David Barber was a journalist with the New Zealand Press Association for 20 years and served as correspondent in all four of its overseas posts: Sydney, Singapore, London and Washington DC.
OPINION: Not many people remember this but New Zealand did not become a sovereign nation until 1947, when it finally became totally independent of the UK parliament. It took another quarter of a century before cementing its independence when then-prime minister Norman Kirk took a truly indigenous foreign policy initiative.
Fifty years ago this month, Kirk sent the Navy frigates HMNZS Otago and Canterbury into the South Pacific to draw world attention to French atmospheric nuclear tests. It was the world’s first government-sponsored Ban-the-Bomb protest.
French tests moved to Mururoa Atoll in Polynesia after France gave up its Sahara testing site following Algeria’s successful war of independence. Kirk said winds from Mururoa tests could blow radioactive fallout over New Zealand. France had no right to hold nuclear experiments in our backyard, he said.
The move predictably angered French president Georges Pompidou, who said it threatened the two countries’ “traditionally friendly relations”. He was supported by New Zealand’s former mother country, another nuclear power, whose prime minister, Edward Heath, told Kirk his “unconventional diplomacy” represented a “very significant cleavage of policy between Britain and New Zealand” and created problems with the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato).
After Pompidou rejected an interim call to halt the tests by the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Kirk said, “We are a small nation but we will not abjectly surrender to injustice. A small country tucked away at the bottom of the world is confronting, on a moral principle, a large nation like France.”
It marked a sea change in New Zealand foreign policy. Until then, successive governments had invariably acted with conventional diplomacy and sycophantically in concert with traditional allies. This nation followed the US into Vietnam, albeit reluctantly. It retained forces in Southeast Asia at Britain’s bidding after the UK withdrew its troops east of Suez.
“From now on, when we have to deal with a new situation, we shall not say what do the British think about it? Or what would the Americans want us to do?” Kirk said later. “Our starting point will be what do we think about it? What course of action best accords with the fundamental principles of our foreign policy?”
It launched Labour’s anti-nuclear campaign, culminating over a decade later in the Lange government’s legislation that led to Washington stripping New Zealand of ally status in the 1951 Anzus defence pact.
On June 28, 1973, HMNZS Otago sailed out to Mururoa. Private protest yachts such as the Fri were towed away by French commandos before the first test of 1973. But HMNZS Otago was never charged with actually trying to stop the tests at the atoll. Kirk said it would be “a silent accusing witness with the power to bring alive the conscience of the world”.
To ensure maximum publicity, he directed the Navy to accommodate a cabinet minister, Fraser Colman, a father of three, and three media people. I worked for the New Zealand Press Association, which supplied every daily newspaper in New Zealand and served the Reuters international news agency.
The Otago had been at sea three weeks and was 21.5 miles off Mururoa when it witnessed the first test, a trigger device for a larger nuclear weapon, estimated at less than a third of the size of the 1945 bomb on Hiroshima. My report of the blast “rising through a layer of cumulous cloud and billowing out into a perfect mushroom” went around the world through NZPA-Reuters in minutes. Although the French carried on, there is no doubt publicity from Kirk’s campaign forced them to test underground in 1975.
But it took another 21 years before France dismantled the Mururoa test site and joined the UK in becoming the first nuclear powers to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
