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 weapons—in the form of the Rapid Deployment Force, tactical weapons, and missiles fitted with multiple warheads—heightens 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 forces—the other side of the military coin—that 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 win—without actually waging—nuclear war. She compares disarmament with abolitionism: most people understood that slavery was evil and didn’t know when it...

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