By 1967 Bull faced a serious decision. Either he returned to the LSE or he became a long-term professional member of the Foreign Office. Fortunately his dilemma was resolved by a very welcome invitation from Australia. Bruce Miller, the Head of the Department of International Relations in the Research School of Pacific Studies at The Australian National University, Canberra, had been able to open the way for a second full professorship to be established there, with Hedley Bull in mind as the person who should hold it. In the way of these things it was a short-lived opportunity and Bull had to make up his mind quickly before the vagaries of University politics allowed another department to claim the necessary funds. Once he had taken the decision to accept and move back to Australia all went well with the appointment process and Bull was soon in Canberra, which was to be his base for the next decade.

Although I had met Hedley while I was a graduate student at Oxford in the early 1960s our paths did not overlap until he returned to Australia, by which time I had completed my studies at Oxford and served for a year as an infantry officer in the Vietnam War. I remember expressing some surprise to him that he had given up a readership at the LSE for The Australian National University Chair, given that in Canberra he would find it so much harder to stay in touch with leading scholars and practitioners in the arms control debate. In reply he pointed to the working advantages he would enjoy at The Australian National University by comparison with those of the LSE: more opportunities to travel, more study leave and fewer teaching obligations. He added that he probably would not stay in Canberra for the rest of his working life.

And so it happened. Bruce Miller in 1969 invited me to forsake the teaching of military history at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, and join his department as a senior fellow. I arrived two years after Hedley and quickly learned to work with him on a number of fronts. He was keen that I should take over the headship of the newly founded Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC) from its then head, Tom Millar. Tom had just taken on the Directorship of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, holding the two positions simultaneously. Tom had not foreseen such pressures to bring a newcomer into his position in the Centre, but Hedley and Bruce had a clear plan in mind and it was implemented with effect from the beginning of 1971.

While the work of the SDSC was focused largely on Asian and Pacific security issues (the Vietnam War was still in progress), I was keen to give it more of a global and a theoretical perspective. This took time, not least because Hedley was away on study leave in 1971–72 and I had my first study leave in 1973. The following year seemed a good time for holding a major conference on global security issues and I sought Hedley’s advice on a topic for the gathering. He had already been thinking of the need for new ideas to be developed for discussion at the first review conference to be held under terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1975. He put that set of issues forward as a policy-related matter to which we as academics could make a contribution, while at the same time we might be able to develop a dialogue with several of the key arms control specialists from the Australian Departments of Defence and Foreign Affairs. I was happy to take up his suggestion and develop a conference accordingly.

The Centre had been augmented by the arrival of Des Ball who knew more than most about the American strategic missile program, its purposes and the political debate around the topic in the United States. Jim Richardson and Geoff Jukes had already followed Hedley to The Australian National University from the Foreign Office. Harry Gelber at Monash University was an expert in Chinese nuclear matters, Peter King at the University of Sydney was working on the Strategic Arms Limitation negotiations and Arthur Burns (also at The Australian National University) had focused his work on great power relations, including their strategic nuclear policies. I invited them all to present papers and we thus had a credible team for an ambitious project. With those academics and a good mixture of government officials, foreign diplomats based in Canberra, relevant journalists and other academics, we held the conference on 24 and 25 July 1974. I edited the proceedings as the Centre’s first book (The Strategic Nuclear Balance; an Australian Perspective) and it appeared early in 1975.

For the purpose of this chapter I shall focus on Hedley’s contribution to that volume because it was succinct and wide-ranging, covering all of the major nuclear weapons issues before national governments in the 1970s and 1980s. He, of course, in the years since the publication of The Control of the Arms Race, had continued to write articles and papers for bodies such as the IISS (no longer just the ISS) and leading international journals on the broader issues not only of arms control but also of world order. He brought his thinking as of mid-1974 together in a concluding address to the conference.^[3]

Bull (in this address) regarded the trend of world events as troubling in that an increased emphasis was being placed on nuclear weapons both by those states which had them (through technological advances, increased accuracy, reduction in sizes of warheads and so forth) and by those who aspired to have them, among which he included India. ‘The nuclearisation of international politics appears to have accelerated.’ His outlook generally was pessimistic: there was little prospect of nuclear disarmament, but the stability of deterrent balances should not be taken for granted. We were headed for trouble, he argued, and salvation lay only in three sets of measures which the international community, especially the nuclear weapons states, might take.

