Desmond Ball made his name as an internationally recognised scholar with an impressive body of work on aspects of American nuclear strategy. This had its origins in his graduate studies at the Australian National University (ANU) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He had first undertaken a study of ballistic missile defence for his Honours thesis in the Faculty of Arts, drafts of which he had shown to a recently arrived Professor of International Relations, Hedley Bull, who had come to the ANU from the London School of Economics via a two years stint as Director of the Wilson government's Arms Control and Disarmament Research Unit (ACDRU) at the Foreign Office. With his impeccable contacts in the United States strategic studies community, Bull was a demanding but ideal lead supervisor for Ball's subsequent Ph.D. thesis on the Kennedy administration's strategic missile program. Geoffrey Jukes, an authority on Soviet forces and a former ACDRU colleague of Bull's, and Arthur Lee Burns, one of the only Australians to have published work on nuclear strategy in American journals, were also on Ball's panel in the Research School of Pacific Studies.

That this research was the platform for Ball's outstanding career in strategic studies is confirmed by the content of the academic works he was writing at the very height of his career. For me that apex comes in 1980 and 1981, some eight years after the completion of Ball's Ph.D., a period of intense intellectual productivity represented by three significant pieces of writing. While these only represent a small fraction in numerical terms of Des Ball's mountainous output, they are clear demonstrations of his scholarship at its most powerful and influential. The first was the extensively revised and extended version of Ball's Ph.D. thesis, which was published by the University of California Press in 1980 under the title Politics and Force Levels. The second was a short but significant article on counterforce which first appeared in the journal of the American arms control community, Arms Control Today and reprinted elsewhere in the 1980s. And the third is a very widely cited Adelphi Paper on the dismal prospects of controlling a nuclear war once it had begun, published in London by the prestigious International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in 1981.