ABSTRACT
Thirty years have passed since the first annual conference of the ISS (as it then was) assembled in Oxford in 1959 to consider the problems of ‘Independence within NATO’. But the Institute had in fact been conceived at an earlier conference which had met in this town of Brighton two years earlier in January 1957; and the convening of that conference was the outcome of discussions which had been going on for most of 1956. Once Alastair was involved, the Institute became his enterprise. More important, Alastair was not prepared to confine the activities of the Institute to what he sardonically described as ‘Buzzardry’ – the limitation of nuclear war – much less the conduct of limited nuclear war. The Institute, he insisted, should cover the whole question of the relationship between defence and foreign policy; of the utility of force in the nuclear age.