First, the nuclear weapons states had to put these systems more into the background of their strategic policies. To Bull this seemed unlikely and events of the 1980s (the deployment of intermediate–range nuclear weapons in Europe, the unveiling of President Reagan’s plan for strategic defences, and the general high profile of debate on the relative strengths and war fighting capacities of American and Russian nuclear weapons) proved him to be correct.

Second, potential proliferators had to exert greater restraint. The obstacles in their path (lack of technical knowledge, cost and strength of the nuclear guarantees offered by friendly nuclear weapon states) were diminishing and the example that had been set by India through its ‘peaceful nuclear explosion (PNE)’, which occurred only two months before the conference, was a further stimulus to proliferation. Bull thought the stated rationale for the PNE, economic gain, was contemptible whereas security was a perfectly respectable objective for India (and others—like the existing nuclear weapons states) to attempt to achieve. As we have seen over the past two decades, a number of potential proliferators (including South Africa and Libya) have, after taking serious thought, abandoned their nuclear weapons projects. Restraint remains a potent factor. But several other states (including Iraq, India, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea) have gone in the opposite direction, opting for strengthened military security over restraint. We in the early twenty-first century now stand before the prospect of possession of nuclear weapons becoming the norm for middle powers in troubled regions. Tensions between restraint and the desire to have nuclear weapons remain strong and break-out by more potential proliferators is a definite possibility. Thus Bull’s second requirement for a better foundation for international security has not been fulfilled.

Third, he argued, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (an ‘already tottering structure’) needed to be strengthened. Bull recognised that further proliferation would take place: ‘it is not credible that the most destructive weapons of the age will remain permanently the monopoly of the handful of states that first developed them.’ The most feasible aim for the NPT regime was to slow the process of proliferation down, and this required not only the co-operation of the nuclear weapons states through keeping these weapons off centre stage, but also awareness on the part of potential proliferators that the more states had them, the more difficult it would be to inhibit their use in war. On the other hand, Bull recognised, it was pointless to preach nuclear abstinence to India or other proliferators who had already decided that they heeded nuclear weapons to strengthen their security and independence. ‘If nuclear weapons were not important in enabling states to provide for their security, their prestige or their national independence, the problem of controlling the spread of nuclear weapons would be more easily soluble than it is.’

Thus Bull left us with no optimistic prospect. The thrust of his arguments was that the nuclear weapons states were unlikely to disarm; proliferation was likely to continue, albeit slowly; the NPT regime would continue to totter; and the world would move slowly to a more dangerous condition with more and more hands on a nuclear button. He characterised his own view as being based ‘on general grounds of historical pessimism’ and he was right in choosing this basis of argument. The long-term prospect for reduction of the nuclear threat 34 years later remains bleak, probably even bleaker than it was in 1974. Bull, at least, did not have to analyse international security developments in an era like that of the present, in which it is possible that terrorists might gain possession of nuclear warheads. These extremely destructive weapons in the hands of people who are perfectly willing to die in their attempts to injure their enemies, and for whom deterrence has no meaning because they lack any essential base whose security has to be preserved, have created a new and very serious dimension to the nuclear threat. Bull’s ‘historical pessimism’ remains a fitting leitmotiv for the future as far as nuclear weapons are concerned.

Bull’s work was certainly not a political platform for those activists such as those of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament who wanted to boost their following by attacking the causes of public neuroses. Rather, he provided a deeply informed and realist brief for those who had to bear the burden of international negotiations. Time and again he was to point out the futility of railing at nuclear weapons states and those who were on their way to achieving this status. In a matter as crucial as national security, government leaders were most unlikely to be swayed by foreign opinion, particularly that which emanated from liberal-thinking non-governmental organisations which had nothing with which to trade in the field of nuclear weapons policy. On the other hand he left us with this cheerless prospect of further proliferation, a weakening NPT regime and obduracy on the parts of existing nuclear weapons states. It is not surprising that humankind has not lain down and accepted this philosophy. Change might be very hard to achieve by way of nuclear disarmament, but something has to be attempted, many have argued and many more will continue to argue into the future.