Minutes

The earliest item in this collection is a minute book, 1957-60, headed Meetings called by the Society of Friends, Auckland, to decide upon an organisation for dealing with H-bomb protests. The organisation becomes the Movement Against Further Testing, Manufacture and Use of Nuclear Weapons. The many organisations in New Zealand with similar aims were brought together as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, centred in Auckland, and the collection includes a minute book of that body from 1963-67.

The greater part of the collection consists of correspondence, concerned with the running of the organisation, but also as an aspect of the campaign itself. CND has been tireless in bombarding NZ Members of Parliament and Ministers, as well as foreign heads of state and United Nations officials with its reactions to the phases of the arms race. Copies of such letters and the replies they have elicited cover successively French atmospheric testing in the Pacific, atmospheric testing in China, disarmament, protests against visits of nuclear-armed warships to NZ, global ecology, and the proposal that NZ should abandon its traditional defence posture in favour of non-alignment. As well as correspondence the collection contains information material, newsletters, pamphlets, minutes etc., including CND submissions made to the Royal Commission on Nuclear Power Generation in 1976/77. There are also small collections of material from the organisations listed below in added entries, and some French government news releases entitled Facts Figures, France.