Nuclear Weapons are Morally Indefensible (Argument for the affirmative, Oxford Union, 1 March 1985) Rt Hon David Lange Prime Minister Mr President, honourable members of the union, ladies and gentlemen … in fact if I could greet straight away – because I understand there is a direct feed to the White House tonight – if I could greet the President of the United States, who is of course of the very genesis of the proposition we are debating tonight. A quote in Time magazine last year, an assertion by the President of the United States that nuclear weapons were immoral; his avowal reiterated in January this year in a statement over the space initiative known as SDI. And there again, he asserted that this system of the nuclear stare-out can not be sustained morally. May I say to the honourable gentleman who preceded me, there is nothing of what I am about to say which has been conditioned in any way by my meeting with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom yesterday … [Laughter] I did not meet her yesterday … [Laughter and applause] I am meeting her on Monday. But I know the apprehension that he feels at his constant fear of being summoned to that carpet … [Laughter] I also feel a considerable sympathy for the members of the opposite side, who have this extraordinary sense of destabilisation at the imminent prospect of peace breaking out. The character of the argument, sir, is something which I find regrettable. So I can say very simply that it is my conviction that there is no moral case for nuclear weapons. That the best defence which can be made of their existence and the threat of their use is, as we have heard tonight, that they are a necessary evil; an abhorrent means to a desirable end. I hold that the character of nuclear weapons is such that their very existence corrupts the best of intentions; that the means in fact perverts the end. And I hold that their character is such that they have brought us to the greatest of all perversions: the belief that this evil is necessary – as it has been stated tonight – when in fact it is not. And I make my case against nuclear weapons the more vigorously because I distinguish between them and all other forms of coercive or deterrent power. I’ve got no case to make against the policeman’s truncheon. And the people tonight who have argued that you must go to the ultimate in force every time you seek to embark upon it, is of course a surrender to the worst of morality. I accept, and do not wish to be heard arguing here against any proposition that the state must arm itself with military force to protect its citizens against aggression or to defend the weak and the helpless against aggression. But I do not accept that the state must for those reasons arm itself with nuclear weapons. That is a case I do not easily or lightly make in Europe where governments have held it their duty to arm themselves with nuclear weapons. I do not doubt for one moment the quality of the intention which led to that decision or that series of decisions. And I freely acknowledge that that decision is pursued in good conscience with the honourable intention of preserving the life and freedom of the people of Western Europe. Because those governments are faced with the close presence of an alien and relentlessly oppressive regime and obviously feel it their duty to prepare for their own defence by membership in what for most governments’ policy now is straightforwardly a nuclear alliance. That is an assessment I understand and I do not come here to argue for any proposition in favour of unilateral disarmament. And if I make that acknowledgement, I must then deal with the argument that it is the intention which determines the moral character of the action. My contention is very simply that the character of nuclear weapons is such that it is demonstrably the case that they subvert the best of intentions. And the snuggling up to the nuclear arsenal which has gone on with my friends on the opposite side tonight shows at what level of sophistication and refinement that subversion takes place. There is, Mr President, a quality of irrationality about nuclear weapons which does not sit well with good intentions. A system of defence serves its purpose if it guarantees the security of those it protects. A system of nuclear defence guarantees only insecurity. The means of defence terrorise as much as the threat of attack. In Europe, it is impossible to be unaware of the intensity of military preparedness. In New Zealand, the visitor must make an effort to find a military installation or indeed any sign of military activity, although it does exist. There is no imperative in New Zealand to prepare for war; the result is that I feel safer in Wellington than I ever could in London or New York or Oxford. The fact is that Europe and the United States are ringed about with nuclear weapons, and your people have never been more at risk. There is simply only one thing more terrifying than nuclear weapons pointed in your direction and that is nuclear weapons pointed in your enemy’s direction: the outcome of their use would be the same in either case, and that is the annihilation of you and all of us. That is a defence which is no defence; it is a defence which disturbs far more than it reassures. The intention of those who for honourable motives use nuclear weapons to deter is to enhance security. Notwithstanding that intention, they succeed only in enhancing insecurity. Because the machine has perverted the motive. The President of the United States has acknowledged that, notwithstanding that my honourable friend opposite does not, and the weapon has installed mass destruction as the objective of the best-intentioned. The weapon simply has its own relentless logic, and it is inhuman. It is the logic of escalation, the logic of the arms race. Nuclear weapons make us insecure, and to compensate for our insecurity we build and deploy more nuclear weapons. We know that we are seized by irrationality – and every now and then some new generation