Ministry Statements & Speeches:
President, Secretary-General, Excellencies, distinguished delegates,
Thank you for the opportunity to put on record the New Zealand Government’s views.
Though I might represent a different New Zealand coalition Government than the one that last addressed this body, New Zealand’s stance on nuclear disarmament remains the same.
We are acutely concerned about the deep slide we are in. Progress toward the shared goal of a nuclear weapon free world has not only faltered, it has begun to reverse.
As High Representative Nakamitsu described it, “there has not been a time since…the Cold War that the risk of a nuclear weapon being used has been so high and, at the same time, the regime intended to prevent such use so fragile”.
The salience of nuclear weapons in some military doctrines is expanding. Investments to modernise arsenals and, in some concerning cases, increase arsenals, is likely to lead to the further entrenchment of nuclear weapons for decades to come. And mistrust has grown. And in the absence of any discernible progress to disarm, the seeming incentive persists for the “have-nots” to join the “haves” and acquire these terrible weapons.
New Zealand has long understood what it would mean for the world, even in our remote part of the Pacific, if nuclear weapons were again used.
We continue to find untenable the arguments made – almost always by those with nuclear weapons or those seemingly protected by them – that ‘now is not the time for nuclear disarmament’.
Well, history teaches us that nuclear disarmament and the arms control measures can be forged in times of crisis or heightened tension.
This is when the risk of not doing so is sometimes clearest.
We need only look at the Cold War. The ‘grand bargain’ at the heart of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was struck only a few years after the world stared into the nuclear abyss during the Cuban missile crisis. Throughout the succeeding period, and despite the chill of the Cold War, important arms control agreements were negotiated and implemented. This was based on the realisation, eventually crystallised in a joint statement in 1985 by US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, that ‘a nuclear war cannot be won, and must never be fought’.
It would be a disservice to those achievements to suggest that that era was somehow easier or simpler.
It is incumbent upon us all, but most of all the nuclear-weapon states, to arrest this slide we are currently in.
I repeat here New Zealand’s call for the universalisation and full implementation of the NPT, as well as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which complements it.
President, as with nuclear disarmament, our collective security across the board rests on upholding the international rules that we have all agreed. By everyone and at all times, irrespective of size and situation.
Those rules are under sustained pressure everywhere we look: The chemical and biological weapons conventions, Security Council resolutions, and the raft of humanitarian disarmament treaties that knit together protections for civilians, and international humanitarian law more generally. We must protect those rules and norms.
Because, if you look around the world today, life depends on it.
President, I conclude with a remark on the Conference on Disarmament. This body was created with a specific mandate: to negotiate disarmament agreements. In essence, to make us and the people we serve safer.
It is still within our collective power to return this forum to meaningful work, going beyond mere delivery of statements to negotiating outcomes that have a real-world impact.
The perilous environment we all find ourselves in demands nothing less from us.
Thank you.