Forsberg, Randall
Description
Dr. Randall Forsberg was executive director of the think tank she founded in 1980, the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies. In her wide-ranging interview for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age: Visions of War and Peace, Forsberg explores war-and-peace issues, military doctrine, the history and economics of nuclear-weapons development and policy, war-fighting capability and force structure, scenarios and resistance to arms reduction, the history of relations between the superpowers, and their interactions with developing nations. Seven countries, she asserts, account for 99 percent of nuclear weapons. The dispersal of weaponsin the form of the Rapid Deployment Force, tactical weapons, and missiles fitted with multiple warheadsheightens the risk of war in a world moving toward becoming what she calls a global nuclear porcupine. Forsberg asserts that threatening to commit genocide as a way of conducting politics is one of the most deeply immoral and subversive acts of government in the modern world. Moreover, she maintains, a conventional military crisis could easily cross that nuclear threshold. Forsberg advocates the three Rs: reduce, restructure, and restrain conventional forcesthe other side of the military cointhat consume 75 percent of the U.S. military budget. She recalls the moment during arms negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union when she determined that the arms race is not driven by basic deterrence but by the imperative to gain superiority in threatening to winwithout actually wagingnuclear war. She compares disarmament with abolitionism: most people understood that slavery was evil and didnt know when it...
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Digital CommonwealthKeywords
- Antinuclear Movement
- Carter, Jimmy 1924
- Communism
- Cruise Missiles
- Deterrence (Strategy)
- Disarmament
- Gorbachev, Mikhail
- Institute For Defense And Disarmament Studies (U.S.)
- Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles
- International Relations
- Kissinger, Henry 1923
- Middle East
- Military Industrial Complex
- Mutual Assured Destruction
- Nuclear Arms Control
- Nuclear Disarmament
- Nuclear Warfare
- Nuclear Weapons
- Reagan, Ronald
- Schlesinger, James R
- Single Integrated Operational Plan
- Soviet Union
- Soviet Union. Treaties, Etc. United States 1987 December 8
- Soviet Union. Treaties, Etc. United States, 1972 May 26 (Abm) 1972 May 26 (Abm)
- Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Ii
- Strategic Defense Initiative
- Testing
- Treaty On The Non Proliferation Of Nuclear Weapons (1968)
- United States
- United States. Congress
- Warfare, Conventional
- Warsaw Treaty Organization
- World War Ii