Herbert W Armstrong

At the moment, it appears that the rift between New Zealand and the United States over the denial of visits by U.S. nuclear-armed or nuclear-powered vessels will only get wider. In retaliation, Washington has cancelled New Zealand's access to routinely shared top-level U.S. intelligence reports on the Soviet Union.

Despite the step-up of tensions, New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange is said to enjoy considerable public support for his "no nukes" policy. In addition, he is under intense pressure from the powerful left wing of the country's Labor Party to hold the line. In the small South Pacific country there is a broadly-held notion that if New Zealand steers clear of big­ power conflicts it might be one of the few places on earth to escape the ravages of all-out war. This view has taken on new luster ever since some scientists speculated that a post World War III "nuclear winter" might be largely confined to the northern hemisphere. (Other scientists dispute this finding, claiming the entirety of the earth would eventually be affected — that there are no havens anywhere.)

This sentiment may appear to be tunnel-vision reasoning, but there can be no doubt of the growing Kiwi sentiment to drop out of the East-West conflict (but not to turn Communist). This view has been given added support by a fair number of people who have emigrated to New Zealand in the past twenty years or so, precisely out of a desire to live in a relatively unpolluted, yet modern country.

New Zealand's policy, however, overlooks the bigger picture of the impact the no-nukes decision could have on the remainder of the Pacific world, threatened — whether Wellington believes it or not — by ever growing Soviet pressures. An elementary fact of international relations is that "power alone can limit power." Who will counter balance the Soviets? Of course, God could if any of the leaders of modern Israel would call on His supreme power. But that, of course, is not being done. One does not detect any appeal to God but rather to "reason," "world public opinion," arms negotiations, or the United Nations. There is not an ounce of counter vailing power in any of these. Moscow smiles — and adds another aircraft carrier to its Pacific fleet.

Analyzing the broader impact of New Zealand's decision, the February 11 WALL STREET JOURNAL ran an opinion piece written by Dora Alves, a specialist in Australia and New Zealand studies at Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies. Here are excerpts:

There is more at stake than the right of U.S. ships to use New Zealand ports. (The U.S. has exercised that right only a couple of times a year, mostly to allow crews shore leave.) ... Anzus is essential to Pacific security. The three signatories consult frequently and develop personal contacts at every level, from foreign minister on down. The two Commonwealth nations gain access to U.S. strategic thinking and state-of-the-art equipment. The U.S. benefits from its allies' scientific discoveries, intelligence gathering and military-assistance programs to neighboring countries. All this promotes order and stability in the region.

Joint military exercises are held annually. An exercise in New Zealand in October (Anzus Triad '84) brought together the largest assemblage of military aircraft there since World War II.... The New Zealand army has one of its two active battalions in Singapore, a stationing justified by the Anzus relationship. The other one is capable of being transported at short notice from New Zealand to points of tension in the South Pacific.

The treaty is especially important in light of the recent Soviet buildup in Asia and the Pacific. U.S. Adm. Robert Long has characterized the increase in Soviet Pacific forces as the most dramatic military action in the past decade. Adm. William J. Crowe, commander of all U.S. military forces in the Pacific theater, said in December that the status of Vietnam's Cam Ranh Bay as a permanent Soviet facility was a "very alarming development."

Japan estimates that the Soviets have 2,220 combat aircraft in East Asia. The number includes 80 Tupolev Tu-22M backfires and more than 1,000 MiG-27s and Su-24s. The 825-ship Soviet Pacific fleet contains two aircraft carriers and 65 nuclear-powered and 70 conventional submarines. In Cam Ranh Bay, the huge naval base built by the U.S., the Soviets maintain a floating dock and five piers, where 20 to 25 ships are usually in port....

The New Zealand ban is also disturbing for other, nonstrategic, reasons. The Pacific Island countries, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, China and Japan, uneasy with the Soviet presence in Vietnam and arms buildup in Asia, view Anzus force for peace and stability in the region. Anzus's unofficial links to ASEAN ...have psychological importance. This is especially true since the oil and mineral reserves in the South China Sea make it a likely area of future dispute. New Zealand and Australian aircraft and ships could also help secure the passage of U.S. and allied naval forces if they need to protect the movement of Mideast oil through the Indian Ocean.

With the exception of Vanuatu, which has always refused visits by American ships, the South Pacific Island nations have quietly urged New Zealand to rescind its ban. Officials of the Cook Islands, Fiji and Papua New Guinea have publicly voiced their agreement with the king of Tonga, who last July said he welcomed U.S. nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed ships....

If New Zealand's ban isn't lifted by the meeting of Anzus foreign ministers in July, the treaty as it stands insofar as New Zealand is concerned will lapse. In that case, it's unlikely that the U.S. would negotiate the treaty anew. If the U.S. and New Zealand fail to reach agreement, as now seems likely, two results are inevitable: New Zealand will be no safer, and the nations supporting Western global deterrence will feel less secure.

