarily aggressive in its intent. China can legitimately expect to have the naval force that other great powers have. The spectacular growth of its international trade and of its need for oil and other raw materials have compelled a change in its foreign policy. It has had to move out of its traditional isolation as the Middle Kingdom to play a greater role in the world and to acquire the necessary capability to protect trade routes and other external interests.
But these interests will not always be those of the US or other Western countries, as clashes in the South China Sea already show. There will be more as China’s naval build-up creates a genuine blue-water navy able to project power anywhere in the Pacific. This does not automatically mean the sunny afternoon of the Long Peace is coming to a close; China, like any other nuclear power, is likely to be careful to keep its moves well below the mushroom cloud. But new capabilities change the outlook and create new risks. We may have to accept that the weather will be less calm and predictable than it has been in recent decades.
It may not be unduly hopeful to suggest that, after long lying in the dark, the first green shoots of a renewed interest in defence are now be appearing. By inviting the USS Sampson, we have made a start in repairing the rusty relationship with the US Navy, but the election of Donald Trump suggests he will expect America’s friends to do more for the common defence than the occasional ship visit. The thinking in our June Defence White Paper, the clearest and most confident of recent years, goes further when it speaks of New Zealand’s “large maritime domain” and the challenges and incidents that will increase our need for a maritime response. It will not be cheap, but after abolishing the combat air force and halving the naval combat force, we have considerable ground to make up in repairing our defence capabilities. Perhaps we are now ready to start on this journey – and in doing so also repair the trust that our friends, especially the US and Australia, felt we broke 32 years ago.
Our nationalism had been challenged and the myth became accepted that the US had tried to bully New Zealand into accepting nuclear weapons.
Gerald Hensley was Head of the Prime Minister’s Department in the Muldoon and Lange administrations and later became Co-ordinator of Domestic and External Security and then Secretary of Defence. This is an edited version of a speech he gave recently to the Navy League Strategy Conference.