Randall Forsberg; fought against nuclear arms

Her charge to the superpowers was straightforward: Halt the "testing, production, and deployment" of nuclear weapons.

That idea, put forth in 1980 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral candidate Randall C. Forsberg, became the spark for a popular, grass-roots peace effort in the 1980s known as The Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign.

At its height, the idea was pushed in Congress by such powerful politicians as Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Its lasting effect was to legitimize the idea of arms control, though its author never gave up on her vision for an end to war.

"Many people will say this is hopeless, this is too much, this is too big, it's too hard," Forsberg told the Globe in 1984. "All I'm talking about is that people understand what's being done in their name, what they're going along with. That people look at their own feelings about the way the world works, about human nature, about warfare and look around them at their neighbors' feelings."

Dr. Forsberg, executive director of the Institute for Defense & Disarmament Studies, a Cambridge-based think tank, and the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Chair in Political Science at City College of New York, died of endometrial cancer Friday night at Calvary Hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y. She was 64.

Randy, as she was known to friends and family, was born in Huntsville, Ala., the eldest of two daughters, but grew up on Long Island in New York, where her father worked as an actor on stage and in soap operas. She received a bachelor's degree from Columbia University, but it wasn't until she began working for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in Stockholm in 1968 that she found her cause, said her sister, Celia Seupel of High Falls, N.Y.

"It was a mesh with her personality when she found that field of endeavor," she said. "She could really help others, do research. It was a wonderful fit for her to have discovered that."

In the 1970s she began work on a doctorate in political science and defense policy at MIT, and in 1980 founded the Institute for Defense & Disarmament Studies, gathering specialists from universities across the country to research and educate on ways to reduce the risks of war and minimize the burden of military spending.

Using her four-page manifesto, "The Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race," as its rallying point, Dr. Forsberg and the IDDS focused most of their work on the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign during the 1980s.

By 1982 the freeze movement became a national campaign with hundreds of local chapters and its supporters in Congress. It fizzled, however, when repeated attempts to pass legislation were stymied. For the 1984 election, participants raised $2.3 million and poured it into 42 campaigns in 37 states, but results were a wash, and the movement lost steam.

The stall didn't deter Dr. Forsberg, however. She received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and dedicated herself to the IDDS.

"Randy proved that one person could make a difference, and she led an inspiring movement to rid the world of the danger of nuclear weapons." Kennedy said in a statement.

Before President George H. W. Bush's first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989 Dr. Forsberg briefed the president on US-Soviet arms control issues, and in 1995 was appointed by President Clinton to the Director's Advisory Committee of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

Funding for antinuclear research waned in the 1990s, but Dr. Forsberg worked hard to raise funding to continue the IDDS's work, recruiting friends, family and colleagues, but dedicating her own finances to her work over the years, said Joshua Cohen, a professor at Stanford University, an IDDS board member and co-editor of Boston Review.

"She never lost sight of what the larger issue was, an end to war," Cohen said. "I think what she thought was that ultimately moral progress in the area of security would come when people cam to regard going to war in the way we now envision cannibalism, or slavery, or human sacrifice . . . . You just don't do that.

In 2002 Dr.. Forsberg waged a last-minute senatorial bid against Senator John F. Kerry, after she felt Kerry appeared to change his once-critical stance of the war. She received more than 22,000 votes, an impressive amount for a write-in candidate who declared herself 15 days before the election.

"Randall was a passionate activist who cared deeply about peace," Kerry said in a statement. "She lived out her values in every single thing she did."

She traded Boston for New York City and an appointment as the first-ever Spitzer Chair at CCNY in 2006, a move that brought IDDS under the financial security of the school, for once guaranteeing its security.

"They realized what an important and good thing it was," Cohen said.

She loved working with students, and teaching, like her years of research and scholarly writing, was marked by its human touch, a quality hinted at by the influx of cards she received in recent months. She was surprised by the outpouring of love, her sister said.

"She really believed in people. She liked to help people," Seupel said. "I tried to explain to her how special, how extraordinary it was to encounter a person who could listen."

In addition to her sister, Dr. Forsberg leaves a daughter, Katarina Lilly, of Boston, and her mother, Genie Watson of Greenwich, Conn.

A service will be held at a later date.