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Editors’ Introduction: Randall Forsberg and the Path to Peace For Randy Forsberg, information and argument were power—the power to open and change minds, the power to build a movement.1 Randy is probably best known as a founder of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, a movement that acknowledged Americans’ fear of nuclear holocaust and articulated the hope that nuclear war could be averted in the 1980s. The Nuclear Freeze movement inspired one of the largest political demonstrations in US history, when up to a million participants rallied in Central Park, New York on 12 June 1982. This was part of a larger political movement that pushed Ronald Reagan’s administration toward the negotiating table with the Soviet Union, where he collaborated with Mikhail Gorbachev to end the Cold War.2 The June 12th demonstration was only surpassed in early 2003 when millions of Americans protested the imminent US attack on Iraq. Randy protested that war as well. Randy epitomized the practice of Habermasian discourse ethics well before Jürgen Habermas theorized it.3 She believed in evidence, the force of the better argument, the use of reason in the search for truth, and the essential constitutive role in democracy of the commitment to nonviolence. But these were more than theoretical commitments. In a life cut short by cancer at the age of 64, Randy pur- sued a range of interconnected activities in trying to bring about a world without war. She was an analyst of military data, engaging public speaker, prolific writer, director of a research institute, mentor to young researchers and aspiring activ- ists, write-in candidate for the United States Senate, and university professor. In her scholarship and activism, Randy practiced a form of argumentation that engaged the other respectfully and always used her brilliance honestly, without deception, meeting the claims of the other with better arguments. Randy was persistent, precise, and clear. And she had a more than slight streak of perfec- tionism, which is, in part, why her carefully crafted dissertation took so long to complete and why she intended to revise it before turning it into a book (as she explains in her preface). In 1997, Randy completed her manuscript, Toward a Theory of Peace: The Role of Moral Beliefs and submitted it as her dissertation, earning her PhD in Politi- cal Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Toward a Theory of Peace is an ambitious attempt to identify the conditions under which the insti- tution of war could be brought to an end. It draws on an extensive program of ix x EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION research into the phenomenon that Randy called “socially sanctioned violence” and focuses on the role of moral beliefs. Aside from excerpts published in an anthology in 2005, just two years before Randy’s death, the work has not been available until the publication of this book, although the year after her disserta- tion was finished Randy published a related, short pamphlet, Abolishing War, in the form of a dialogue with Elise Boulding, a sociologist and founder of the field of Peace and Conflict Studies.4 In our view, this volume marks an important contribution to the literature on social change and especially to the goal of eradicating the scourge of war. It should be of interest not only to scholars but also to activists and ordinary citizens concerned about mass violence, who should welcome this thoughtful, erudite, and well-grounded analysis. Randy viewed the dissertation as part of a larger project, where she would develop a “theory of the conditions under which world peace might be established and maintained.”5 Because Randy’s theory of peace was so closely linked to her military analysis and disarmament activism, we devote much of this introduction to summarizing her career, before turning to an overview of the book. The larger theory of peace is implicit in the outline of Randy’s career and the way Randy worked. Early Life and Career Randall Caroline Watson was born in Huntsville, Alabama in July 1943, which at the time of her birth was rife with racism overlaid by a veneer of Southern charm epitomized by the stately mansions that can still be seen in the center of town. Early on, her father Douglass Watson, the well-known Shakespearian and television actor, taught Randy to memorize her speeches. Randy usually spoke without notes and clearly loved the English language. She was educated at Bar- nard College in New York City, where she majored in English. In her first job after graduating college in 1965, Randy taught English, and throughout her life she was a fierce editor. Randy was always careful to say what she meant and generally meant what she said. Randy married Gunnar Forsberg in 1967 and moved to Sweden where she began working at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI, founded by the Swedish government the year before. SIPRI’s mandate was to contribute to “the understanding of the preconditions for a stable peace and for peaceful solutions of international conflicts.”6 In many respects that mandate became Randy’s life’s work. SIPRI tended to focus on data collection and special- ized studies of particular topics related to armament and disarmament, and it soon began and continues today to publish an authoritative yearbook, tracking EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION xi the trends in various military forces and spending. SIPRI’s guiding principle seems to be that understanding the nature of the problem of armament and war in all its empirical detail is a precondition for doing something about it. That is a principle in which Randy also strongly believed. Randy soon became an English language editor at SIPRI and then one of its key researchers. Although she worked on many projects there, two stand out— both as bodies of work of which she was particularly proud, and as representative of themes that she would pursue in her subsequent scholarship and activism. In the early 1970s Randy prepared a multicountry study of military research and development, the first attempt to assess the overall size of the worldwide military R&D effort.7 What were her main conclusions? She found that most of the spending on new weapons development was concentrated in some twenty advanced industrial countries, with the efforts of the United States and the Soviet Union dominating the rest. And even though those two countries were engaged in a costly nuclear arms race, the bulk of their spending on research and development—and on procurement as well—was focused on conventional, non- nuclear military forces. In studying the patterns of spending for military R&D and procurement, Randy began to recognize that most of the conventional forces of the United States and the Soviet Union were not oriented toward defense of their national territories, but toward military intervention in foreign countries— and that was their main use. The Soviet Union had launched ground invasions of members of its own alliance, the Warsaw Treaty Organization, in 1956 and 1968, and in December 1979 it invaded neighboring Afghanistan. The United States, with a powerful fleet of aircraft carrier battle groups and tens of thousands of marines, had launched major interventions in Korea and Vietnam, many smaller invasions in Latin America, and was poised to intervene in the Persian Gulf. The second major project that Randy pursued at SIPRI was an inventory of the world’s long-range, so-called strategic nuclear weapons, with the emphasis again on the nuclear superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Randy’s detailed assessment of the strategic nuclear balance became the world standard, and she continued to prepare the data for publication in the SIPRI yearbooks even after she returned to the United States. What were the main insights she drew from her analysis of the nuclear arms race? First, that it had both a quan- titative and qualitative dimension, and second, that the qualitative advances in technology were making weapons more accurate and, when targeted against the weapons of the other side, potentially destabilizing in a crisis. Randy was far from alone in recognizing these features of the nuclear arms race, but she was uniquely thorough in establishing the empirical foundations for her analysis. At this point, the mid-1970s, one might not have recognized Randy Forsberg as a peace activist. She seemed more like what is sometimes called, with a bit of a xii EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION pejorative tone, a “bean counter,” engaged in estimating the numbers, character- istics, and costs of weapons. There is no doubt, however, that Randy was already at this stage committed to the long-term goal of abolishing war, and she was beginning to develop a theory of social change that would underpin her efforts at achieving that goal. Randy thought she could use more training and more credentials. In 1974 she returned to the United States and enrolled in the graduate program in Defense Studies in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the time it was the preeminent program for training people to go on to civilian careers in the US Defense Department. Randy’s work as a peace activist began at the same time, and thereafter her activist and intellectual careers were closely intertwined. Her application to MIT captures the beginning of what became a forty year intellectual and activist journey: “In 1967. I took what I thought would be a temporary job at SIPRI. In half a year of typing manu- scripts, I was exposed to information on international relations and on the arms race which put an end to my previous tendency to avoid politics and ignore social problems.”8 Randy’s understanding of war was very much informed by her empirical research, while her prescription of what to do about it stemmed from an evolv- ing theory of social change which was, itself, influenced by her own experience as a scholar-activist.

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