technology comes in, the argument for which is that it will cause us to draw back from the nuclear precipice. And we are seeing right now another initiative, under a new title: the title of course in dispute as much as its efficiency will be. And that, Mr President, is the story of the whole saga of the nuclear escalation. We know, all of us, that it is wholly without logic or reason, any sense at all, to have the means at the disposal of two particular sets of powers to turn this world into rubble time and time again. And yet in spite of that awareness, the world watches as two enormous machines enhance, refine their capacity to inflict destruction on each other and on all of us. Every nuclear development, whatever its strategic or tactical significance, has only one result, and that is to add to an arsenal which is already quite beyond reason. There is an argument in defence of the possession of nuclear weapons which holds that the terror created by the existence of those weapons is in itself the fulfilment of a peaceful purpose: the argument advanced here tonight that that 50 million killed over four years by concerted war in a conventional sense in Europe, and the argument that somehow the existence of this mutually assured destruction phenomenon has since that time preserved this planet from destruction. It is I think probably an example of northern hemisphere or European arrogance that we overlook now the 30 million people in this world who have died in wars since then – while we are apparently beset from the two super-powers by a system designed to have people stop killing each other. I believe that the fear they inspire is not a justification for their existence. INTERJECTION: Sir, the one area of the world do you refer to then? How have those casualties in that area defended by nuclear deterrence? Namely Europe. Not one of those 30 million lived in Europe. Have you considered the proposition for one moment that that war, that cost those casualties might have entrenched within people the yearning for peace, the growth of democratic institutions, the accountability of political representatives, so that none wishes to wage in conventional or nuclear terms, any war? Why attribute to the presence of that awesome potential clash of firepower a stability which your politicians have been arguing they created? You can’t have it both ways! Either you are hailing a new, United Europe, matching to glory and to the exclusion of certain primary production from other countries … [Laughter] Or you have it there simply because you have counterpoised this terrible means of destruction … I’m want to pass over … yeah? [Laughter] INTERJECTION: Mr Lange Sir, if I may address you as ‘mate’, perhaps. You talk about the quality of rationality. Now I’ve heard many reasons advanced for keeping American sailors out of ports – it usually has something to do with the honour of the women involved, or the property value of the ports. What I should like to know, sir, is why you don’t do the honourable and the consistent thing, and pull out of the ANZUS alliance. For whether you are snuggling up to the bomb, or living in the peaceful shadow of the bomb, New Zealand benefits, sir. And that’s the question with which we charge you. And that’s the question with which we would like an answer, sir. And I’m going to give it to you if you hold your breath just for a moment … I can smell the uranium on it as you lean forward! [Laughter] I want to pass over here the preparations which are constantly being made for the winnable or even survivable nuclear war. I would ignore those and wholeheartedly embrace the logic of the unthinkable war if it could be established that the damage which could result from the collapse of that logic could be confined to nuclear weapon states. Unfortunately and demonstrably, it would not. We in New Zealand, you know, used to be able to relax a bit, to be able to think that we would sit comfortably while the rest of the world seared, singed, withered. We were enraptured! [Laughter] And the fact is that we used to have the reputation of being some kind of an antipodean Noah’s Ark, which would from within its quite isolated, preserve, spawn a whole new world of realistic human kind. Now, the fact is that we know that that is not achievable. We know that if the nuclear winter comes, we freeze, we join the rest of you. And that means that there is now a total denouement as far as any argument in favour of moral purpose goes. It is a strange, dubious and totally unaccepted moral purpose which holds the whole of the world to ransom. There is another assertion of the good moral character of nuclear weapons which holds that they are the armour of good against evil. The argument of the Crusaders; the people who took to arms. The evil which cannot be defeated by persuasion or example must needs be suppressed by annihilation. The obvious difficulty here is that evil has declined to be subdued; evil has not accepted annihilation. The church and its representatives have been going at it now for 2000 years – and it persists. Every attempt to subdue it strengthens its resolve to arm itself further. And the will of the good in weaponry’s terms is corrupted by the terrible force of the weapon, into the will of the evil. And all of us, wherever we are, whatever we believe, live in fear of nuclear weapons. There is a community of interest which binds us all to common ground, which is there so that we all wish to see the elimination of nuclear weapons. The President of the United States speaks in terms of the elimination of nuclear weapons. Yet nuclear weapons proliferate. The budgets for their creation expand. They in fact govern us. Their existence diverts attention from the fact that there are other ways of resolving the difficulties and tensions which will always abound in the world. Nuclear weapons are not needed. All the arguments which can be brought forward in support of this evil come to nothing in the fact of its ultimate irrelevance. I don’t make that assertion because I have some simple South Pacific – as you put it, grand gesture – answer to the question of the existence of nuclear weapons: all of you in Europe know that negotiating an end to nuclear weapons could hardly be more difficult. And then you have the hide to come here and say that New Zealand’s stance is somehow threatening the strength of the West in Geneva. And then others criticise us because they say our position has not reduced by one the number of nuclear weapons in the world. You can’t have it both ways! Either the West goes to Geneva girt about with the hardware it had a month ago, or it doesn’t. And it does – and in that nuclear stare-out, there will be a blink – I pray – and there can be a climb-back. But you know you can’t wholeheartedly support the argument in favour of the superpowers negotiating control of them while nuclear powers embrace the logic of escalation. INTERJECTION: Sir, there are many of us here tonight who are very impressed by your courage and idealism. But on the other side of the house, from which I come, there are many of us indeed who cannot but remember that this debate is only taking place because hundreds of thousands of your fellow countrymen were prepared to give their lives so that we might live in freedom. And the accusation which those of us who would be your friends and supporters still must make against you is to express our scepticism that you are substituting idealism – a very fragile idealism – for the very secure reality that we have gained through long years of struggle. And I put that to you that that is the real subject we are debating tonight. And I would ask you to answer it. [Applause] The simple fact is that I make no pretence that the problem which confronted New Zealand is that same as that which confronts Western Europe. And you point out – and you have the right to point out, and I am glad that you did, notwithstanding that you allege that you oppose me – that people from New Zealand, a country which has never been attacked, have willingly taken up arms in Europe. They have died in African campaigns, they have their bones bleaching in deserts, they are buried in Italy. They have fought in Vietnam. We have forces right now in Sinai. We have a battalion in Singapore where the British used to be! And the fact is we do not shrink from that responsibility. We never have, and we are not going to. The fact is that we do not choose, we do not choose to be unilateral armers. It makes no sense for a country to surround its waters or to invite into its ports or country nuclear weapons, when there is no balance to be achieved. The balances there now, there are none. And we don’t propose to deter enemies which do not yet exist. And I ask you to consider that as a fundamental reality of the New Zealand position. And the people of New Zealand reached a very straightforward conclusion: that nuclear weapons which would defend them; they believed, caused them more alarm than any which threatened them, and accordingly, they deem it pointless to be defended by them. And the speakers for the negative who asked the question, are we prepared to have a nuclear umbrella from the United States in terms of an ANZUS arrangement … the answer to that is very simply, very definitely, is not only are we [not] prepared to accept it, we deny it, we refuse it and we specifically say – we do not want to be defended by nuclear weapons! [Applause] Because we by that avoid the risk of escalating our area into a nuclear zone. You see, in the South Pacific, it’s not difficult to achieve the balance of force which allows you with that cheerfulness to dispense with nuclear weapons. INTERJECTION: Sir, I would just like to say, don’t you feel that you should weigh your moral stance with the pernicious effects it will have not only on Asian security, but western security as a whole? Particularly in light of the fact that there are movements in Japan, Australia and NATO itself, that would like to pull out, and use your precedent as an example, and pull out of their responsibilities to the alliance. And I for one as an American do not feel that we should shoulder the defence of the western world. And I think it’s something that everybody should contribute to and you, sir, are not doing your part This country New Zealand is not going to contribute to a nuclear alliance. This country New Zealand never has. New Zealand was declared by the former government to be no part of a nuclear alliance – and we will pick up the tab by conventional defence. And one of the immoralities of nuclear weaponry, surely, is that it creates such a level of depersonalisation that the infinite capacity of destruction is unleashed by a few. Much more is there a moral posture in the conventional event where the humanity of a situation has to be constantly assessed, and where there is always a possibility of restraint, because individual people say, dammit, I’m not going to go ahead and do that, because it is absolutely immoral, contrary to the whole ethos of humankind, to do that. You don’t get the checks and balances along the nuclear trail. And in my country, we pay our tab. We are not creating a policy for imitation or export. We can’t even deport it to Australia! It’s 1200 miles away! And if you think that Belgium and Holland and Greece developed a certain posture, an undercurrent, a surge because of the New Zealand position, you do us a considerable flattery about our omnipotence, because, you, know, we didn’t even know they were even thinking about it! And we are no threat to that. I say to you we are prepared to pay that price. We have a long history of being anti-nuclear. One of my predecessors in office sent those ships to Mururoa. We’ve had the fight in the legal areas. We are constantly at issue with France. We proposed in ’75 a South Pacific Zone. We are going to work to protect that this year. We have honoured our long-standing commitments. We’ve not welshed on any deals for defence. We are in Singapore with a battalion where Britain was, and