By 1976 Bull had published most of his work on arms control. His focus had shifted to the nature of international order. His second book, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics,^[4] appeared in 1977 at the time of his re-location to Oxford, succeeding Alastair Buchan as the Montague Burton Professor of International Relations. He was to move increasingly into the realms of the international society of states and away from those of international security. However he did remain active in the International Institute for Strategic Studies and was a powerful source of advice and ideas on the Institute’s own endeavours in the late 1970s and 1980s to analyse the arms control problems of the SALT and START eras. Both I and my predecessor as Director of the Institute, Christoph Bertram, found his counsel invaluable because Hedley always had new ideas to impart

His work on arms control as a whole was based on his belief that the great powers would continue to compete for control in international affairs, and that the developing states would refuse to accept the injustices inflicted on them as newcomers to the international system. He also had a keen awareness for what Government leaders and their advisers would tolerate and accept from others by way of serious argument and criticism applied to their own policies. He abjured the more technical aspects of the arms control debate which came to the fore as weapons and missile technology continued to develop. He was no believer in strategic defences, arguing that if effective they would make nuclear war more rational and hence more probable.

Bull’s work in this field demonstrates how far a very intelligent and logical person could progress in a new field of international security. As arms control was really developed only in the 1950s and 1960s, it was a topic on which a newcomer could make rapid progress, but few managed to approach Bull’s standard of work. Many were drawn into the field because they had clear policy aims: usually to eliminate nuclear weapons or, less frequently, to utilise nuclear superiority to limit and weaken the other side. Bull initially lacked the usual background of experience in government or the armed forces. His area of academic knowledge was more philosophical and historical than political. The opportunity he had to work with Alastair Buchan, Michael Howard, and other senior persons in the ISS team was a major advantage, but he would not have gone far had his colleagues not been highly impressed by his qualities of thought and argument. This background, plus the publication of The Control of the Arms Race while he was still young (30 years of age), put him in an excellent position to establish arms control as a policy specialty within the British Foreign Office. The contacts he then made across NATO Europe and on the other side of the Atlantic, together with the ideas he drew from them for comparison with his own, equipped him to remain a leading arms control thinker on the world stage for the following decade and on some matters even longer.

Even moving to Australia in the late 1970s did not cut him off from active participation in the North Atlantic debate, because he continued to have excellent travel opportunities and a year of study leave in both 1971 and 1975. There was no Internet in those days of course, but airmail and the telephone played important roles for Hedley as he settled into his new working environment in the late 1960s.

By the mid-1970s Bull found that arms control had lost some of its fascination. He travelled increasingly to India and became both interested in and impressed by the arguments of leading Indian scholars on the need for reform in the international system, such as it was then. Coming from a former British imperial dominion himself, Bull had some natural sympathy for the underdogs in international politics and began to ask himself by what right did mainly Western, white European great powers, or those derived from them such as the United States, dominate in international councils and derive greater benefits from the existing world order than the poorer, newly independent states of Asia, Africa and Latin America. His work on the nature of international society led him into the two major projects at Oxford which each resulted in edited books: The Expansion of International Society and Intervention in World Politics.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s Bull also came to believe that the US alliance system was in decline. And indeed it was subject to a great deal of internal friction during these years, as the Reagan Administration began to re-emphasise US military power and his Administration’s willingness to use force. Bull sided with those European leaders who claimed a stronger role in shaping alliance policy, and emphasised the second track of the ‘twin-track’ approach to relations with the Warsaw Pact which NATO claimed to have adopted: increased willingness to negotiate, especially to control the numbers and types of weapons envisaged for both deterrence and operational use. Bull argued that a bigger effort to achieve more comprehensive arms control agreements would be essential to the gaining and retention of public support for NATO policies in Western Europe. Fortunately the Americans took some note of the strength of these attitudes among their European allies, and in the mid and late 1980s adopted a less strident line. Sadly most of this re-orientation of policy took place after Bull’s death in 1985.

In 1983, Bull returned to arms control, giving a final overview of the five ideas (which he believed to have been the essence of the new approach of 1958–61) in his well-known article ‘The Classical Approach to Arms Control Twenty Years After’. The five ideas were:

These five ideas remain of high relevance, notwithstanding the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. The West might no longer stand in danger of suffering defeat at the hands of a massive Warsaw Pact conventional force, but recent events in the Middle East point to the limitations on Western and particularly US conventional fighting power. While many may think that nuclear weapons no longer have any justifiable role in international politics and that we would be better off without them, we are a long way from this view being adopted by Western governments. In the meantime, as the framework of international order comes under attack by sub-national extremist groups, the menace of nuclear weapons to the leading powers of the current system grows increasingly strong.

As mentioned above, Bull remained active in the International Institute for Strategic Studies, serving both as a Council member and a member of the Executive Committee. As his illness became more serious in 1984–85, if anything he increased his level of participation in the Institute’s work. I do not think he missed a meeting of either Council or Executive Committee in his last several months of life, even though he was weary and sometimes in pain. He gave everyone he came into contact with in those days heart to tackle more effectively whatever problems were absorbing their attention and energy. He remains an example in so many ways for all who were fortunate to work with him over three decades and more.

Bull’s impact in the field of arms control policy was, on the whole, an indirect one. His work for the British Foreign Office is an exception to this judgement, of course, but he was in the British Government’s service for just over two years. He will be remembered for his contributions to conferences of leading specialists, his journal articles, The Control of the Arms Race, his informal conversations with many who were in government service and above all for his teaching. At Oxford he had an opportunity to teach outstanding graduate students from around the world about international security and arms control. There are many who are still in the service of foreign and defence ministries, armed services, news media, universities and research institutes or, like myself, now in the ranks of the retired, who will always be grateful to Hedley Bull for the quality of his thought, his critical abilities and willingness to use them, his ready sense of humour and his intellectual energy. He was a rare phenomenon and deserves to be remembered and held in the highest regard. On looking at his independence and impact, it is not difficult to see why he made his colleagues feel proud to have chosen the same profession and field as himself.^[5]