7 - Avoiding Armageddon

Summary

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), 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.