The “50 Faces of Women” highlights the many contributions of women in the field of nuclear arms control and disarmament. It includes leaders from past generations such as Coretta Scott King and Randy Forsberg, who led the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. And it includes women, who are leading efforts to reduce nuclear threats today, such as Emma Belcher. Together, their path breaking contributions offer a rich legacy of engagement and leadership on the threat of nuclear war.
Dr. Randall Caroline Forsberg
Randall Forsberg was the founder of the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies and leader of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. Forsberg wrote the Call to Halt the Arms Race in 1979, a four page document calling for the end of testing, production, deployment and delivery of nuclear weapons which became the manifesto of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign in the 1980s; she effectively created a grassroots disarmament movement.
Mareena Robinson Snowden
Mareena Robinson Snowden is a Senior Engineer in the National Security Analysis Department at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. She researches nuclear arms control verification, nonproliferation, and modernization.
Barbara Lee
Barbara Lee is the U.S. House Representative of California’s 13th District, in Oakland. She is a long-time member of SANE/FREEZE (now known as Peace Action). She is an outspoken disarmament, arms control, and peace advocate.
Lauren Borja
Lauren Borja is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. She researches the effects of technological advancement on nuclear security.
Sister Megan Rice
Megan Gillespie Rice S.H.C.J. was a nuclear disarmament activist and Catholic nun. She was notable for illegally entering the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with two fellow activists of the Transform Now Plowshares group. At the time, she was 82.
Bonnie Jenkins
Bonnie Jenkins is the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs. A nonproliferation expert, she formerly served as the U.S. Department of State‘s Coordinator for Threat Reduction Programs in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation in the Obama Administration.
Jenkins is a regular contributor to Outrider. She is the founder and President of WOmen of Color Advancing Peace. Jenkins is concerned that women of color are the most vulnerable population threatened by global disaster, including the climate crisis and nuclear posturing.
Rachel Traczyk
Rachel Traczyk is an activist who works with Beyond the Bomb to help train and recruit the next generation of anti-nuclear activists, more specifically the nuclear frontline communities who have been impacted by nuclear weapons in their home of New Mexico.
Barbara Omolade
Barbara Omolade is a professor and author who writes and teaches about African-American and women’s issues. She has written essays on the topic of nuclear weapons, including 1984’s “Women of Color and the Nuclear Holocaust.”
Michelle Dover
Michelle Dover is the director of programs at Ploughshares Fund, where she leads the grantmaking team. She provides guidance on grantmaking strategies, performance and direction to the program team and Ploughshares leadership, as well as conducting due diligence on grants.
Prior to joining Ploughshares, Michelle conducted research at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. She was previously a Nonproliferation Graduate Fellow at the National Nuclear Security Administration, where she worked on International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards.
Jasmine Owens
Jasmine Owens is the Associate Director of the Nuclear Weapons Abolition program at Physicians for Social Responsibility. Previously, Owens has done work at the Council on Strategic Risks, the Outrider Foundation, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Coretta Scott King
Coretta Scott King was a renowned civil rights activist, author, and wife of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She was an outspoken advocate for nuclear disarmament.
Kelsey Davenport
Kelsey Davenport is the Director for Nonproliferation Policy at the Arms Control Association. She writes for the P4=1 and Iran Nuclear Deal Alert and North Korea Denuclearization Digest newsletters, as well as for Arms Control Today. She has also written standalone articles on nuclear issues for a variety of publications.
Eartha Kitt
Eartha Kitt was a singer, actor, and social activist. She is known for her anti-war sentiments and membership in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which calls for the total elimination of nuclear weapons.
Eslanda “Essie” Goode Robeson
“Essie” and her husband Paul Robeson were among the first to link the struggle for civil rights back home with the independence from colonialism abroad and a world free from nuclear weapons. A copy of her lecture on the Atomic Age (1946) can be found in the Howard University archives.
Emma Belcher
Dr. Emma Belcher is the President of the Ploughshares Fund. Before that she worked at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, leading the foundation’s Nuclear Challenges grant program. She developed the foundation’s Nuclear Challenge Big Bet team.
