N-weapons at Chch Airport?

Press, 4 July 1983, Page 1

N-weapons at Chch Airport?

The New Zealand Government does not seem to care enough to find out whether nuclear weapons are being ferried in aircraft using Christchurch Airport, according to a Nuclear Free Zone Committee campaigner yesterday. Mr R. L. Leonard said he intended to find out whether the Government was interested. Mr Leonard said that American military flights carrying nuclear weapons at the airport would be violating the Christchurch City Council’s nuclear weapon-free zone, since airport land was owned by the council. He said that lack of information about weapons cargo left protesters “no choice but to conclude that nuclear weapons are entering our airport.”

He said that much of the airport’s use by American military aircraft had nothing whatever to do with civilian research in the Antarctic and was completely outside the control of the New Zealand Government. Because of that, such activity was a blatant violation of New Zealand sovereignty, said Mr Leonard.

He was most concerned about the possible cargo of Starlifter aircraft which visited the airport. So far, he did not have information on the destination of those aircraft which were not servicing the Antarctic programme. Mr Leonard said that the United States Embassy had refused to answer his questions about agreements or treaties with New Zealand that would allow “secret transiting” of military air-

craft cargo through the airport.

From airport records, he had learned that 57 per cent of military aircraft stopping at the airport in 1982 “had nothing to do with support of civilian Antarctic research,” he said. “In the first five months of this year, 50 per cent were in that category.”

There had been a total of 321 American military flights during the last 17 months, 54 per cent of them Starlifters.

Another 44 per cent were Hercules aircraft, and the remaining 2 per cent were either KCI3S cargo aircraft or Orions, which were not cargo aircraft. Mr K. C. Burgess, another local anti-nuclear weapons campaigner, said it was clear that the Pacific had become for United States strategists as potential a limited nuclear battlefield as Europe. Of about 22,000 nonstrategic nuclear weapons the United States possessed, about 1500 were deployed with the Seventh Fleet in the Pacific.

Reports used to justify the defence budget in the United States were candid about the use of nuclear weapons as standard equipment in warships. “It provokes the question, why is the United States so secretive about the presence or absence of nuclear weapons aboard visiting warships?” said Mr Burgess. “Neither confirming nor denying seems to be a policy that is reserved for areas where nuclear weapons are unwelcome, such as New Zealand harbours.”