New Zealand to Soften Stance on U.S. Ship Visits

Prime Minister David Lange, moving to heal a rift in a defense pact, said Thursday that New Zealand will tell the United States it does not have to specify whether visiting U.S. warships are nuclear armed or powered.

But New Zealand would still bar visits by American ships believed to be carrying nuclear weapons. Lange said there is “a bottom line from the New Zealand Cabinet and that bottom line is that we are not going to have nuclear weapons in New Zealand.”

Lange told a news conference that Deputy Prime Minister George Palmer plans to invite an American warship to visit New Zealand when he speaks with Secretary of State George P. Shultz today in Washington.

He said the move is being made in an attempt to reactivate the ANZUS military alliance linking the United States, New Zealand and Australia. New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policy prompted its ANZUS partners to cut it off from intelligence sharing and military exercises.

No American warships have visited New Zealand since the government turned down a U.S. request to allow the Buchanan to visit in March.

Lange said Palmer will yield to Washington demands that it need not say which ships carry nuclear weapons, a policy that prompted New Zealand to bar the Buchanan.

“We would establish whether (a ship) actually carried weapons by the collective assessment, advice and intelligence that we acquire and I can assure you that if we are not satisfied that it does not carry nuclear weapons, then it will not come,” Lange said.