UN General Assembly
1988

New Zealand believes that achieving reductions and balances in conventional forces will be central, in the search for nuclear disarmament, to the nuclear-free world seen by President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev at Reykjavik. In Europe and many other parts of the globe the accumulation of conventional forces, often without regard to actual defensive requirements, has heightened tensions and led some to look for other mote dangerous means of deterring aggression; so the processes of nuclear and conventional disarmament must take place in step, and must involve all States. Yet, at the third United Nations special session devoted to disarmament, when we had an opportunity to set up a multilateral disarmament agenda to take us up to the beginning of the next century, we could not take advantage of it. But our failure then does not mean it cannot be done. Instead we have the task now, beginning at this session of the Assembly, to pick up where the special session left off.