Despite Noel-Baker’s impressive record as a thinker, scholar and politician, the young scholar from Sydney was sceptical about the feasibility of his senior colleague’s grand design for general and complete disarmament. Bull’s first task, probably for Noel-Baker’s next project rather than the volume he published in 1958, The Arms Race: A Programme for World Disarmament, was to go through the records of the disarmament conferences of the 1930s to see if they had been successful in narrowing differences to the extent that there was some prospect of a significant agreement. Bull soon saw that the differences between the major states remained wide, and they increased as international tensions grew in East Asia and in Central Europe. There was no real prospect of success by moving along that path. If disarmament were to come at all (as Bull hoped it might but in lasting form), it would be limited in its scope and would endure only where mutual advantage between negotiating partners was realised. Bull questioned the feasibility of the whole international community agreeing suddenly to dispense with all means of defending national sovereignty, national interests or even of administering a sharp lesson to an annoying neighbour. Noel-Baker and Bull parted company in 1957. Although the partnership had not been fruitful, the experience had aroused Bull’s interest in the problems of disarmament and he was soon to have the opportunity to develop his own line of thinking for an influential and appreciative audience.

Ironically Hedley was nearly claimed by the arms race of the Cold War itself. In 1957 he received call-up papers from the British Government for national service. All Commonwealth citizens below the age of 26, living in and paying taxes to the United Kingdom, were eligible at that time for British military service. Hedley thought briefly that he might actually have to don a uniform and be trained by the British Army, a prospect that he did not altogether shun. However his head of department at the London School of Economics (LSE), Charles Manning, was horrified at the prospect of losing Bull for two years, not to mention being apprehensive at the degree of risk to which Hedley might be subjected personally during his period of service. Manning used his extensive network of contacts to see that Bull was elected to a Rockefeller fellowship for 1957–58 which would take him out of the United Kingdom for the crucial period until he had passed his 26th birthday.

This was a very fortunate move from Hedley’s perspective, enabling him and his wife Mary to spend nearly 12 months among leading scholars in the field of Strategic Studies in the United States before returning to the United Kingdom via Australia, re-uniting with families and friends. He went first to the Center for International Affairs at Harvard, directed then by Robert Bowie. He also had ample opportunity for interchange of ideas with other Harvard scholars such as Tom Schelling and Henry Kissinger. He visited Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute, who was developing the central ideas in his celebrated book Thinking about the Unthinkable, a volume which dealt with the consequences of the actual use of nuclear weapons in war. Bull was in strong disagreement with many of Kahn’s views, but admired the rigour of the research which went into the production of his publications.

In the New Year Hedley and Mary moved on to spend six weeks at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC where Hedley came to know several other leaders in the field such as Paul Nitze and Robert Osgood. Their next stay was for four months at the University of Chicago, where Hedley had lively discussions with Morton Kaplan. At the end of May they drove to San Francisco, via Yellowstone National Park, for a few weeks at the University of California, Berkeley before crossing the Pacific to Sydney in July 1958. After a few weeks with family and friends, they embarked once more for Britain. Hedley found on his return to London that, as a result of his travels and the quality of the people he had formed links with, he was regarded as the person who knew most about the American scene in international security among London academics. This cachet made him particularly interesting to the Director of the recently established Institute for Strategic Studies (ISS), Alastair Buchan. Bull naturally was keen to take part in Institute activities and he found a ready reception.

The ISS (to be known as the IISS once it had added the word ‘International’ to its title in 1964) had been founded by a group of British scholars, journalists, churchmen, former civil servants, diplomats and armed service officers known as the Brighton Conference Association. They had come together at Brighton in January 1957 to grapple with the question of whether nuclear weapons served a rational purpose and if so, how they might be incorporated into Western strategic doctrine without counter-productive effect. The group had played a useful part in helping Noel-Baker with his book. By late 1958 this group had sufficient funds and sense of purpose to establish the new Institute and to attract Buchan to be its executive head. In 1958–59 Buchan came to know Bull well and was very favourably impressed by his capacity to argue forcefully, his knowledge of international history, and his very pragmatic approach to the issues of what would and what would not gain political support in the international arena.

In the meantime Noel-Baker had achieved a great impact with his publication of The Arms Race in the same year. The book had a strong appeal to many on the liberal and socialist sides of politics, to those who saw the Second World War as having been caused by the League of Nations having too little power and authority rather than too much, and to those who saw nuclear weapons in particular as a means of dominating international affairs. In 1959 Noel-Baker was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace and his influence in his own circle was strengthened thereby. In 1961 he won the Schweitzer Prize for The Arms Race.

Hedley Bull, far from being intimidated by this acclamation for what he regarded as a seriously flawed work, saw it as all the more reason for mounting a strong attack on Noel-Baker’s ideas. In 1959 he published a long review of The Arms Race in The Australian Journal of Politics and History which, while paying Noel-Baker proper respect for his distinguished career, was strongly critical of his current line of thinking.^[1]