About the Author

Randall Caroline Watson Forsberg (1943-2007) was born in Huntsville, Alabama, and educated at Barnard College in New York City, where she majored in English. She began her career as an analyst of military policy at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in 1968. In 1974, she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she would eventually receive her Ph.D. In 1979, she founded the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies and drafted the Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race, a manifesto that helped launch the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. In 1982, the campaign organized what was then the largest political demonstration in U.S. history in New York’s Central Park. Forsberg was a MacArthur Fellow and a member of the Director’s Advisory Committee of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. She wrote or co-wrote several books and was granted honorary doctorates from the University of Notre Dame and Governors State University. At the time of her death at age 64 she held the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Chair in Political Science at The City College of New York.