The Pacific Security Treaty, better known as the ANZUS Pact, was signed in San Francisco in 1951. It is a rather vague document that links the three nations militarily, but does not automatically obligate any one of them to come to the others' aid if attacked. Neither does it specifically mention nuclear weapons, nuclear-powered craft nor the obligation of accommodating port calls by allied ships in peacetime. But Washington clearly regards Wellington's move as contrary to the spirit of the ANZUS agreement.

Interestingly enough, the birth of the ANZUS defense treaty on September 1, 1951 marked the first time Australia and New Zealand, two former British colonies, turned away from London and looked to Washington for protection. State Department historian Edward Keefer has written that "Canberra and Wellington saw this formal security pact as a guarantee against possible threat from a resurgent Japan as well as other potential adversaries. For the United States, the ANZUS pact was an integral part of a series of new American security arrangements in the Pacific which also included bilateral security treaties with the Philippines and Japan."

A New Zealand cut off from its adopted big brother is virtually defenseless. The national military roster includes only 12,600 servicemen, less than one-fourth the number of those serving in the military of the tiny city-state of Singapore. The navy of this island nation, which is dependent upon its commodity exports for economic survival, numbers six patrol boats and four frigates. An editorial in the February 8 DAILY TELEGRAPH warned Wellington of what it considered the folly of its decision:

This small dispute, if it continues to go wrong, might lead to the isolation of New Zealand. She would be left alone, with no protection but her own in the Pacific. Given her past Imperial ties, that would be controversial. That is the direction in which this quarrel is heading.

Mr. Lange may wish with all his heart to preserve New Zealand as, in his own words, a "pocket of tranquility" in the South Pacific, but the menacing real world is not that far away.

And one wonders what the impact of the destabilizing decision will have on Japan — a nation at peace with its neighbors now for 40 years. Initially the Japanese anti-nuclear left might show more boldness. But forces advocating a greater military posture could grow in strength too.

AIDS — Overlooking the Moral Factor

AIDS — Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome — has long since broken out of its strongholds among homosexuals in San Francisco and New York. It is spreading fairly rapidly in Great Britain, the disease obviously having been carried there by U.S. gays. A rather sensational case recently erupted in Chelmsford, England, as reported on our February 2 Reuters news wire:

A British priest's death from AIDS has touched a raw nerve among old ladies who used to receive communion wine from him. Doctors in this eastern English town said today they had received a stream of anxious telephone calls from women who attended services conducted by ...Gregory Richards, the priest [who] died Thursday. Doctors refused to carry out a post-mortem examination because of health risks involved.

A hospital official said: "We are getting a number of calls from eminently respectable church ladies who have sipped wine from the same cup as the [priest]. They are obviously worried that they may have picked up the infection. But I can assure them there is absolutely nothing for them to worry about. There is no evidence that AIDS can be passed on in this way."...

A man claiming to have had a long sexual relationship with Richards telephoned a local radio station, saying he had contracted the killer disease.

The noted columnist for Britain's SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, Peregrine Worsthorne, came out in his February 10 column and said what other journalists are seemingly afraid to say — that the spread of AIDS is primarily a moral rather than a medical problem — despite all the hoopla over the discovery of this and that new drug treatment. He particularly scored the failure of the Church of England for failing to speak out against homosexual practices. Here are excerpts of Worsthorne's column:

The lethal disease Aids could well reach epidemic proportions in the foreseeable future, and it is high time serious attention was given to some of the social implications of this dread development, the significance of which could be equivalent to that of the arrival of syphilis on this side of the Atlantic in the 15th century — imported from the Americas by Christopher Columbus's returning sailors ....

At the present rate of increase there could be a fatality rate from Aids in this country of 786 a year within 18 months .... No description of this problem can be limited to its medical aspects, since, unlike cancer and other fatal diseases, it is also inescapably moral .... Its cause is the promiscuous indulgence in sexual practices which until recently were condemned by both Church and State as perverted and unnatural, not to say grossly unhygienic ....

Yet homosexuals [are] ...demanding that the Government spend more money on finding a cure or vaccine for the disease. Their view seems to be that society as a whole has the duty to protect them from themselves, as if Aids was a purely medical problem, rather than a moral one. What this view overlooks, of course, is that there is already a moral vaccine against Aids: chastity, which needs no taxpayers' subsidy to be made effective ....

What may be required here and now is not just a campaign warning of the physical dangers of carefree coupling ...but also, for the first time, some admission that such practices are morally wrong .... Yet such pronouncements as there are all come from doctors and medical officers, etc. Is it not time that the bishops brought God into the act, since one suspects that religious fanatics — condemned by homosexuals as ignorant bigots — who talk about the wrath of God may know more about the cause of the disease, and its cure, than at present do all the scientists put together?

