Antinuclear

Australian security scholar Des Ball saved us all from nuclear war

Des Ball: the man who saved the world, The Age, December 21, 2012, David Wroe,  THAT America could launch a limited nuclear strike against Russia was a fashionable belief in US strategic theory of the 1970s. Policymakers thought that if Cold War tensions boiled over, they could hit selected Soviet targets in a way that controlled further
escalation and forced Moscow to back down.

It took the iconoclastic Australian security scholar Des Ball to point out that the theory was bunkum. In his influential essays of the early 1980s, Ball argued that reasoned strategic theory was likely to go out the window once the missiles started flying. Among the first targets would be the other side’s command and control centres – its eyes and ears. Once blinded, a superpower – consisting of real people responding with human instincts – would not distinguish a ”controlled” strike from a full-scale attack and would retaliate with everything it had.

A controlled exchange would quickly become all-out nuclear war. Today, none other than former US president Jimmy Carter says that Ball’s work helped save the world from potential holocaust. In a new book of essays honouring Ball’s four decades helping to keep Australia and the world a safer place, Carter says Ball’s ”counsel and cautionary advice, based on deep research, made a great difference to our collective goal of avoiding nuclear war”.

Released last week, the book, Insurgent Intellectual: Essays in Honour of Professor Desmond Ball, is an extraordinary outpouring of praise for a colossus of strategic thinking in Australia – albeit one who stands out as an odd fit among his generation of largely conservative colleagues.

Ball, who is marking his 25th year as a special professor at the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, cuts an unusual figure with his beard, rumpled clothing and rat’s tail hair………
http://www.theage.com.au/national/des-ball-the-man-who-saved-the-world-20121220-2bpdd.html#ixzz2FiJCmAdw

December 21, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, history, weapons and war