Insurgent Intellectual: Essays in Honour of Professor Desmond Ball

7. Avoiding Armageddon

7 AVOIDING ARMAGEDDON Ron Huisken I first met Des Ball in 1975, at the Australian National University in Canberra. We have been comfortable friends ever since. Our careers diverged and we lost contact several times, sometimes for years, but it was the sort of friendship that never had to be restarted, it was always there. In 1975, I was into my fifth year with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and, in lieu of “home leave”, had been allowed to attend a conference on nuclear disarmament in Fiji. En route to Fiji, I dropped into the Australian National University’s (ANU) Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC) and, in addition to Des, met the then head, Robert O’Neill, and a bunch of other current and prospective doyens of the Australian strategic community including David Horner, Ross Babbage, Hedley Bull, Tom B. Millar, J. D. B Miller and Geoffrey Jukes. This could have turned the head of a young migrant economist from an (at the time) unfashionable extremity of the Commonwealth, and it did. When, a year later, O’Neill asked me to join SDSC as a visiting fellow for a year, I jumped at the chance. Later still, I had the good fortune to have O’Neill and Des as supervisors for my Ph.D. After more than two decades with the United Nations and the Australian Public Service (intersecting occasionally with SDSC and the newer ANU Peace Research Centre), 58 Ron Huisken I re-joined SDSC (with Des still at the heart of it) in 2001 until I retired in 2012. In short, Des has been something of a constant in my professional life (although he is still evasive when I ask whether he ever read any draft chapters of my thesis, let alone the final product). He also lured me into my one and only (scouts honour) experiment with a “prohibited substance”, but that’s another story. It is not easy to attach a familiar label to Des Ball. He is not an ideologue of any kind and labels like hawk, realist, constructivist and so on seem quite out of place. Des is what I would call a forensic analyst with a work ethic of Dickensian proportions. Indeed, I know of no other student of security affairs that comes close to matching Des’ consistent and absolute faith in the capacity of diligent scholarship to unlock all doors, especially those guarded by official secrecy. Des has never held a security clearance. Nor, to my knowledge, has he ever used information conveyed confidentially prematurely, that is, before he was able to locate corroborating open source information or before the source agreed to its use. Despite this iron discipline, on every issue that piqued his curiosity and engaged his sustained attention, he ended up being justifiably confident that there were very few people in the world that had a more complete picture than he had. Given the international status that Des attained on several broad issues in the field of security studies, I recall on more than one occasion urging him to step back and write the occasional reflective piece, something devoid of footnotes. He essentially ignored this advice. It simply was not in him to have a paragraph let alone a page or several pages that was not referenced to something that he had seen, heard, touched, photographed or read. This is only a slight exaggeration. A glance through his list of publications reveals “Reflections of a Defence Intellectual”, “The Blind Men and the Elephant: A Critique of Bureaucratic Politics Theory” and a few other pieces that one can reasonably infer were exceptions to my generalisation. But the list of his publications is itself a publication and these pieces look rather lonely. The theme I want to explore in this chapter is whether, behind that formidable figure and the penchant for the forensic assembly of information, there is some other predisposition that informed Des’ professional output. Specifically, I will explore the proposition that the appearance of a hawkish security and defence analyst is just that, an ‘appearance’, and that Des Ball is in fact something of a dove. At one level, this is not hard to do. He dabbled periodically with the subject of arms control, including in publications like Arms Control Today, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and clearly not Avoiding Armageddon 59 from the standpoint of a defence hawk seeking to highlight...