Cornell University Library Digital Collections

Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies Records

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Randall Forsberg and Gennadii Gerasimov

Randall Forsberg with two instructors at the Air Force in Colorado, preparing to address a lecture hall with 200 cadets on alternative defense policies

About this collection

This collection contains articles, memos, correspondence, essays, congressional testimony, speeches, and other manuscripts authored (and co-authored) by Randall Forsberg, founder of the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies. This online collection represents a subset of materials available in the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies Records collection that is held by the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

In 2019, Dr. Agnieszka Nimark, who had catalogued the IDDS archive for the library, prepared, in consultation with Professors Reppy and Evangelista, a selection of materials to be digitized with support from a Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences grant.

Historical context

The Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies (IDDS) was founded in 1979 by the scholar-activist Randall Caroline Watson Forsberg (1943-2007) to conduct research on military forces and the prospects for disarmament and to provide knowledge in support of peace activism. The Institute’s publications included the Arms Control Reporter (a monthly update on negotiations), the World Weapon Database, and the Peace Resource Book, along with a newsletter. IDDS became the first headquarters of the influential Nuclear Weapons Freeze campaign and it collaborated with the European Nuclear Disarmament (END) movement and colleagues worldwide, including in the Soviet bloc. Cornell faculty members Judith Reppy and Matthew Evangelista served on the Institute’s board of directors.

Upon Forsberg’s untimely death from cancer, Professor Reppy, as chair of the IDDS board, assumed responsibility for the voluminous IDDS archive and secured its transfer to the Cornell University Library. The full archive consists of files concerning the Nuclear Freeze Movement, including correspondence with counterpart organizations in other countries as well as with members of the general public; records of the hundreds of talks given by Forsberg to activist groups, universities, and government bodies; organizational material; letters and reports of meetings to form a Political Action Committee to push for the Freeze during the 1984 presidential election; and reports of the yearly meetings of the Nuclear Freeze campaign, as well as documents from specific task forces within the campaign. Audio tapes in the collection include many of Forsberg's talks, as well as recordings of workshops and meetings. There are a few draft monographs by scholars and activists associated with IDDS and a small collection of about ten photographs of Forsberg with public figures. The archive includes various drafts of Forsberg’s proposals and chapters for her PhD dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the final version of which was published as Toward a Theory of Peace: The Role of Moral Beliefs.

Using the collection

For more information about the collection, please contact the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at rareref@cornell.edu.

More information

Collection steward
Evan Earle, Peter J. Thaler University Archivist
Metadata creation
Dr. Agnieszka Nimark, Judith Reppy Institute for Peace & Conflict Studies
Funding
Grants Program for Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences, awarded to Matthew Evangelista, Government; Agnieszka Nimark, Judith Reppy Institute for Peace & Conflict Studies; Judith Reppy, Science & Technology Studies; awarded in 2019.
Credits
This collection overview was adapted from an introduction to the collection written by Dr. Agnieszka Nimarka and was last reviewed in 2025.
Collection sources