American Notes Defense

The capstone of Navy Secretary John Lehman's visit to Peking last August was an agreement for three U.S. destroyers to call at Shanghai this year, the first such visit since the Communists took power in 1949. Talking to reporters last week, however, Chinese Communist Party Chief Hu Yaobang dropped a bit of a bomb. Asked by an Australian reporter whether the warships would be nuclear armed, Hu replied that the U.S. had pledged they would not be.

That China would not officially welcome American nuclear weapons was hardly surprising, but the announcement rekindled a touchy controversy. Only two months ago, New Zealand denied the U.S. destroyer Buchanan permission to call at its ports when similar assurances were withheld, with the result that joint maneuvers with New Zealand were canceled by the U.S. State Department , officials quickly denied that Peking had received the sort of no-nuke pledge that had been denied to Wellington. "Our policy on ship visits remains the same," said Spokesman Edward Djerejian. "We will neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons on board our ships." But sources conceded that an implicit understanding had probably been reached.