The corollary of the State legalising homosexuality should have been a far more rigorous and demanding effort by the Church of England to promulgate its own strict laws governing such practices. As it was, the Church did exactly the opposite, following the State into the same morass of generalised toleration.

In the United States, the attempt to control the appalling upsurge in the incidence of AIDS is being frustrated at every turn by homosexual organizations and civil rights groups. As a result the epidemic is going virtually untreated, producing a gigantic reservoir of victims in the future — considering the increasing number of pediatric AIDS victims. Here are excerpts from an article in the February 8, 1985 issue of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL:

In...[a] wooded suburb an hour from Manhattan, Mark Kaplan frets over AIDS and the world's oldest profession. "I have a prostitute-patient with pre-AIDS and I can't get her off the street," agonizes the young chief of infectious diseases at North Shore University Hospital. "One day she looked especially tired. I asked what was wrong. She said: 'I got fined $250, and now I have to go out and work twice as hard.'"

In 17th-century London, victims of the plague were locked in their houses. But quarantine, the classic tool of the epidemiologist's trade, isn't being used in this epidemic. Efforts to control AIDS have run smack into civil liberties, which have never been so fiercely protected .... Efforts to close bathhouses and detain infected prostitutes have been criticized as repressive and ineffectual .... And carrier-mothers bear infected children, against medical advice.

Now in its fifth year, the epidemic of AIDS ...has struck 8,215 people, killing 3,921. New cases may more than double again this year, says the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Those exposed to the virus, once estimated at 300,000, may be closer to 500,000, the Centers' James Curran told scientists recently. Some health officials estimate that 10% of that number will get AIDS, but many more could be symptom-free carriers. Researchers in the U.S. and France are trying to develop vaccines, but so far there isn't a cure. "Quarantine for AIDS isn't like a one-month quarantine for smallpox," says Evelyn Fisher, a physician at Detroit's Henry Ford's Hospital. "This disease is for life."

In San Francisco, where two men contracted AIDS from prostitutes, one infected prostitute was recently released after a medical examination. "There's nothing I can do," says her physician, Paul Volberding. "Our role is to take care of people and investigate this disease, not take people off the street. No court would allow us to hospitalize her involuntarily."... "If they want prostitutes with AIDS antibodies not to work, they'll have to offer them disability," says Priscilla Alexander, who counsels prostitutes in San Francisco on "safe sex" and the dangers of AIDS ....

The bloodiest political fight was waged over the brief closure of San Francisco's homosexual bathhouses .... The closings last Octo­ber lasted only two months. Superior Court Judge Roy L. Wonder re-opened the bathhouses, but ordered owners to make sure clients practiced "safe sex," that is, using condoms....

Drug abusers, one of the original risk groups for AIDS, continue to frustrate and frighten public-health officials. New York has 190,000 intravenous-drug users, 80% of whom probably infected with AIDS virus, Dr. Sencer says. "We have 945 cases of IV (intravenous) drug abusers with active AIDS, and we don't know how to approach it. It's horrible," he says....

More difficult than regulating brothels or bathhouses is invading the nursery. Yet pediatric AIDS cases may prove "global reservoir of the virus," says Wade Parks of the University of Miami School of Medicine. "Mothers with antibody to the AIDS virus shouldn't get pregnant," Dr. Parks says. "But anything we do is going to be wrong in someone's eyes."

He gingerly pushes birth control, but addicts and Roman Catholic Haitian mothers are rejecting it. Even after counseling, some women continue to give birth. Many of the mothers have had one baby with AIDS and would like to keep trying for a healthy baby. Not all babies get the full-blown syndrome. Some have swollen lymph glands and weakened immunity but "will probably survive to reproductive age," Dr. Parks says. Thus, the cycle could repeat itself.

Even in the suburb of Manhasset, Dr. Kaplan has more than two dozen cases of mother-child transmission. "We have addicts' children who are antibody-negative and virus-positive. I don't know what to do. These kids are in school. It's being hushed up, because it's such a horrific thing."

The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Gay Task Force and the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Foundation see fear of AIDS spawning a massive assault on the civil rights of homosexuals. "Now there's a public-health basis for homophobia and discrimination," worries Tim Sweeney of Lambda, a New York-based civil-rights group.

Lambda says New York case law is clear: AIDS is a disability, and job discrimination on the basis of disability is illegal. And UAL Inc., parent company of United Airlines, was recently ordered by a mediator to abandon its rule of grounding all flight attendants with AIDS. The company now says it will review each employee on a case-by-case basis.... In the face of rampant fears, most health officials calmly insist AIDS cannot be transmitted by a handshake or a sneeze. Still, a few like Dr. Kaplan privately agonize. "I've got salad chef and pizza cook who are antibody positive, and I don't know what to do."

The self-appointed shepherds of modern Israel — in Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the U.S. and elsewhere — are virtually mute before the onslaught of this moral scourge. They no longer believe the words of Paul in Romans 1:27 — "Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due" (RAV ).

— Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau