I spent a year in your very fair country a few years ago for grad school (Victoria U.).
I think you make some fair points. There is a lot of ignorance going around here, though it is not surprising - most Americans I come into contact with think New Zealand is somewhere in Europe.
Kiwi troops suffered more than their fair share in both world wars and Korea and Vietnam and the Gulf. Rommel, in fact, rated them the best Allied troops he ever faced. I am not sure he was wrong.
Your basic understanding of Lange's confrontation with the U.S. in 1986 is of course correct. I cannot, however, agree with your evaluation of it.
Lange's anti-nuke feelings, reflecting as they did much of the Labour caucus, got the better of him. Ultimately he wanted to be part of ANZUS but only on his own terms.
Sidebar: I knew some Kiwis who felt that Lange only fought on the nuclear issue because he wanted cover with the Left part of his caucus for Douglas's radical privatization and free market schemes.
The fact remains that New Zealand was the only treaty ally that had a problem with the U.S.'s confirm-or-deny policy on nukes, though I know Norway came close to it. What was worse is that Shultz essentially offered a compromise to Lange, offering to unofficially send only ships without nuclear warheads on board. Lange rejected the compromise, noting that he did not want even nuclear *powered* ships in New Zealand waters. That effectively ruled out most of our surface combatants and all of our submarine forces.
New Zealand is indeed a small country and would have suffered disproportionately from any nuclear attack. But she is hardly the only small country that was in the same boat. Luxembourg (or the other Low Countries) did not feel similarly dissuaded from staying in NATO despite the fact that she could expect that a single nuclear blast could efectively wipe the country out. But she did not have the luxury of being 10,000 miles away from the nearest Soviet forces and having little strategic value.
I simply find it disappointing that given New Zealand's staunch contributions and support for the British Empire and the West in general for so many years that she (or at least Lange) bailed out at a crucial time when the apparent costs to her for doing so were apparently negligible.
As for Helen Clark, I met her briefly back when she was a shadow cabinet minister and did not think much of her at the time. I hope that her position is not as was reported in this thread, but then I would not be surprised.
Anyhow, I am sure that most Kiwis - despite a lingering anti-U.S. resentment - are firmly with the U.S. in this hour of trial. Despite your limited resources I hope that you are in fact able to help out in the common cause in the coming months.
When you expand on it, the reasons behind Sir David Lange's stance on the nuclear issue get pretty interesting, but if he was playing to the people, or to factions of his caucus – that’s politics.
There are many reasons New Zealand became anti-nuclear, and given the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, French nuclear testing, and changing world opinion there are more reasons we have stayed so. Obviously many of these reasons are essentially cultural, rather than strictly logical. Despite this I think it is fair to use the logical reason to describe why American ship visits were not for us.
To suggest that American disclosure of which ships were armed and which were not is a solution to the problem is not practical. I think the Russians would have be quite comfortable with the idea of sending a few warheads in our direction on the off-chance that any US ships in our ports were capable of returning fire. Certainly after such a war, few would have asked the Russians why they had done such a thing.
I’m aware that other countries faced the same shattering risks that we did, but you have to expect they had their own unique reasons for their decisions. They may not have had the chance to opt out of the destruction – certainly European countries would have suffered deeply no matter what their stance – simply by proxy. Other nations, as you note, had more strategic value – which means any possible incentives offered them would have been higher, and for others it would not have been as easy as ‘will you accept this ship?’. The issue of nuclear powered ships is less clear, although it again would have proven our unwillingness to be a target – but publicly it reflects little the (slightly silly) scare factor of nuclear leaks, or that maybe we did get a little carried away. In the end though, it all hasn’t turned out that badly – ANZUS is a shame, but then the world no longer lives next to nuclear midnight, nuclear testing is all but gone, and although it could all have turned out quite differently, New Zealand has tried to be a standard bearer to the anti-nuclear cause.
Forgive me, I know I don’t personally need to tell you this Iguana, but for the sake of others, in the end it’s been said time and time again in this forum, ANZUS is an aberration in the issue of New Zealand’s current support for the US.