Marian Anderson
Marian Anderson, one of the most renowned opera singers of the 20th century, signed the ‘Ban The Bomb’ petition and spoke out against the use of nuclear weapons.
Miyoko Matsubara
Miyoko Matsubara was a Japanese survivor of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. She went on to become an advocate for world peace and the prevention of nuclear testing and warfare.
Helen Caldicott
Helen Caldicott gained prominence in 1970’s Australia, New Zealand, and North America, speaking on the health hazards of radiation from the perspective of pediatrics. She informed Australian trade unions about the dangers of uranium mining, which led to the three-year banning of the mining and export of uranium. In 1980, she founded the Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament (WAND) in the United States, which was later renamed Women’s Action for New Directions. The group is dedicated to redirecting government spending from nuclear projects towards unmet social issues. In 2008, Caldicott founded the Helen Caldicott Foundation for a Nuclear Free Future.
Setsuko Thurlow
Setsuko Thurlow, born Setsuko Nakamura, is a Japanese–Canadian nuclear disarmament activist who survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Since then she has used the power of her personal story to try to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Setsuko has told her story in unflinching detail to thousands of people at protests, conferences, schools and even cruise ships. She delivered an acceptance lecture in Oslo when the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Hansberry was a playwright. In her works she often linked freedom to nuclear disarmament. Her last two works were heavily centered on themes of nuclear armageddon.
Beatrice Fihn
Beatrice Fihn is a Swedish lawyer and Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. Together with Setsuko Thurlow, she accepted the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for ICAN.
Dagmar Wilson
Dagmar Wilson was a founder of Women Strike for Peace, a Cold War-era movement that organized demonstrations around the world calling for nuclear disarmament.
Bella Abzug
Bella Abzug was a feminist, activist, and member of the U.S. House of Representatives. She was one of the founders of Women Strike for Peace, a woman-led organization that began lobbying for nuclear nonproliferation in 1961.
Bella Savitzky Abzug, U.S. House of Representatives Archives
Sylvia Mishra
Sylvia Mishra is a Scoville Fellow conducting research on nuclear strategy and nonproliferation, Southern Asian security and nuclear dynamics, and emerging and disruptive technologies. She was a visiting fellow at CNS, scholar for the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Carnegie New Leader at the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs. Mishra has also worked for the Observer Research Foundation and Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER)-Wadhwani Chair in India-U.S. Policy Studies.
Zora Neale Hurtson
Zora Neale Hurtson was an influential and award-winning author. She called then-President Harry Truman the “butcher” of Asia following the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and denounced the use of nuclear weapons on behalf of the U.S.
Ellen Leonard
Ellen Leonard is a field associate with Beyond the Bomb. She conducts congressional candidate outreach for legislation on nuclear issues.
Akmaral Arystanbekova
Akmaral Arystanbekova was the first Foreign Minister of Kazakhstan, 1989-91. She initiated destruction of the world’s fourth-largest cache of nuclear weapons following the breakup of the Soviet Union and closed the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in 1991. She proposed the Central Asian Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone. She is currently Ambassador at Large for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
Solange Fernex
Solange Fernex was a biologist, activist, and former member of the European Parliament. In 1975, she camped outdoors for five months in protest of the building of a French nuclear plant. In 1983, she underwent a 38-day “Fast for Life” for nuclear disarmament in Paris.
Reja Younis
Reja Younis is the program manager and a research associate with the Project on Nuclear Issues in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. She was previously a Stimson Center fellow, researching nuclear deterrence politics in South Asia.
Shirley Graham Du Bois
Shirley Graham Du Bois was a founding member of the Peace Information Center, an anti-war organization in the United States which provided information about peace movements across the globe. Du Bois helped to promote the “Ban The Bomb” petition. In addition, she was a playwright, writer, and composer. She was the wife of W.E.B. Du Bois.
Erna Prather Harris
Erna Prather Harris was appointed to the National Board of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in 1956 and regularly traveled to WILPF congresses in Europe and Asia. She was a member of the WILPF delegation that traveled to the U.S.S.R. in 1964 to participate in the U.S.-Soviet Women’s Seminar in Moscow that sought to build peaceful ties between women in the two countries.
