RON HUISKEN

Setting aside marriage and children, my encounter with SIPRI probably ranks as the most transformational event of my life.

I arrived in Stockholm from Perth, West Australia in 1968, freshly married and armed with an Honours degree in economics plus a modest bank scholarship to secure a Masters with the Royal University of Stockholm. Within weeks we were facing starvation. I must have misplaced the decimal point in concluding that all this was financially feasible. My enquiries established that, elsewhere in the building where I took Swedish classes, there was an offi ce that did whatever it did in English. I went along to this office, which had a long unpronounceable label on the door, with the lowest of ambitions: I was ready to make the coffee, do the photocopying, anything that would at least put a sausage on our table (meat and fi sh required serious money). As it happened, I encountered Frank Blackaby, arguably the most English of all Englishmen it has been my privilege to meet. Frank was in charge of the first SIPRI Yearbook, and in particular of the first unclassified estimate of world military expenditure. He had more numbers than he could deal with and presumably saw in me the adequately intelligent calculator he needed (I did not dwell on my difficulties with decimal points). So I had a modest role in crafting the military expenditure chapter and tables in that first Yearbook. I can still recall quite vividly all of us glued to the window, wait-ing for the publisher's truck to deliver the book.

SIPRI was then less than two years old, staffed with a bunch of remarkable people. Enthusiasm and idealism abounded. Everything was entirely new to me-the strategic nuclear balance, chemical and biological weapons (Julian Perry Robinson), nuclear proliferation (Jozef Goldblat), the trade in conventional weapons (Mary Kaldor)-but I quickly concluded that pretty much all of it was more engaging than economics. In my second year, I took full responsibility for military expenditure but also soaked up all the literature, discussions and original research being done at the institute. For reasons not germane to this account, I left SIPRI in 1970 (with my Master's degree, completed part-time) to teach economics at the University of Malaya, but when SIPRI invited me back in 1972 it was the easiest of decisions to make. For the next four years plus, I indulged myself in some of the deeper implications of military expenditure (including the popular puzzle of what the Soviet Union really spent), developed some original data on the world's naval forces and began to acquire a keen interest in the nuclear arms race and arms control.

When it was eventually time to return home, my SIPRI credentials secured me a job with the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University and then an ANU scholarship for a PhD in International Relations. At this point, the SIPRI factor intervened once more. Rolf Björnerstedt, a former member of the SIPRI Governing Board, was Under-Secretary for Disarmament Affairs in the United Nations and in need of a consultant to support a major study of the relationship between disarmament and development. I did that job part-time for two years alongside my PhD research and, when my thesis had been submitted, joined the UN Secretariat full-time for another two years to complete that report. During this time, I had the opportunity to contribute chapters to a couple of SIPRI Yearbooks on my new areas of 'expertise'.

The modernist Wenner-Gren Center on Sveavägen housed SIPRI between 1967 and 1980 before its move to Bergshamra

For the second time, we elected to go home and bring up the children (one born in Sweden, the other in Malaysia) in Australia. I got a position in defence intelligence, working primarily on the 'central balance'. My security clearance took rather a long time to come through, probably because my career to that point looked a bit 'leftish' and because I had accumulated a number of friends and acquaintances from 'behind the Iron Curtain'. That was the only time to my knowledge when my association with SIPRI might have raised an enquiring eyebrow or two, at least momentarily. On balance, my SIPRI background has been extremely valuable. Indeed, my strong impression has been that the value of this pedigree has risen over the years as respect for SIPRI's work has grown around the world. Certainly from the late 1970s, SIPRI was an acronym everybody recognized.

From intelligence, I moved into a series of policy jobs, always with a security focus. I spent 10 years with our Foreign Ministry, mostly on arms control, and a number of years back in Defence but responsible for Australia's alliance relationships with the USA (including intelligence collaboration which necessitated very high security clearances!) and with New Zealand. When the Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, established the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons in 1996, I was the defence official seconded to the secretariat set up to help draft the report. Again, it was the expertise I had acquired at SIPRI (and in the Foreign Ministry) that granted me a fascinating assignment.

I left government in 2001 and rejoined the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. I now focus on US security policies and the architecture of security in East Asia. But SIPRI just keeps on coming into my life. My colleagues and I have been planning a major research project concerning China. SIPRI is also keenly interested in China and the current Director and I have had discussions on how we might collaborate to mutual advantage. So this story may yet have another chapter.