When it comes to the superpowers of the world, God's Own is little more than a flea in the elephant's ear.

But as we all know, fleas are irritating little blighters and can cause discomfort, significantly out of proportion to their size.

That was certainly the case thirty years ago when Uncle Sam was flexing his muscles, leaving the world to think that its greatest deterrent to Armageddon, nuclear weapons, were under threat because Big Dave Lange was smelling the uranium on his breath.

It was at a meeting in a Manila hotel room where the dustup between Lange and Ronnie Reagan's man, Secretary of State George Schultz, came to a head. Those of us waiting outside the hotel room were told, in no uncertain terms, that the grumpy, straight talking American wasn't going to talk to us.

When he emerged from the room yours truly fired a question at him and the secret servicemen slammed me against the wall as Schultz made his way over. A microphone draped over the assailants' shoulders caught the now immortal words:

"We part company as friends, but we part company as far as the alliance is concerned."

In other words he was telling Lange to get knotted and saying the ANZUS Alliance was all but fish and chip paper.

Lange was of course never lost for a word and later said there was nothing in the ANZUS treaty that'd oblige the United States to help us if we got into trouble and rightly observed that if the bogeyman of the time, Russia, invaded New Zealand it'd be unlikely that no one would come to our aid.

No other country followed our anti nuclear declaration banning nuclear warships, which was the Americans' main cause for concern, but our nuclear free status, now set in stone, has seen us taking the moral high ground at Parliament, summoning top diplomats to ask them why they're not being serious enough about the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty.

The ambassadors from the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China were all here. The Russian, by all accounts, was like a bear with a sore head, but who wouldn't be when you have to contend with powerhouse Putin?

There's a meeting on the issue in the Big Apple later this month but on this one the flea's unlikely to even cause an itch!