we going to see that we contribute to regional security and stability. And what has happened to New Zealand since the Labour government was elected last year and began to implement its long-established policy – you know, one of the most amazing things about expectations of world governments, is that first they assume that the opposition’s policy is infinitely flexible, and then they immediately assume that when you get into government you’ll do a u-turn. Well, we are not infinitely flexible, and we’ve done no u-turn, and we’ve done exactly what we’ve said we’d do. And that of course is terribly destabilising … [Laughter] Because it makes it so difficult to read all the signs. But what essentially has happened is a demonstration of how nuclear weapons have assumed a moral life of their own. We have never been part of strategic defence. The only nuclear weapons which presumably were brought by our allies to New Zealand in the past have been tactical weapons. We decided we didn’t want to be part of someone’s tactical nuclear battle. It’s just about as bad as being part of somebody else’s strategic nuclear battle. But that has not in any way diminished the deterrent power of the Western alliance. We have not given comfort to the Soviet bloc. We have not undermined the West. But the result has been that we have been told by some officials in the United States administration that our decision is not, as they put it, to be cost-free; that we are in fact to be made to pay for our action. Not by our enemies, but by our friends. We are in fact to be made an example of; we are to be ostracised, we are to be convicted of some form of heresy and put on probation. We are going to be kept there until we are compelled to resume our seat in the dress circle of the nuclear theatre. We have been told that because others in the West – and their advocates are here tonight – carry the fearful burden of a defence which terrorises as much as the threat it counters, we too must carry that burden. We are actually told that New Zealanders cannot decide for themselves how to defend New Zealand, but are obliged to adopt the methods which others use to defend themselves. Lord Carrington [the Secretary-General of NATO] made a case in Copenhagen recently against the creation of nuclear weapon free zones. He argued that if the people of the United States – as advocated by my friend over there – found themselves bearing the burden alone, they would tire of bearing it. Now that is exactly the point. Genuine agreement[s] about the control of nuclear weapons do not cede the advantage to one side or the other: they enhance security, they do not diminish it. And if such arrangements can be made, and such agreements reached, then those who remain outside those arrangements might well and truly tire of their insecurity. They will reject the logic of the weapon and they will assert their essential humanity. They will look for arms control agreements which are real and verifiable. And there’s no humanity at all in the logic which holds that my country, New Zealand, must be obliged to play host to nuclear weapons because others in the West are playing host to nuclear weapons. That is the logic which refuses to admit that there is any alternative to nuclear weapons, when plainly there is. It is self-defeating logic, just as the weapons themselves are self-defeating: to compel an ally to accept nuclear weapons against the wishes of that ally is to take the moral position of totalitarianism, which allows for no self-determination, and which is exactly the evil that we are supposed to be fighting against. [Applause] Any claim to a moral justification for the West’s possession of nuclear weapons is thereby eliminated. In those circumstances we would be no better than they are. The great strength of the West, in fact, lies not in the force of arms – although some would seek under the cover of a benign democracy to argue that it is in fact the force of arms – but it lies in its free and democratic systems of government. That is why, in spite of all the difficulties and disagreements which we have amongst friends and allies, I am not disheartened. I came to Great Britain by way of the United States, where I put my case to the American people through the news media without any kind of hindrance from the United States Administration. Members of Her Majesty’s Government have made it plain to me that they do not hold with the views I am committed to. I in fact have heard those before. The other night I heard them from Washington. They were compelling. They were a restatement of the United Kingdom position, and they were said with such candour and frankness that they seemed to persist even after the volume had been turned off. They were done with a strength and a purpose and a vigour. I want to say that notwithstanding that difference, I have felt welcome here. I have been freely able to express my views. I can say freely whatever I please. Just as any member of Her Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom would be welcome in New Zealand to expound any line of argument in any forum she cared to use. That is the true strength of the West. And that is a strength which is threatened, not defended, by nuclear weapons. The appalling character of those weapons has robbed us of our right to determine our destiny and subordinates our humanity to their manic logic. They have subordinated reason to irrationality and placed our very will to live in hostage. Rejecting the logic of nuclear weapons does not mean surrendering to evil; evil must still be guarded against. Rejecting nuclear weapons is to assert what is human over the evil nature of the weapon; it is to restore to humanity the power of the decision; it is to allow a moral force to reign supreme. It stops the macho lurch into mutual madness. And for me, the position of my country is a genuine long-term affirmation of this proposition: that nuclear weapons are morally indefensible. And I support that proposition. [Applause – standing ovation]