[Webstral]

It's interesting to conjecture what kind of contribution New Zealand might have made to Korea once the fighting kicked off. The political attitudes of the Kiwis would be critical and hard to predict from where I'm sitting. New Zealand effectively cancelled the US-NZ connection in ANZUS over nuclear issues. In the context of an ongoing Cold War, would the Kiwis continue to keep the US at arm's length over the nuclear issue, or would the ongoing hazard presented by a revived Soviet Union have served to mend fences? I really don't know.

Several important factors exist. In no particular order of precedence:

The Soviet Union still exists, and they had to kill an awful lot of people in Eastern Europe to reverse the Velvet Revolution.

The Soviet Union invaded China, plain and simple. Lots of death, lots of destruction

The West Germans are responsible for the spread of the war to Europe. It's hard to believe that the US wasn't in on it at some level--especially when US forces join the fight in East Germany.

The DPRK invades the ROK. Whatever is happening in Germany, a country not directly involved in the fighting to that point invades another country not directly involved in the fighting to that point. Both nations are clients of the warring superpowers, but they are still each a sovereign nation.

The US is the de facto (nice one!) leader of the Allied effort to assist the ROK.


So, does New Zealand lean more towards justifiable reluctance to get involved in an expanded war started by the FRG with the collusion of the USA, or does New Zealand lean more towards supporting the ROK in spite of being on the outs with the US over nuke boats and the war in Europe? I don't have any way of taking the pulse of New Zealanders in real life or conjecturing how they might feel in a v1 chronology. I'd like to think that they'd choose to support the ROK, even if this meant coming under the hand of US command structure in Korea. It's hard to say, though.