[E-rundbrief] Info 42 - David Lange: Bombs away - The perverse nuclear umbrella

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief - Info 42

Bad Ischl, 11.10.2003

Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit
www.begegnungszentrum.at

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BOMBS AWAY
The perverse nuclear umbrella

Essay by David Lange

(New Zealand's former Prime Minister till 1989, promoted Nuclear-Free-Zone 
in South-Pacific, advocate, defends antinuclear activists, RLA/ Alternative 
Nobelprice 2003 - see Info 38)

It does no harm to wonder why people not unlike us should have chosen to 
shelter under the nuclear umbrella. Why do populations with which we have 
much in common allow their governments to build or deploy nuclear weapons, 
or actively seek the protection of powers which have nuclear weapons?

It is on the face of it irrational to build an arsenal whose use would make 
the whole planet uninhabitable, to base a defence on a professed 
willingness to risk the lives of every last one of us, and to underpin 
international relationships with fear of the unthinkable. This is the 
essence of nuclear armament.

For all its perversity, the necessity of nuclear weaponry is accepted, or 
argued, by many who are not otherwise out of touch with reality. Indeed, 
when New Zealand first adopted its nuclear free policy, the most common 
rebuke from the policy's critics, both foreign and domestic, was that New 
Zealand's exclusion of nuclear weapons from its territory was unrealistic. 
Its supposed idealism was the quality for which the nuclear free policy was 
most frequently faulted.

This view was not the exclusive property of a political elite. Support for 
nuclear deterrence was, and is, common among people with whom many in New 
Zealand might easily identify. Many of us have close ties with the United 
Kingdom, a country in which the Labour party finally accepted that it could 
not win a general election until it abandoned its policy of unilateral 
nuclear disarmament. The Australian Labor party discarded its commitment to 
nuclear arms control after it came to office, and became the sternest 
critic of New Zealand's policy.

Exactly why people in the United Kingdom and Australia should support 
nuclear armament, or why voters in many democratic societies should allow 
their governments to spend countless billions arming themselves with 
weapons of mass destruction, is complex, but fear lies at the bottom of it. 
In the cold war era, fear was palpable in Europe. Nobody could escape the 
tension between the great power blocs. Fear that enemies might use nuclear 
weapons against civilian populations was genuine, whatever its source. 
Insecurity allowed, or perhaps demanded, an acceptance of the doctrines of 
nuclear deterrence. Although their use might be threatened, there was 
consolation in the assumption that the weapons might never be used. The 
risks of deterrence were lesser in this view than the risks of disarmament.

There was far less immediate cause for fear in this country, but it was 
present nonetheless. There was considerable attachment to the ANZUS 
alliance, and some doubt that the nuclear free policy would prevail once it 
became clear that its price was the end of the active alliance 
relationship. While alliance membership was most often presented in 
political and diplomatic circles as a means of getting a hearing from the 
powerful and promoting our wider international interests, public support 
for the alliance was more visceral. It rested on the belief that New 
Zealand needed a powerful protector.

This belief lost currency only gradually. Events in the 1980s saw the 
popularity of the nuclear free policy come to outweigh any lingering sense 
of insecurity.

The end of the cold war put an end to much of the fear which had shaped 
international relations. The nuclear powers were accordingly able to reduce 
their stockpiles of nuclear weapons and limit their deployment. But nuclear 
deterrence is far from abandoned. It is still the foundation of military 
strategy among the nuclear powers. There remain active deployments of 
nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are not routinely deployed on surface 
vessels, but the right to deploy them is reserved. Strategic doctrines 
allow for the first use of nuclear weapons or for their use against 
countries not themselves armed with nuclear weapons. Technological 
refinement of weapons and weapons systems continues.

In a climate where the need to openly threaten the use of nuclear weapons 
has diminished, their possession is more easily tolerated. There seems, for 
the time being, small chance of their use. They are seen as insurance 
against some unspecified future risk.

Recent interest in New Zealand in reviving a form of active alliance with 
the United States feeds on something of this complacency. Because nuclear 
deterrence is no longer obtrusive, the nuclear free policy may be presented 
as something of purely symbolic value which could usefully be traded off in 
exchange for the benefits of a closer relationship with the United States. 
The advantages of such a closer relationship are rightly a matter for 
debate, but there is no doubting the price, as a recent episode confirms. 
New Zealand is still formally, if not actively, allied with the United 
States. It responded to the terrible events of September 11 with 
uncalculated sympathy. It sent members of its armed forces into danger in 
support of the war against terrorism. For all of that we are allowed the 
overweening condescension of being not an ally but a "very very very good 
friend". Much foreign policy debate in the future will revolve around 
whether there is more we can, or should do, in exchange for a different 
form of words, and what such words might actually be worth.

New Zealand's commitment to its nuclear free policy was tested in many ways 
in the 1980s, but we were to a great extent distant from the insecurity 
which led others to embrace nuclear deterrence. We are not in the same way 
immune from the complacency which allows many to believe that nuclear 
weapons are no longer a danger simply because their use is no longer openly 
threatened. The weapons are still with us, and there are still those who 
justify their presence. Complacency and indifference may in the end prove a 
greater threat than insecurity to the nuclear free policy.

David Lange

This essay originally appeared in
Bombs Away- the catalogue
Published June 2002
$10.00
ISBN# 0-9582359-2-9

http://www.physicsroom.org.nz/space/2002/bombsaway/lange/

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Matthias Reichl
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