By Ramesh Thakur, June 14, 2017, YaponiyaTimes,
Iyul oyi 15, 2017.
WELLINGTON - On June 8, 1987, the parliament of Yangi Zelandiya passed a law that has become a milestone in the evolution of the nation. The primary purpose of the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act 1987 was to establish a nuclear- free zone in Yangi Zelandiya. Har qanday Yangi Zelandiya citizen or resident is forbidden to manufacture, acquire, possess or have any control over any nuclear or biological weapon.
The law covers all Yangi Zelandiya territory, including airspace and ocean territory up to the 12 nautical mile limit. The entry of nuclear-powered ships and the dumping of radioactive wastes are prohibited. The law also established a Public Advisory Committee on Disarmament and Arms Control. I was a member of PACDAC as a professor at the universitet of Otago 1990s boshida.
Against the global backdrop of elevated nuclear threat levels, many New Zealanders concluded that involvement in the Qo'shma Shtatlar’ nuclear-deployment practices exposed the country to global nuclear risks more than it protected the country against nonexistent national security threats. NGO activists succeeded in converting the Labour Party to their cause and in 1985 the Labour government of Prime Minister David Lange terminated the practice of permitting the entry of nuclear-capable AQSh ships into Yangi Zelandiya ports without an explicit declaration that they did not carry nuclear weapons. Because that was a global AQSh siyosat, Vashington refused to make an exception for a minor ally and Yangi Zelandiya effectively parted company from the ANZUS alliance, which fractured into two bilateral alliances between the AQSh va Avstraliyava Yangi Zelandiya va Avstraliya.
Anniversaries are occasions to take stock: Reflect on progress, celebrate successes, acknowledge setbacks and outline a vision and road map for doing better. Thirty years of the passage of a landmark law is a major anniversary. The 1987 nuclear-free act was a milestone in Yangi Zelandiya’s development as a nation and a determined assertion of national sovereignty and self-determination.
Today the nuclear-free law is widely considered to be a part of national and cultural identity, as became clear to me in a roundtable conversation with around 20 high school students in Vellington. I was in the Yangi Zelandiya capital to help the institut of Xalqaro aloqalar and the United Nations Association celebrate the 30th anniversary and pay tribute to one of the pioneers of the movement in the 1980s, the late Dame Laurie Salas, who was also a personal friend.
The 1987 nuclear-free act had a broader purpose still: “to promote and encourage an active and effective contribution by Yangi Zelandiya to the essential process of disarmament and international arms control.” The global geopolitical context of Yangi Zelandiya’s national legislation was the heightened tensions between the AQSh va sovet Ittifoqi as the world’s nuclear superpowers. Yangi Zelandiya’s anti-nuclear movement was one of the many powerful civil society fronts of anti-nuclear activism around the world.
The 1987 national law, ahead though it was of its time, reflected the circumstances of the first nuclear age. Today we confront the risks and threats of the second nuclear age. The first nuclear age was shaped by the overarching U.S.-Soviet ideological rivalry, their competitive nuclear arms buildup and doctrines, the development of mechanisms for maintaining strategic stability, and the practice of strategic nuclear policy dialogues among the AQSh and its allies, and also between the AQSh allies and the sovet Ittifoqi.
The second nuclear age is characterized by multiple nuclear powers with crisscrossing ties of cooperation and conflict. Several have fragile command and control systems. Cybersecurity is of critical importance to all. Some hold asymmetric perceptions of the military and political utility of nuclear weapons, with Xitoy va Hindiston having declared no-first-use policies because they foresee political more than military utility in nuclear weapons. Xitoy, Hindiston va Pokiston have also had long-running territorial disputes, so that today threat perceptions between three or more nuclear-armed states exist simultaneously.
The Cold War nuclear dyads have accordingly morphed into interlinked nuclear chains with a resulting greater complexity of deterrence relations between the nuclear powers, so that changes in the nuclear posture of one can generate a cascading effect on several others. The nuclear relationship between Hindiston va Pokiston, for example, is historically, conceptually, politically and strategically deeply intertwined with Xitoy as a nuclear power.
On top of all this, state-sponsored cross-border militancy and extremism involving nuclear-armed states is another contemporary reality, as is the fear of nuclear terrorism.
Thus the central dynamics and drivers of nuclear policy and relations in the second nuclear age are qualitatively different from the earlier era. Even though there are fewer nuclear weapons in the world today than at the height of the Cold War, there is a higher likelihood of their use — by design, accident, rogue launch or system error. With 1,800 nuclear weapons held in a state of hair-trigger alert, we run the risk of a nuclear war launched by blips on the radar screen.
The updated response therefore is the negotiation of a universal prohibition treaty that will scale up the Yangi Zelandiya national law to the global level. On June 8, Kennedy Graham of the Green Party submitted a motion in parliament that would have noted the 30th anniversary of the national legislation and called on Yangi Zelandiya to lead the negotiations to complete the global nuclear ban convention. Following a logic so fine that it was impossible to see, Foreign Minister Gerry Brownlee took Yangi Zelandiya back to the 1980s in emphasizing the importance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty instead, calling on nonmembers to sign it as non-nuclear weapon states.
How 20th century is that, asking Hindiston, Isroil va Pokiston to renounce their nuclear weapons in permanent legal obligations while Britaniya, Xitoy, Frantsiya, Rossiya va AQSh keep them? The government motion also singled out Shimoliy Koreya for condemnation when Pxenyan possess but 20 of the world’s estimated 15,000 warheads. The best that can be said is Brownlee is new and learning on the job. On the other hand, the government has abolished the separate post of minister for disarmament, which might be evidence of the country trying to crab-walk away from its legally entrenched nuclear-free national identity.
Happy 30th anniversary, Yangi Zelandiya.
Professor Ramesh Thakur is director of the Center for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, Avstraliya milliy universitet..
