Thus by 1959 Bull had set forth his views on the desirability and scope of arms limitation agreements in the nuclear era, and his thoughts achieved resonance among specialists in Western Europe and North America. They were particularly interesting to Alastair Buchan, who was putting together a team of leading analysts to make a major attempt to develop more rational Western policies on the roles and use of nuclear weapons in order to minimise their dangers. A key person in any such team, of course, is the rapporteur or author of the final report, and Buchan saw in Bull the ideal person for this important job. It was vital to the newly founded ISS for its product to be regarded as of the highest quality. As the project progressed in 1959–60, the senior members of the team, including Michael Howard and Richard Goold-Adams, became increasingly impressed by the presentations that Bull made at discussion meetings and they encouraged him to expand and deepen his efforts. The group met every few weeks to hear and discuss a paper prepared by Bull. The group’s enthusiasm mounted. Participants could see not only that in each of these papers they had close to a chapter for the resulting book, but also that they could be confident that the book would achieve a major impact.
In 1960 the ISS held its second annual conference, at Oxford, on the theme of arms control. Bull was appointed rapporteur for the conference. The rapporteur was not just a reporter of the proceedings, but was given a full plenary session at the conclusion of proceedings both to sum up what the conference had achieved and to give his own thoughts on the main topics under discussion. As Michael Howard, one of the conference participants, has recorded in his memoirs:
The text he [Bull] provided for discussion, later published under the title The Control of the Arms Race, was to become a classic. Hedley was an abrasive young Australian who had no time for the woolly cant that well-meaning liberals had accumulated around the topic over the past half-century, and to watch him deftly despatch their sacred cows was a sheer joy. We could not reinvent the world he argued: we live inevitably in a world of mistrustful sovereign powers, and the best we could do was to make it possible for them to distrust one another a little less. It would not be too much to say that his little book revolutionised thinking on the subject. It should still be the point of departure for both academics and bureaucrats.[2]
Fortified no doubt by his reception from some of the North Atlantic community’s leading thinkers in this field, Bull handed the manuscript to Buchan and the ISS published it in 1961 under the title The Control of the Arms Race. It was the Institute’s second book in a long and distinguished series titled Studies in International Security. As Michael Howard has said, this volume established him as the leading newcomer in the field of nuclear arms control policy. It also helped to publicise the idea of arms control rather than disarmament, moving the policy debate into a much more fruitful course. In the following year Bull was promoted to be a Reader in International Relations at the LSE. His book appeared just after the Kennedy Administration had been elected to office in the United States. The incoming US Government was very interested in arms control and Bull received a wide readership on both sides of the Atlantic.