Randall Forsberg was an Associate of the International Security Program. Previously, she was an ISP Research Fellow from 1977–1978. In 1980, she founded the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies (IDDS), a nonprofit center which she directed. At IDDS, Forsberg published the Arms Control Reporter, a monthly reference work, and she was the series editor of the annually updated IDDS Database: World Arms Holdings, Production, and Trade. She was also the editor of the IDDS annual survey, War and Armaments, Peace and Disarmament—Global Trends, Prospects, and Policy Options.

Dr. Forsberg worked at SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, starting in 1968 and was a regular contributor to the SIPRI Yearbook of World Armaments and Disarmament, writing on U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons, until 1979. She received her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Political Science, specializing in defense policy and arms control. Dr. Forsberg also authored "The Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race"—the manifesto that inspired the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Movement of the 1980s.

In 1989, Dr. Forsberg briefed President George H. W. Bush and his foreign policy and security Cabinet officials on U.S.-Soviet arms control issues. She was appointed by President Bill Clinton to the Advisory Committee of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1995.

In 2006, Randall Forsberg was appointed the first holder of the Bernard and Anne Spitzer Professorship of Political Science and International Security Studies at The City College of New York. IDDS has relocated to the City College campus from Cambridge, Mass., where it had been based since its founding.

Dr. Forsberg passed away on October 19, 2007, in Brooklyn, N.Y.