Tribute to Randy Forsberg: Colleague and Arms Control Activist

Only once in a great while does someone come along with a combination of rare intellectual ability, deep substantive knowledge, great organizational skills, and a passionate, contagious stubbornness to make a big big difference. Randy Forsberg was one. A Barnard graduate, she learned from scratch about national security and nuclear weapons while working originally as a secretary at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and raising a daughter. She later returned to the U.S., completed a PhD in defense studies at MIT, and did a post-doc at the Center for Science and International Affairs (now Belfer Center).

Randy was intense, indefatigable, and impatient with those of us in academia who wanted to study and speak and were content to move primarily within the specialized, expert community. She wanted to take the danger of nuclear weapons to the people and, ultimately, to the streets.

After founding her own institute at the start of the 1980s in the early Reagan years, she conceived of the elegantly simple but compelling concept of a "nuclear freeze" to halt and then reverse the intense and dangerous U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms competition. Through fits and starts and despite the opposition of many and the skepticism of many more, she succeeded in galvanizing an international movement that produced peaceful demonstrations in support of the freeze in major cities in the U.S., Western Europe, and elsewhere--the largest mass outpourings since the celebrations to end the World War II.

While hard to prove, it is plausible that the enormity and scope of these demonstrations helped lead Reagan and Gorbachev within two years to Iceland for the first superpower head-of-state discussions to eliminate all nuclear weapons.

Randy's energy and determination, her skill and her cleverness, and her achievements should be a reminder to all of us who too often doubt the impact that one human being can make in this complex and crazy world.

Randall (Randy) Forsberg, a fellow and associate of the Belfer Center since 1977, passed away October 19, 2007 after a courageous battle with cancer.

Michael Nacht, currently dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, was founding assistant director of the Belfer Center and worked with Forsberg at the center.