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\u003cp\u003e\u003ciframe width=\u0022100%\u0022 height=\u0022300\u0022 scrolling=\u0022no\u0022 frameborder=\u0022no\u0022 allow=\u0022autoplay\u0022 src=\u0022https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/725144131%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-wjNsv\u0026amp;color=%23ff5500\u0026amp;auto_play=true\u0026amp;hide_related=false\u0026amp;show_comments=true\u0026amp;show_user=true\u0026amp;show_reposts=false\u0026amp;show_teaser=true\u0026amp;visual=true\u0022\u003e\u003c/iframe\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eProfessor Sir Michael Howard, a towering intellectual figure of the post-Second World War era, died on 30 November 2019 at the age of 97. Sir Michael, eulogised \u003ca href=\u0022https://www.iiss.org/blogs/analysis/2019/12/professor-sir-michael-howard-1922-2019\u0022\u003ehere\u003c/a\u003e by John Chipman, was a founder of the International Institute for Strategic Studies as well as the Department of War Studies at King’s College London (pretty much creating, in the process, a new academic discipline). He also held distinguished chairs at Oxford and Yale.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTwo years ago this month, I conducted an interview with Sir Michael in the library of his home in Berkshire. The quality of the recording is not perfect: it was a cold day, the boiler had broken down and you can hear the drone of an electric fan heater in the background. But the content is fascinating.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWe ranged well beyond our ostensible topic – the history of the IISS – to talk about the world that Howard’s generation confronted in those first two decades after coming home from the Second World War. By 1958, the year of the Institute’s founding, Sir Michael’s circle of military officers, theologians, journalists, academics and politicians was grappling with the implications not just of the atomic weapon – which it was ‘possible to regard … as just a larger bomb’ – to thermonuclear weapons that created, as he put it, ‘a different, nightmarish world’.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e1958 was also the year that the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was launched. The IISS, though ‘not in conscious competition’ with CND, took a distinctly different approach from utopian leftist appeals for nuclear disarmament. On the basis of the Institute’s second annual conference, Hedley Bull wrote his influential work, \u003cem\u003eThe control of the arms race: Disarmament and arms control in the missile age\u003c/em\u003e, which argued ‘forget about disarmament’, as Howard put it, and ‘think about arms control’. Meanwhile, the Institute’s first president, Leader of the Labour Party and Former Prime Minister Clement Atlee, ‘represented’, in Howard’s words, ‘the sane branch of the left as he always had’. \u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOn the right, meanwhile, ‘Dr Strangelove was a very, very real figure at that time’ – encountered first hand, as Howard recalled, on his regular trips to Washington and to the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica. (He mentions, in particular, the US Air Force General Curtis LeMay.) ‘Then what does change is the Cuban Missile Crisis. The thing becomes very real [and] Dr Strangelove more or less disappeared.’\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSir Michael’s voice on this tape, at the age of 95, remains eloquent and erudite also in his recollections of famous contemporaries including Raymond Aaron, Albert Wohlstetter, Henry Kissinger and George F. Kennan. And he also sounds, in a manner gratifying to one who works at the Institute today, more than pleased about the development and accomplishments of the institution he helped found more than 60 years ago.\u003c/p\u003e","className":"richtext reading--content font-secondary"}), document.getElementById("react_czY1yG6hZE2wHeR9SttQRQ"))});
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