Pearl Primus
Pearl Primus was a dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist who practiced and researched African and African American dance. She backed the Stockholm Peace appeal.
Wardah Amir
Wardah Amir is a national security advisor for the U.S. Department of State. She is also the co-chair of the Women of Color Advancing Peace and Security’s (WCAPS) Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Policy Working Group, and has conducted other work on disarmament issues.
Anne Marie Janson Lang
Anne Marie Janson Lang is a doctor at Karolynska Institute. She led the WHO case against nuclear weapons at World Court 1996.
Kozue Akibayashi
Kozue Akibayashi is the President of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She is a professor at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, researching gender and peace issues. She is a member of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She spoke at the Women’s March to Ban the Bomb in 2017.
Lovely Umayam
Lovely Umayam is the manager of the Stimson Center’s nuclear security portfolio. She is the founder of Bombshelltoe, a creative hub linking artists, organizers, and issue experts together to present nuclear politics in compelling ways to the public.
Joan Baez
Joan Baez was a singer and activist who performed at the 1979 anti-nuclear rally, “Alliance for Survival,” and again in the 1982 Central Park rally against nuclear weapons.
Chantell Murphy
Chantell Murphy is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISC). Murphy is the Program Manager for the Nonproliferation & Arms Control Research at the CISC. She researches the analysis of advanced nuclear fuel cycle systems. She has also worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, and as a graduate research assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Jessica Sleight
Jessica Sleight is the Program Director of Global Zero. She researches nuclear risk reduction and disarmament, as well as coordinating Global Zero policy initiatives.
Hazel O’Leary
Hazel O’Leary was the U.S. Secretary of Energy for four years, under the Clinton administration. She pushed for an end to nuclear weapons testing and declassified documents pertaining to “vital nuclear information,” which led to reparations to the families of those involved in radiation testing and public knowledge of misuse of radioactive material by the U.S. government.
Dolores Huerta
Dolores Huerta is a lifelong labor leader and activist for farmers’ rights. She is co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association, which would eventually become part of United Farm Workers. She has spoken at a nuclear freeze rally.
Suzanne Claeys
Suzanne Claeys is a program manager and research associate at the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Center for the Strategic and International Studies. She manages the CSIS European Trilateral Track 2 Nuclear Dialogues and researches arms control in the context of strategic competition.
Izumi Nakamitsu
Izumi Nakamitsu is the Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs for the United Nations.
Tara Drozdenko
Tara Drozdenko is the director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. In the past, she worked on nuclear issues for the Outrider Foundation, the State Department, and the U.S. Navy.
Darlene Keju
Darlene Keju was a advocate for the end of nuclear weapons testing. She was born on Ebeye Island in the Marshall Islands group in 1951, downwind from U.S. nuclear weapons tests that left radiation which remains in the area today. She was a singer, writer, and educator, and used her skills to educate on this topic.
Andrea Miller
Andrea Miller is the founder of People Demanding Action and is a former congressional candidate. She advocates for clean energy and nuclear disarmament. She is particularly concerned with the budgetary consequences of continuing to build nuclear arms.
Gabriela Ngirmang
Gabriela Ngirmang was an advocate for a nuclear-free world, and that started with her home, Palau. She was a successful advocate for including a ban on nuclear weapons in Palau’s constitution, the first in the world. In 1979, 92% of Palauan people voted for their nuclear-free constitution, which included a clause requiring 75% of voters to agree before nuclear weapons could be brought into Palau.
Alicia Sanders-Zakre
Alicia Sanders-Zakre is the Policy and Research Coordinator at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. In the past, she conducted research at the Arms Control Association and the Brookings Institution. She has written extensively on nuclear weapons and their disarmament.
Binalakshmi Nepram
Binalakshmi Nepram is a Carr Center Fellow at Harvard University. She is an influential peace and disarmament advocate. In 2004 she founded the Control Arms Foundation of India, and in 2011 was awarded the Sean MacBride Peace Prize for disarmament work.
Claire Collins Harvey
Claire Collins Harvey was a church and business leader in her Mississippi community. She was a civil rights and peace activist who attended nuclear peace conferences and advocated against nuclear weapons.