Antinuclear

Professor Des Ball, who spent his formative years in Timboon, was presented the Peter Baume Award last month, recognising a career of global significance and an association with the ANU lasting almost five decades………

Professor Ball progressed from a prize-winning economics student who was arrested for climbing a statue of King George V during an anti-Vietnam War rally, to blowing the lid on the secret military facility at Pine Gap during a Senate hearing on treaties in 1999.

Despite his outspoken criticism of US government policy, he was personally invited by President Jimmy Carter to critique the USA’s nuclear defence plans during the Cold War — his analysis persuading the US that its plan to destroy selected Soviet targets would not work in practice.

At the end of last year, a book of essays honouring the iconoclastic scholar contained a contribution from the former president saying Professor Ball had helped save the world from a potential nuclear holocaust.

The book, Insurgent Intellectual: Essays in Honour of Professor Desmond Ball, quoted Mr Carter as saying Professor Ball’s “counsel and cautionary advice, based on deep research, made a great difference to our collective goal of avoiding nuclear war”…….http://www.standard.net.au/story/1961594/award-for-man-who-helped-avoid-nuclear-catastrophe/?cs=12,