I served as Deputy Director of SIPRI from the autumn of 1969 until the autumn of 1972, in the years when SIPRI began to publish its work, with the launch of the Yearbooks and other major volumes on the arms trade and on chemical and biological warfare. Before joining SIPRI, I was with the Swedish Foreign Service with postings in Moscow and in London.

At the Institute half my time was spent on administration, including budget and publishing, and half on research work. I worked with two SIPRI directors, Robert Neild and Frank Barnaby. I found Neild a very impressive Cambridge don. He could dictate whole research papers into a microphone, while I was bound to paper and pen. Robert Neild rightly insisted that he as the arbiter of SIPRI's policy should have the last word on the formulation of all research papers.

Since I was the senior Swede at SIPRI and responsible for administration, I worked closely with the Chairman of the Governing Board, Professor Gunnar Myrdal, on all major questions involving the Swedish authorities. Professor Myrdal had his office at the upper level of the Wenner-Gren Center, where SIPRI was housed, so we had almost daily contact. I found Gunnar Myrdal in his old age a very wise and humane person. I had met him once earlier at university and then found him a bit arrogant. Now, at a much older age, he worked humbly along, personally answering all letters sent to him. He still had strong views on many subjects-and on many persons-which made it a joy to talk to him one-on-one. I also got to know Ambassador Alva Myrdal, whom I had earlier had met at the Foreign Ministry. She was a very strong personality and a major support to her husband. Since she had been chairman of the Swedish Government commission that proposed the establishment of SIPRI, she took a close interest in all our matters but without interfering.

One memorable event during my period at SIPRI was the first meeting of SIPRI's Scientific Council, in August 1971. This was a most impressive group, with Lord Mountbatten and Philip Noel-Baker from Britain, Kenneth Boulding from the USA, Abdus Salam from Pakistan, Johan Galtung from Norway and many others, as well as the members of SIPRI's Governing Board, among them Joseph Rotblat from the UK. Gunnar Myrdal chaired the full-day meeting, which was devoted mainly to the situation in the world but also contained many personal reminiscences. I particularly remember Lord Mountbatten's account of how he as one of the first Allied representatives entered Hitler's bunker at the beginning of May 1945; also what Philip Noel-Baker told us about the Versailles peace conference in 1919, where he had been a young British delegate. I wrote down almost verbatim what was said at the conference, an account which should be in SIPRI's archives. Gunnar Myrdal was not as happy with the meeting as I was, since he disagreed with several of the participants, including Galtung and Rotblat, on various issues. That may be one of the reasons why the Scientific Council met only one other time.

In the field of administration, tax issues took a lot of Robert Neild's and my time. The 10 or so researchers recruited from abroad had been promised that they would enjoy free housing in Stockholm. This went counter to existing Swedish tax legislation and caused endless discussions with the authorities, including the powerful Minister of Finance, Gunnar Sträng.

A further complication was the taxation of Mrs Neild's Australian sheep, which refused to fit into the Swedish taxation year. In the end, a special 'lex SIPRI' had to be adopted by the Swedish Parliament to solve the problems.

One of my main tasks was to oversee the publishing and distribution of the Yearbook and other publications. Here I worked closely with the editor of the Yearbook, Frank Blackaby, and his assistant, Randy Forsberg. In the spring periods, before the Yearbook began to be published in June, there was always a tremendous stress. Our publisher was Almqvist & Wiksell, who had their printing office in Uppsala, supervised by Mr Thomson. In the last weeks before publication, we had to do a lot of proofreading in Uppsala late into the night to get all the tables and figures right-a feature for which the Yearbook is famous.

As I remember it, we printed 3000 copies of the Yearbook, of which about 80 per cent were distributed free of charge throughout the world to government institutions, NGOs and news media; for the public the sales price was only 60 Swedish Kronor (c. $10). This was a good policy which ensured that SIPRI's voice was heard. It was also a financially sound decision. SIPRI then cost the Swedish taxpayers the equivalent of about $750 000 annually, its whole purpose being to spread the word of reason in armaments and disarmament affairs. If the Yearbook had been sold at its real cost of several hundred dollars a copy, it would have found very few readers.

Like Robert Neild and Frank Blackaby I was also a member of SIPRI's research staff. I sincerely enjoyed the research atmosphere at SIPRI with a number of highly talented people like Mary Kaldor, Julian Perry Robinson, the meticulous Jozef Goldblat, Milton Leitenberg and others. Particularly fruitful was the practice of peer review, which really improved the final version of the research papers.

Milton Leitenberg (left) and Julian Perry Robinson (second from right) meet with Russian chemical and biological weapons experts in 1968

Besides some minor papers, I was responsible for two major studies which were published as lengthy chapters in the SIPRI Yearbooks 1969/70 and 1972, respectively. The first one was called 'The militarization of the deep ocean' and involved a year's study of all open sources on the undersea arms race. Greatly helped by Milton Leitenberg, I went through all US congressional hearings, read all specialized naval publications, etc. The end result was that I could document the new nuclear arms race that was taking place in the deep ocean, with new types of strategic submarines and surveillance systems. This had its sequel more than 20 years later when, together with the Swedish Defence Minister, I visited the US Pacific Fleet in San Diego and we were taken out to sea to spend the night at an exercise with a US nuclear carrier. When I mentioned to the commanding Vice Admiral that I had been at SIPRI and had done the study on the militarization of the ocean, he said that when he was responsible for the future Trident project he had seen this study at the time and wondered where we could have got all the secret information from. I could barely convince him that I had only used open sources.

My other research project was called 'The Near-Nuclear Countries and the NPT' and was published in the SIPRI Yearbook 1972. It consisted of 15 case studies of countries with some nuclear capability and which either had not signed the NPT or, if they had, had not ratified it. Among the conclusions were that Israel already had a 'bomb capability', something which was confirmed to me when in the 1980s I served as Ambassador to Israel; that India and possibly Pakistan were likely to go nuclear; and that so was South Africa. On the other hand, I missed out on North Korea and Iran, although I now doubt that they had much of a capability or a nuclear strategy in 1971, when I made the study.

In conclusion, I should say that the years at SIPRI gave me a more international outlook. The high intellectual standards at SIPRI and my own research work were a great benefit to me and helped to improve my analytical and diplomatic work during a long career, including the past 10 years as Sweden's Ambassador to Russia.

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Sven Hirdman is a Swedish Ambassador. He was Deputy Director of SIPRI from 1969 to 1972