Editor's Note
Editor's Note Matthew Rothschild Randall Forsberg, Remembered Iopened up my New York Times one day in late October to find out that Randall Forsberg had died. Forsberg was the leader of the...
...This being the December issue, I'm making one last pitch as publisher for you to send us a tax-deductible contribution on the occas-sion of our upcoming 100th anniversary...
...This August, I had the pleasure of interviewing the novelist Jane Smiley, which I finally got around to transcribing and editing for you...
...Forsberg, who was then the executive director of the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, said the Pentagon could do fine with just $80 billion...
...immigration...
...Randy Forsberg never gave up on peace—or on activism...
...And she said: "If the United States advocated cutting its nuclear arsenal to the minimum deterrence levels, we could get everyone to come with us...
...At a time when the Cold War was raging, and Ronald Reagan was joking about launching nuclear weapons against Moscow in ten seconds, Forsberg, then a graduate student at MIT, not only came up with the idea of a nuclear freeze but threw herself into a campaign to attain it...
...Clinton had increased the budget to $267 billion (compare that to Bush's $700 billion...
...Forsberg was the leader of the nuclear freeze movement in the early eighties, and she played a big role in halting the arms race...
...She understood that by starting with a modest goal, she could galvanize opposition to the entire nuclear project...
...On top of that, Wendell Berry offers a poem with one of his trademark messages...
...Now is also the time to let us know which of your friends or family members you want to give holiday subscriptions to...
...warheads and some 20,000 Soviet warheads, equal in aggregate power to more than a million bombs like the one that devastated Hiroshima in 1945...
...If you're interested in books, this issue should be a treat for you...
...I interviewed her for an editorial I was writing about the Pentagon budget in our March 1999 issue...
...We all really appreciate your support...
...With her inspiration, hundreds of towns and cities passed nuclear freeze resolutions, as did several states...
...We've included a postage-paid return envelope in this issue for your convenience...
...And then we could move jointly to eliminate nuclear weapons...
...That was always her goal until she died, at sixty-four, of cancer...
...I felt that energy and sensed that potential when I attended the nuclear freeze rally she organized in New York in June of 1982...
...As Sidney Lens pointed out in The Progressive back in May 1982, the freeze "would leave in place some 30,000 U.S...
...But even Sid's jaundiced eye twinkled at the positive energy that Forsberg harnessed, and the potential it held in store...
...And on the cover, we've got the great writer Edwidge Danticat presenting her devastating personal testimony of what happened to her uncle in the custody of U.S...
...Almost a million Americans filled the streets and then gathered in Central Park to say no to nuclear war (and to listen to Linda Ronstadt oddly choosing to sing "Blue Bayou...
...We've all chosen our favorite books of the year, which is fun for us to do and, I hope, for you to read...
...And modest it was...
Vol. 71 • December 2007 • No. 12
