Maritime security, writ large, is a broad canvas enmeshing everything from high-intensity naval warfare and territorial disputes to low-end criminal acts and matters of navigational safety. Non-state and transnational issues, such as piracy, maritime terrorism and trafficking at sea, have featured prominently in the definition for much of the post-Cold War period. In recent years, however, there has been a noticeable tilt towards a more inter-state agenda, defined by such concerns as creeping jurisdiction, competition over offshore resources and a region-wide naval arms build-up. Through his Track 2 work, Des Ball has maintained a lengthy association with the full spectrum of maritime activity in the region. But it is in the context of this tilt back towards the inter-state dimensions of security that Des’ earlier body of work on navies and arms control is regaining new relevance.

The maritime domain, by the same token, is also a useful thematic window on to Des’ cosmopolitan interests in regional security: strategic, comprehensive, cooperative and technical. His major contributions fall within four inter-connecting themes: nuclear strategy at sea, naval arms racing, confidence building and technical intelligence gathering.

Nuclear strategy at sea

Des’ interest in naval affairs and the maritime domain can be traced to his doctoral research on nuclear strategy during the presidency of John F. Kennedy (1961–1963). During this still-raw phase of the Cold War — Des’ intellectual point of departure for a career-spanning interest in strategic arms control — the submarine arm was first established as the most survivable prong of the nuclear triad, an attribute it maintains to this day. This did not wholly obviate the traditional concern of navies with manoeuvre and projection. But the stark mission requirement of the ballistic missile submarine (SSBN), to reliably deliver Armageddon, cast a long and strange shadow over the Cold War at sea.

The advent of the SSBN as a major focus of the superpowers’ strategic competition also played to Des’ abiding and somewhat double-edged fascination with nuclear strategy and military secrecy. As a young scholar exposed to the foment of the Vietnam protest movement in Australia and the United States, Des nonetheless acquired an appreciation of this esoteric subset of naval warfare, as well as the risks of escalation that he would later go on, with forceful logic, to argue were significantly under-managed.